Duncan's post on the Commodore 64 brings back a flood of memories.
The Commodore 64 was really my first major computer. Although I used several others at school or friends' (like the TRS-80, PET, TI-99/4A, the Atari 800, the Apple IIe, and the original Mac), the 64 was the first computer I owned.
I got my Commodore 64 for my 12th birthday - we forked out Cdn. $1500 for a system that included a C64, a 1541 floppy drive (170K!), and a 1526 printer. We added a 1701 monitor a few months later - it was the only component I still had by the time I entered university, because it had RCA jacks for inputs, which made it great for a dorm room TV.
Some random memories:
- The 1526 printer was a big mistake. It was billed as a near-letter-quality printer (and the default printout was definitely better than the 1525. But, unlike the 1525, where you could individually access dots on a line, the 1526 only let you define an 8x8 “custom character“ per line. So, when word processors and tools with better fonts (like Print Master) came out, they would support the 1525 well; but on the 1526 (if the software supported it at all), you'd have to print each 8x8 block, then do a carriage return (without a line feed), and then print the next block and so on. It was painful to watch. It's why I used Print Master instead of Print Shop
- I loved playing a game called Micro League Baseball, but I think the disk had a copy protection mechanism where the second track was bad (or maybe it was just my disk). Now, 1541 drives also had frequent problems with the heads misaligning, and it would cost $50 to fix. But I found that if I put the MLB disk in, and then used a tool to seek to the track from the right direction (from track 1 or 3), it would cause the drive to stutter around until it threw back into proper alignment. Scary stuff. Apparently, I am not the only one that loved MLB. Matt McEnerny, lead designer for Inside Pitch Baseball, counts it as his favorite game.
- I remember getting the monthly issue of Compute magazine (and, later, Compute's Gazette, which was dedicated to the Commodore). It was a lot like MSDN magazine, but each article came with a complete listing, usually in machine language, and you had to enter the program by hand into the computer. They had a couple of programs (like MLX) that would show checksums for every line you entered, so you didn't get any lines wrong. But some tools were better than others, and you could make mistakes and still get the right checksum (or worse, sometimes the magazine would print the wrong checksum). I still remember the thrill of getting to the end of typing in the long listing of hex byte sequences, followed by the pain of it not running. But the magazine was great, at least in its early years - they had an entire free word processor called SpeedScript, that fit in 6K!
- I didn't use SpeedScript though, I used a product called Paper Clip. It was a bit more complex, but it served all my needs through high school. And when my uncle wanted to publish a book, I did the entire manuscript in Paper Clip. Later versions came on two floppies, and you had to switch floppies to check spelling, or do a bunch of other things. The innovations you had to do to work within memory constraints in those days - Paper Clip had a dynamic module loading/unloading system.
- My favorite games were the Epyx sports simulations - Summer Games, Winter Games, World Games, etc. I remember sprinting fast by hammering the joystick back and forth as fast as I could.
- Late in its life, the 64 got a boost from a GUI OS called GEOS. I didn't have much of a need for this at the time (I had access to a Mac at school). But it had a whole new programming methodology, complete with a programmer's guide - I remember being drawn to it because of how different it was to write GEOS programs.
There's a real nice site on the history of the C64, including what happened to Commodore and it's leaders. If you really want to revisit memory lane, you can use one of the very good C-64 emulators. There's even a couple of web browsers for the 64!