Ah, that was the first one I owned. The little 1520 4 color pen plotter you could get was incredible. Printed on receipt paper. It was also eventually my bridge to the BBS world via the 300 baud vicmodem.
Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
81–90 of 186 posts
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#82To whom it may concern, I believe the year was 1987 or 1988. (I was around 9ish, I think.) My brothers and I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 amidst trash beside a country road. In the box, even the manual was in good shape.
This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written.
The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive.
I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.)
This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#83I was taught on how to use my new C64C since I was 5. My favorite games were Boulder Dash and Gridder (hence my hn handle). Good times
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#84I started coding on c64 when I was 10. I'm close to 50 now and still code but it was much more fun 40 years ago.
I started with the VIC-20, and I'm now 62. After years of resisting the draw to turn my hobby into a career, I started working as a software developer almost 30 years ago. I feared that I might lose the joy, but (for the most part) it's still there.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#85Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers. I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them. Eventually my parents realized that, despite th…
Similarly for me. My dad bought a fully expanded TI-99/4A from a friend who was selling it to buy a C64. On the TI, I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played Parsec, BurgerTime, and others. Cartridges were super expensive in my home country.
A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had already announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU, and Compaq was already selling clones.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#86Somewhat relevant DOOM on C64 with variable height floor/ceilings https://kweepa.itch.io/doom64 And my favorite, Quake on C64 https://kweepa.itch.io/quake64
For some reason I read that as Quack. Long live BFINN.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#87Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers. I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them. Eventually my parents realized that, despite th…
The 8 Bit Guy has a pretty good video about the Tandy 1000, a great machine.
I probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it up once while making an ISA board to connect to some sensors. Replace quite a few caps on that weekend.
My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.
The C64 disk drive would still have left you with plenty of reading time.
Yeah the bug in the hardware for the disk drive was a bummer. It was supposed to be 4-5 times faster but due to the hardware bug it shipped with a slow workaround. Its kind of amazing that you allow it to ship like that.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#89Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#90Greetings, fellow old people.
Hello hello
Age is just a number lol