What is your C64?

[User 14060113]

My C64 is the C128. Although I must admit that I spent about 90% of the time in C64 mode, mostly not for programming or making music or demos but for playing games. I knew a little C64 Basic already when I got the machine and appreciated the extended syntax of C128 Basic very much. Unfortunately, extended syntax at the same CPU speed means slower execution, so I finally turned back to C64 Basic and also learned a little assembler for the time-critical stuff like copying a whole screen full of characters from an offscreen buffer to the display. The two things I liked most about the C64 were its sound capabilities (SID chip forever!! ;-)) and the way you could glean much more potential from the machine than its obvious capabilities. You could do real magic if you knew all the not-so-well-documented tricks like certain memory addresses, interrupt, raster interrupt or the 4th audio voice, which could be used for playing sampled stuff like digital drums. It was a world with very narrow boundaries that could be vastly extended, that's what was so cool about it for me. Unfortunately, I was born a few years to late, bc once I had become really good on the C64, everybody else had switched to Amiga already.

[pkfox]

I had one of these [oric computers - Google Search](https://www.google.com/search?q=oric+computers&client=firefox-b-d&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=WNekp5Q37puH3M%253A%252C\_q31qEB9CL5CxM%252C%252Fm%252F0j24zr8&vet=1&usg=AI4\_-kRYQsKx9ut6KGitRTf6jGYxx\_b39A&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiixcmj0uPjAhWNQEEAHVPsB98Q\_B0wE3oECAkQAw&biw=1231&bih=688#imgrc=ReCgAdB0Y4tXHM:&vet=1)

We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP

[Member 9167057]

My "C64", that is the first computer I had, was some Windows 95 machine built by a local electronics store. I learned programming later, staring with some HTML (which is programming in a rather loose sense of that word), then PHP, then Delphi and later low-level stuff like C and ASM. Both I learned after learning C# in the meanwhile.

[Vitomir Cvitanovic]

My first comp was (Sinclair) ZX81 with 1Kb of ram, upgraded with 16K module :) After that it was ZX Spectrum 48K with total of 48 Kb J. Thanks to very specific feature of Spectrum (most of his basic was one byte commands, not byte per letter) I was able to make some very fancy programs like (not so simple) FEM (Finite elements method) calculation... My First PC-like comp was IBM IT (not AT) that has numeric coprocessor :) (wow !)

[lieball]

Hi, I was born in 1970 in Eastgermany (GDR) In my childhood and youth I dreamed from a C64 but we could not get one. :sigh: My dad has me give a Z1013. It was a one platine computer with a east germany Z80 clone - a U880 from Robotron. I loved him! In a computer circle "Station junger Techniker" we had other devices. A KC87 and a KC85/3 always with the U880. I loved playing "Digger" on it! I'm always excited from the Z80. He has shaped my understanding of how the computer works.

[daleofcourse]

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 128K +2A, with the +2A meaning some games just didn't work because of the architecture; as opposed to those games that just didn't load for reasons, and those games that did work for 10 minutes then crashed hard. My favourite games on that platform were the Dizzy series. Good times. ;)

[Alister Morton]

Despite starting out on my school's HP2000 time-share access in 1975 I managed, by judicious borrowing and sharing of friends' machines, to avoid actually buying my own machine until the early 90s! But over that period I had access to: ETI Triton (8080) Nascom II (Z80) Kim1 (6502) UK101 (6502 and suspiciously similar to the Ohio Superboard) Apple ][ (6502) BBC B (6502) Spectrum (Z80) then, through work a Phillips luggable 8080 running CP/M, a couple of amstrads, and a PC-AT before buying my own 486DX system in about 90/91. I think I might have had access to a late model Atari ST series somewhere along that line, too, with the GUI front end, and a PET at college (as well as mini's). Over that period I wrote BASIC, various assembler (including han assembling some stuff to opcodes) Pascal and eventually C code.

