What is your C64?

[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

[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.

[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

[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[^].

Software Zen: delete this;

[NOD32 user]

My first experience with computers was an 8080 and then an 8085 that my father was working on in the late 1970's. They came as project boards to be hand-spooled with about a 20 key keypad to be hand programmed directly in machine code. Then, a video game system kit built possibly before they were available in stores in the early 1980's. After that I was fortunate enough to have my on Tandy MC-10 with 4kb then later 64kb of memory, and a CoCo 3 that I much enjoyed. In between I also had a TRS-80 Model III computer with programs to conquer like ARS and Eliza[^], both of I took an interest in even at the tender age of 12. The most important thing, apart from having all of the manuals for BASIC, was the monthly subscription to hardware specific magazines to practice typing and learn programming techniques by examining other people's code. On the 68B09E I even learnt to program directly in machine code, used the cursor interrupt to operate a print spooler, and picked up all of that from one book (possible the one by. David W Harding) having already learned every conceivable command in BASIC. LOGO at school on the Apple IIc computers was quite straight forward. I solved Island and with the assistance of an Atlas from the school library found that it is Haiti. By the time I was second-year apprentice I was teaching the other students ladder logic for Idec Izumi PLC's - shifting into IT ten years after commencing a trade was the most straight forward thing, and a real understatement at that. Now I recommend an early involvement with children and technology. If someone still has all of the Australian MC-10 and CoCo magazine, acquire a free licence and put them up on cafe press to be printed on demand. It does not matter that it is the same editions over and over, just buy one copy a month. I had interests in sport and captained an u15's Australian Rules team, played basketball and was never stuck inside apart from for several hours a week in front of a keyboard WITH NO INTERNET. Later I became proficient in HTML, and then PHP. Currently I am completing a Masters in Cyber Security. The course work is easy, it is just a matter of writing enough to please the assessing facilitat

[clemenslinders]

Hi, My first computer was a Sharp computer with tape-drive, it was a cp/m machine. I quickly sold it to buy an IBM compatible PC. I was able to change the 8086 CPU (running at an incredible 4.77MHz) for a super fast Nec V20 CPU running at 8MHz. As a student I spend almost al the money I earned working in the weekends and holidays on this machine. I bought an EGA monitor with 16 colors!! (Yes 16, not 16 million) before that I had an amber colored display (It was so much more interesting to call it amber than orange). Than I bought my first (second hand) harddisk of an incredible 5Mb. It was the size of a shoe box and when you turned it on you could hear it slowly coming up to speed. It than made all kinds of clicking sounds before it would become idle. I think this process took about 30 seconds and I always had the feeling it would drain so much power that my mum would come up because the lights downstairs would dim. Of course this wasn't the case, but this harddrive made you feel as if it did. I bought it second hand for a couple of hundred US$ but when it was purchased new about 5 years earlier the first owner must have paid at least a couple of thousand dollars, they were very expansive in the beginning. The disk drive was 360Kb (and that was double sided). These disks would cost about 3 to 5 US$ a piece. And me and my friends would play Frogger or King's Quest. I also purchased an additional 8087 co-processor for super fast math and a special memory board to upgrade the memory to an astonashing 1Mb (640KB for MS-DOS than some 128Kb got lost and an additional 256Kb as a really super fast memory drive). Well I still had a lot of fun on with this machine and so did my friends. At my school, with some 600 students, I was the only one with a PC. Most kids had no computer and if they had a computer it would be a Commodore 64, Atari or Sinclair Spectrum. I really liked MS-DOS and my keyboard was so much larger than that of a Sinclair Spectrum.... I learned BASIC and let the computer draw by calculations some nice looking pictures on the screen (in two colors so either black or white). The EGA card had a resolution of 640 x 350 and before all these dots were calculated it took my computer about 10 minutes!!! Later on I started selling computers and started my own computer store and after that I started programming. So at the end I guess it was worth it. Kind regards, Clemens Linders

[BrewMan_NH]

I had the Atari 400 as my first computer, tape drive that took 45 minutes to load a game, upgraded to the SS/SD 5.25 floppy which made things a whole lot easier. I hacked together an external keyboard from an old teletype machine and a LOT wiring, and ribbon cables to get a "real" keyboard for it. I spent so much money on that thing doing upgrades, wish I had that money right now. :)

[Paul Kemner]

Another Atari 800, and Star Raiders player. Started with the cassette drive, and eventually got the 5-1/4" floppy. And different languages including LISP. Remember the magazines with code listings in each issue? Type them in, DEBUG THEM, and play the games. Then modify them. There was a small Atari club nearby, and we'd drive up to the huge club meetings in Detroit occasionally.

[englebart]

C64 One favorite trick was to map a Sprite (hardware based graphic entity 24 pixels wide by 21 pixels tall in 63 bytes of memory) to the low addresses of memory. It was like an x-ray of the OS working memory. You could see the system clock binary counter running, pieces of memory involved in making the input cursor blink, the system call stack, etc. Very cool. If you messed something up, turn it off and back on within a second or two to start over. My father wrote his own family budget system on that platform. He used a fixed record length dataset on the floppy drive for his storage.

[SkyNom]

After school with a Digital PDP8, with 4K of RAM. Woo! Big day when we upgraded to 8K and DEC Tape. ASR33 teletype terminal, paper tape for boot loading and for storing short programs.

[krensauce]

My first was a C16 (the first model which looked like the C64), with which I spent my time playing games with my brother (at the time they sold "legit" pirated games compilations in the stores), and when I was alone, trying to learn programming, which I found so fascinating. When I finally got into the best part of it (POKE'n'PEEKs), it broke and we were never able to repair it because it went out of production since too much time. So my next dream was the Amiga, so much that I actually spent all my (very little) money on a magazine which teached Assembly, which I started learning without having the computer. When I finally got the Amiga, in 1995 (it was the first batch produced by the new owners, ESCOM, after Commodore went bankrupt), I didn't have an assembler, so I used my time to learn the OS and what it had already: AmigaDOS (that is so good that it can be considered a programming language, there's even a racing game made in ASCII available on Aminet) and ARexx (an amazing feature that still today is nowhere to be seen in any other OS, at least in a similar form). I then learned other languages as soon as I could get my hands on their compilers (yes, Assembly too at a certain point, finally...). What was so great is really what you already described, probably, the way you could "touch" the hardware and "speak" to it directly, to make something that it was not made for, for example, or just to get that extra performance/feature that the language didn't have (in the case of using a C compiler on the Amiga, for example, you could add some ASM to access HW directly in a part of your time-critical routines to do things actually easier, and much faster, than you would by doing it with C itself). It was the absence of this forceful abstraction that is, legitimately, present today in every system (even in consoles), which really meant freedom, and on the Amiga, it was done without giving up multi-tasking (though you had to disable it momentarily if you went too deep in the HW, but it was made for that). It was a time of discovery for all our young minds, and to master the machine. I believe today's kids might have a similar inner experience but in the end, it's always the machine which masters the man, which forces the way, while at that time, you were the one which chose the way. It was also something relatively new and not so common, which added to the mystery, while today it's quite a normal thing to have at least one computer in the house (smartphones included). It's taken for granted, and because