Those are completely different things with a very different learning value.
Not much. Back in the days most of the C64 owners used it only for games. Most of them just learned the basic commands to load the games, and nothing else.
Today is the same. Get an old PC only for retrogaming, don't learn anything to you.
With Arduino is the same. If you use it only for copy/paste sketches made by someone else, you don't learn anything.
But, if you want to start to learn something is a good first step.
Once you learned the basic, the concept are the same. You have to deal with the memory, registers, and so on. Is not much different from start to use the PEEK and POKE commands on the C64.
Loved my C64. Had a vic 20 before that.
Opened up my career in IT.
Writing in assembler with the programmers reference guide, I was hooked.
I sort of liken my experience with the C64 to an old school mechanic who would know how to strip a gearbox, rebuild an alternator etc. I learnt how everything worked, how each bit comes together.
Whereas, I liken someone getting their first computer experience on a PC/Mac, rather like someone learning to work in a garage nowadays, many things on cars are simply swapped for new parts, very little is actually repaired. Many new mechanics will never get to say strip and rebuild a gearbox etc, end result, they might be good at what they do, but most will never have the in-depth knowledge and experience of how every part works.
True you can argue with the modern pc (or car etc) you don’t actually need to. But I’m just glad I was around when we did
The attached pic isn’t that far from the truth
Hard to tell with The C64 but the company that brought out the modern mini C64 brought out a couple years ago the full size C64 which is cleverly designated The C64. What powers it, FPGA based emulator or what I do not know. All I recall is you can boot it into C64 Rom Basic or into Vic 20 or into a menu that brings up 64 games. Joystick connectors are replaced with USB ports. Video is HDMI 720 and no cartridge port. Keyboard is faithfully reproduced which means an ergonomic nightmare whose extended use will bring great pain, the only thing not replicated is the latching caps.
If I wanted a C64 I'd probably prefer the modern one. Not sure what used prices are but a working C64 vintage with no hardware faults was said to be worth $100 and that's about the price of tge modern rendition.
I grew up throughout the era and I have no desire to get one. It was a trash computer, in all loving respect. Nothing on it was new or designed for it specifically, it was a rush job of reuse of all the parts from existing computers rushed out the door as a very temporary planned market life to compete with the rumor of an Atari 64kbyte machine.
Commodore in typical Commodore fashion blundered into an epic success story and thia temporary stop gap bag of old parts became infamous to the kids and adults who owned one during the 80s golden age of personal computers.
Serious though for those buying and restoring vintage. You want a bundle of analog chips not made anymore that had their own issues, no two alike came off the assembly line quite like the other one, now having to rely on Chinese e-waste reclamation to get original parts. Again, arduino teaches you more about interfacing to electronics and programming in constrained environments. And if the keyboard doesn't give you carpal tunnel the aweful joystick that came with C64 will.
Lets see if 40 years from now how many people remember anything about arduino.
These old personal computers were way ahead of Arduino.
A kid could walk up to a C64 and easily make a program in BASIC. We did it in the malls, back in the day.
Now that computing science has condemned
BASIC and
Pascal, and given us C, C++ for the Arduino we instead have students lost and having no fun, struggling. It's stupid hard for them.
In 40 years Arduino will be viewed as "punch cards" lol.
I bet Arduino will still be around in 40 years. If you saw one of those future Arduinos today you may not recognize it but it has gained enough traction and diversity that the platform will likely exist at least in name. Certainly the younger people who cut their teeth programming arduinos will have nostalgia at some point and a lot of them will probably still have one in a box in a closet somewhere that maybe they'll try to get their kids to play with.
Good observations, Arduino is now a platform for uC more so than a specific uC hardware choice and back in the day to make uC projects meant you had to use assembly and then the uCs got more powerful and have more inbuilt storage and you could now do it all in C/C++, now uC are insanely fast with huge inbuilt storage and we are seeing the introduction of Python running on the uC (today's equivalent for BASIC, your typical 101 programming class in uni these days). uCs now have various RTOS to provide more services for the developer on the platforms but will future uCs continue into more evolved RTOS equivalents with more general OS features? Arduino jumped on top of C++ with a stupid simple most batteries already provided for you lego system where all the low-level details are already handled by the various libraries in the framework and beginners can focus on learning basic high-level principles. Whats needed is a bridging where people can leave the toybox and start to use their own selections of interfaced hardware and start handling the lower level details themselves without the training wheels of the framework. Otherwise I see a small subset of manufacturers providing all the low level details and implementers and integrators just using Python as a glue language to make all the bits work.
The C64 was an object of desire to kids and adults, not only was it used for programming it was a super popular gaming platform until replaced by the Amiga. Obviously not everyone had access to them and some were persuaded to buy other brands or needed Apples or IBMs.
But ordinary people spent thousands of dollars on them (or hundreds on blank floppies). These weren't electronics or ham guys these were just average people. Years of spare time clocked in front of the same beige or white keyboard.
So no the Arduino isn't the same at all. I'm not saying it won't have its own legacy but it's more like a modern programming calculator equivalent. If the OS on mobile phones was fleshed out a little more I would say that could be a good stand in for the micro computer of the future for programming as well as media, games, communication.
The important part is the C64 in terms of legacy wasn't unique it's just not everyone could afford an IBM PC which was the hands down most influential design to come from that period.
Anyway this thread has dragged on some, can we let it die please. This forum is about vintage computing and that last Arduino post is comprehensibly off topic.
You could take these vintage personal computers and have a sprite moving and some sounds within a few minutes of coding in BASIC. Tons of something called... FUN.
Turn on your IBM-PC and code a simple game. Hint: you can't and never could. IBM-PC is gross, a cheezy timer for beeps and primitive graphics, something the C64 kicked the PC's ass in the fun department.
Microsoft 2020/4
open-sources GW BASIC yeah Bill it's a bit too late and it's in ASM lol.
It does surprise me a bit that nobody ever (to my knowledge) made a sprite based gaming video card for the PC back in the PC/XT/286 days. Doesn't seem like it would have been very difficult to add arcade style motion object hardware to a card incorporating monochrome text mode or even CGA compatible graphics. The motion object hardware used in the old arcade games was not very complicated, and RAM could have been used in place of ROM to store the object bitmaps. Would have required games written specifically to support it but I don't see that as an insurmountable obstacle, the same was true of sound cards. If I were better at the software development side I'd be tempted to make a FPGA based video card for a vintage PC. Not that I need any more projects.