[Martin ISDN]

the c64, around 1984 and i still have it firstly into games: Boulderdash, Elite, Blue Max, Space Rogue... then i started noticing intros in front of the games. just a message and rolling colors, The Yak Society. silent colored logos, Dynamic Duo. silent scrolls like Triad, silent sprites Ikari... at first it was the visual effects that got my attention, but when the music came i got hooked. Maniacs of Noise and Vibrants. the intro scene: Ikari, Hotline, Dominators, North East Importers, Triad, Fairlight and then came the demo scene. who are those guys? i wanna be like them: Cenzor Design, Crest, Bonzai, Flash Inc, F4CG... we still have that from the early 80's. the demo scene. here's greeting from a recent demo party X'2018 [Rewind / TempesT Commodore 64 X'2018 file demo UTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT0qBbod1BY) [Unboxed / Bonzai Commodore 64 X'2018 mega demo UTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tastYp8J8Cs)

[Luperco]

I'm not sure. A lot of year have passed. But I remember a ZX81 with 1K attached to a TV where I've learn to develop in basic and assembler. And also the Casio PB 100. A sophisticated programmable calculator. I'm not sure which one come first. But I really start to be involved in computer software developing with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. I still have one in my showcase completed with microdrives. Sinclair ZX Spectrum+[^] This is the plus version with an hard keyboard. Unfortunately I've lost the original one in some moving house

Saluti Emanuele

[AndyH Hewco]

Mine was a Vic20, with a whopping 5K of RAM, of which 3.5K was available to program with (the rest being for BASIC/Kernal in the Zero Page and for the screen). It had a decent keyboard, lots of ports to be expanded (thankfully 16K RAM expansions were common, but expensive) and it was immediate - at the READY prompt to start to do anything you wanted...usually loading a tape but the wait time was not too bad for 3.5K programs ;) I'm just finishing a new Vic20 game in machine code right now called Vic Nibbler. Should have a version out at the weekend. Reliving the 80's! Find out more on: https://www.facebook.com/Hewco64[^] or https://hewco.uk

[Bitsqueezer]

My C64 was a C64...:-) The original one, not the flat new models. It was in 1984. When we look at the computers of this era we cannot find the answers to these questions just by looking at the computer itself. It is all about the technical things around at that time. There was, compared to today, simply NO technology all around us. We need to remember: In our family, we even didn't had a telephone at home. We had one TV with only few channels. High tech was a Tape Recorder with multiple speed and a Super 8 camera. Just new were cassette recorders. The best was a video game named Pong - wow! We could ACTIVELY change the contents of the TV screen! And then came the C64. Multicolor, electronic sound like we just heard from Jean Michele Jarre, arcade games which we saw only in fancy American films or maybe in a game hall. Everything at home! And best of all - we could sit down and program that thing, so it does what WE want. And to get out everything possible you of course need a lot to learn like assembly or the system of pokes and peeks or the different memory layers and so on - but at the end we could say: Yeah, I know the complete machine, every bit, and I can get everything out of it. And there were a lot genius programmers who even got a lot more out of it like we saw in genius cracker demos and so on. That was real science fiction at home, we were heroes (=nerds..freaks.."guys with special interests"...:-) ) in the eyes of all who didn't own one or just started with it. Today? We have Gigabytes of OS where no one really knows what it does and where a lifetime is not enough to learn all about it. Software and hardware changes so fast that only very specialists knows about small parts of all of this. Only few people (even such which are programmers of any kind) just want to know HOW it works, what a bit is, why the computer can count only from 0 to 1 and not more. Every minute a new "free" app appears, whose main purpose is to feed more of our data to the creator, nobody has even enough time to learn about the pure funcionality of even a small part of these apps - and only few people wants to know more about the internal function because technology is ALL around us. So the complete "spirit" of that time in the 80s is gone, nobody is impressed today if you were able to program a cool application on your computer or mobile. There is no exploratory spirit anymore, if you don't have somethin

[Sydney Fixie]

My C64 was the PDP-11 RSTS/E opeating system made available to computing science students in the ACT (Australia) in the late 1970s. Wrote my first AI program on it in 1979/1980 (analysing syllogisms) and a real-time ADVENT type game which transported the interaction from caves and trolls to a galaxy far, far away with attacking robot spacecraft. My first ever personal computer was a Dick Smith System-80 (https://collection.maas.museum/object/456918), followed quickly by an AMIGA 1000 (still the best gaming/graphics/multi-tasking PC I've ever owned) and then sadly nothing but a series of IBM PC clones ever since. True story - one of my friends from university (with whom I had lunch just this week) was a co-founder of MicroForte which wrote the official America's Cup game for the C64 in the early 1980s.

