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For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

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Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#111

Post by timknauf »

leptons wrote: post #78
neuroelectron wrote: post #9

I always wondered what it would be like if Commodore had serious co processors, but the base Commodore is really too slow for anything like that. Could you imagine a Voodoo 2? I think the SNES was only about 10mhz as well and used the FX math co-processor for 3d.

>had serious co processors What decade do you think this computer is from? "Serious co processors" in 1982 wasn't a thing.

Maybe not in 1982, but as other commenters have pointed out, by 1985 you had the Amiga, which definitely DID have serious co-processors.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#112

Post by timknauf »

mrandish wrote: post #51

As I searched for a first computer I hoped to talk my parents into buying for my late-teen self, I read a lot of early computer magazines and visited local stores. I looked first at the Atari 400 and loved the games but, wanting to learn programming too, I just couldn't imagine that membrane keyboard being livable. Then I saw the C64, fell in love and went home from the store clutching the same color brochure linked…

Thanks for taking the time to write that! I really enjoyed hearing about your journey, and I learned a fair bit about the Coco too, which wasn’t really known in my part of the world. Sounds like a great little machine, actually!

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#113

Post by II2II »

TMWNN wrote: post #65
fmajid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of Woz's major accomplishments with the Apple II was driving a floppy drive entirely in software from the host computer's CPU, which made the floppy drive and its controller much cheaper.

... and much faster. Like *30 times* faster. Even had the hardware bug juancn and classichasclass discuss not existed with the C64, the Disk II is still much faster. It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world —was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direc…

I am not dismissing Wozniak's designs here, but it is important to not a couple of major differences between the Disk II and it's competitors:

- Many of the design constraints that other companies faced were removed. Apple designed their own drive electronics and drive interface card. Yes, it takes a talented engineer to handle both the analog and digital side of things. On the other hand, there were compromises. The Apple II was stuck doing a lot of the heavy work. Apple also ended up designing a more complex drive controller to go beyond single sided, double density drives.

- On the flip side, Commodore had more design constraints than most. The 1541 was based upon drives from the PET era. The drives also interfaced to the computer in a fundamentally different way. On the surface level, Commodore drives interfaced to the computer over a generic bus (a bit like USB is a generic bus). The drives also handled high level commands over that bus, to the point where they could operate autonomously. I recall a colleague demoing a drive-to-drive copy between two 1541 drives that occurred without the drives being connected to a computer (after the initial setup was done). The commands were also very high level, dealing with file system access rather than block level access.

While it would be easy to claim that Commodore drives were over-engineered, one must also consider that the original designs came from a time when personal computers had 4 kB of RAM, with nearly 1 kB of that being used by a 40x25 text display (many early computers shared memory between the CPU and video). Software like a disk operating system also required at least some RAM and, in the case of the Apple II, was entirely loaded into RAM. In other words, Commodore was offloading some of the work and memory requirements from the computer.

Wozniak was a genius at designing simple hardware, but those designs usually pushed things into hardware. The Disk II is one example. The other classic example is the non-linear addressing of video on the Apple II. It simplified hardware, but more work had to be done in software.

As for Commodore, well, they were geniuses at botching sophisticated hardware designs. But that's another story.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#114

Post by timknauf »

hobbitstan wrote: post #2

I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling. This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in…

I’ve seen this sentiment a lot, and I do understand it but… I just feel so completely differently. The 2000s web, early web apps and Flash, the iPhone and smartphone revolution, the incredible buffet that is modern video games, virtual and mixed reality, and yes, even (imperfect, fraught) AI have all seemed as magical to me as those wonderful things from the 80s and 90s. Probably not coincidentally, many of those things have featured in my working life pretty heavily!

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#115

Post by sizzle »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #82
brudgers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. They are computers…for example the C64’s floppy drive had its own CPU. This was also typical for printers…in fact it still is.

Yep, and in 1986 I had just interned at a NASA lab where they were investigating multiprocessors, which at the time was a wild and crazy idea. I had the epiphany that I could bit-bang a driver between a C64 and one or more 1541s and make my own little multiprocessor, so I did. I made it all the way to the International Science Fair and ended up getting a college scholarship. I've written a lot of code but I'm probabl…

With your decades of experience in tech, is AI really the next frontier?

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#116

Post by Nihilartikel »

Man, I had a hand-me-down Atari 800 with 48k. It was great, but I coveted the c64 with its crunchy cool sid sounds.

Then I had a 486 vga pc that could barely scroll a game at 60fps (except for ones like jazz jackrabbit with its hardware scrolling wizardry) and I coveted the Amiga with its smooth scaling and rotation and 4 channel samples.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#117

Post by syntex »

TMWNN wrote: post #66
syntex wrote: post #20

I bought my C64 very late - around 1991/1992. It was in Poland where I bought a used one from my friend. Back then, Eastern Europe was a decade behind the Western side of Europe. Two years later, I purchased a used disk drive. So, for two years, I could only run cartridges like Boulder Dash (I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games"). But from that boredom, I started program…

>(I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games") Odd; the Commodore Datasette is about as reliable as a microcomputer tape storage system can be, far more so than the tin cans-on-a-string designs of Sinclair and TRS-80. Did you attempt to use a regular cassette recorder with a third-party adapter?

I think there were alignment programs for the Datasette. It played a constant tone or signal that would show whether the head was properly aligned. I think it was on on cartridge that I didn't have. And actually as a young kid I didn't know about this alignment thing. Learned years later after switching to Amiga 500.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#118

Post by syntex »

masto wrote: post #73
suzzer99 wrote: post #63

Trying to teach myself BASIC on the C64 in high school frustrated me so much it kept me from becoming a programmer until I was 29.

Teaching myself BASIC on a Commodore 64 in elementary school made me a programmer and set the direction for the next 40 years. Different strokes I guess.

The same for me. I only knew how to assign variables, use for loops, if->then, and use poke command. And from this specific point I started thinking about myself as programmer event that the only thing I wrote with C64 basic was a ball moving on the screen. :)

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#120

Post by criddell »

Lerc wrote: post #35

It's interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, combined with the features that they chose to highlight. The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show informa…

I had no idea about the CP/M option. I’ve never heard of anybody actually running CP/M on a C64.
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