[AndyH Hewco]

Mine was the Vic20. Currently working on a new game for it as it happens. :)

[Daren Church]

I was fortunate to start with a C64 moving onto Amiga 500, 1200 where I first had a 40Mb hard drive. From there I was fortunate to work commercially with the Amiga 3000 for a few years and also I dabbled with the zx80, where myself and friend created some speech recognition using the tape port, it had a repertoire of 3 words only and with the memory expansion pack having a dodgy connection crashed often. My friend and I then linked this to the IO port and mains isolated switch to turn a light on and off using voice. It makes you wonder at the rapid progress at speech recognition in recent years. Daren

[BryanFazekas]

The first PC I worked on was PET 8K, which my high school acquired. Then we got a 16K! The tape drive on which we stored our work was amazing technology. An insurance agent I dealt with had a luggable. He was tremendously proud of that thing, as he could do all his work while visiting your home. At the time, it was also amazing technology -- AND -- carrying it around eliminated the need to do regular workouts.

[glennPattonWork3]

Quote:

the memory expansion pack having a dodgy connection crashed often.

Did you not use the Clive Sinclair approved bodge of Blu Tack!

[efuentes67]

When I was about 10 I had my first contact with a computer, a mainframe (I don't know which one). I went with my father (as a trip companion) to a medical associations meeting. Being there, bored, a man took me to the computer room, sat me in front of a terminal and gave me some instructions to play a few games. I played Start Trek and others. I was amazed, the place was really cold but I stayed the whole afternoon there. That situation convinced me to "what I going to do when I'll be big". Some time after that, he bought me my first computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000 with 2KB of ram, later a 16KB ram pack. With that machine I learned BASIC, z80 assembler and some digital electronics. My second computer was a TS-2068. At that time I played with C64/C128 of my friends. Later I, by myself, bought my first PC, a 386 with color monitor, it cost me $2600. And now here we are, making software as a way of life. Long live to Sir Clive, Jack Tramiel and many others. Hoping not have bored you so much. Regards from Argentina.

[grralph1]

I would like to answer saying that it was an i7 8th generation. It would make me sound young and if I tell the truth then it gives my age away. What the elephant...... Here we go...... Sinclair ZX81 Fun but keyboard was elephanted Sinclair ZX Spectrum Fun and keyboard better but still elephanted Then a machine that was made by Burroughs but not branded by them. Excellent Keyboard. Can't remember the name now, but it was the most fun that you could have. Good colour graphics, sprites and the fastest and most reliable cassette save and load. Wrote heaps of code on this including business and games. A Sony something that was used in TV studios for graphics. This was a fun machine. Propriety as well as CPM OS. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Wrote heaps of code on this. Then a TRS-80 Model 4 - 128 TRS-Dos and CPM Much fun. Lots of code IBM XT with Maths Co-processor Wow Getting serious. Generic 286 Did heaps on this also. 386 Did more on this. This was perhaps the weirdest PC as I built it on a chip board frame. All open so I could swap what ever in and out. It looked agricultural but it was fun as well as fast for those days. Pentium 3 Crunch crunch.... i7 in various robes ever since. I never had a C64 so my equivalent was probably the one that I can't remember the name of. I thought that it was better as I didn't need to peek and poke so much, although I could if required. I must need to replace my RAM else I would remember it's name.

"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980

[bleahy48]

Atari 800 with 24k RAM Star Raiders FTW!!!

[Gary Wheeler]

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote:

* What is/was your C64?

A TI-59 programmable calculator[^], a Netronics ELF II[^] and finally a TRS-80 Model 100[^].

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