EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Computers => Vintage Computing => Topic started by: EasyGoing1 on February 25, 2021, 03:11:22 pm
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I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ... this seemingly growing cult fanaticism to bring back the Commodore 64. I mean one company is even selling kits for $1,000 where you can build your own???
My first computer was a Commodore 64 back in 1982 and I cannot tell you how happy I was to get rid of it when I upgraded to a 128, then an Amiga, then into PCs, and now my 2019 MBP which literally has 500,000 times more RAM than my C=64 had ... and there isn't a single cell in my body that would even remotely be interested in seeing the C=64 again much less actually use one. I mean initially, I had to store my programs on cassette tape until the 1541 disk drive came out ... and computers were NOT fast back then ... I had to WAIT AND WAIT to load games or do bit-level disk copying ... it was a nightmare.
I'm sure these modern renditions cheat somehow and use solid-state storage so technically these enthusiasts are most likely not getting the full experience because I'm sure if they were, the whole thing would lose its luster rather quickly.
The only thing I can think to compare it to would be back when I was a teenager, I had a fascination for the '55, '56, and '57 Chevy Bel-Air cars. My dad owned a '57 for a few years before selling it to a cousin long before I was born, and to him, it was just a car that he had and got rid of. To me, it was a symbol of Americana when cars had grace and style that simply doesn't exist anymore in that classic way so I had a different perspective than he had on the matter ... is that kinda similar to this new penchant for the revival of the C=64? Because honestly, I don't get it ... they're absolute junk to me and as far as I was concerned and still am ... GOOD RIDDANCE!
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One other comment that some may appreciate ... when I was 16, I found on Compuserve (using my $300 - 300 BAUD MODEM), an ASCII schematic that showed how to add a second SID chip to a Commodore 128 to give it TRUE STEREO sound as each chip could be assigned to one speaker. And there was software along with MIDI music that I could download that took advantage of the second chip, so I got the parts and soldered everything in and had the pleasure of hearing my C=128 play true stereo music. But that was probably the highlight of my Commodore days ... that and Exodus Ultima III :)
GOD I STILL REMEMBER the reset command for that C=64
SYS64738
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Let people do what they enjoy. Reasons can be different. There are people who goes hunting using muzzleloaders. So what?
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It's not quite new. This interest has been there for years already. Vintage computing in general has a solid "fan" base. And while I'm no "fan", I admit this often piques my interest.
But I've indeed noted a recent interest peak for the C64.
The answer to your question: you gave it yourself. In your first sentence. "I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ..."
It's always difficult to identify the initial spark of a trend, but what makes it exist and grow is obvious here. Youtube and social media. Once videos about some topic become popular, a lot of youtubers will want to make videos about the same topic. And bam, this gets viral. As you yourself said, if it weren't for all the videos and projects "all over the Internet", the C64 would likely still have fans but they would essentially remain silent and nobody out of their circles would care. So welcome to the 21st century?
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Name doesn't check out. :(
Tim
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Computers like the Commodore 64, Apple ][, Radio Shack Model 100, etc. are interesting for a few reasons:
- A lot were made, they are available for a reasonable price, and all the technical data is available
- Online forums like this allow for questions to be answered in reasonable times
- It's possible to just about understand most everything about it, down to the registers and memory locations, unlike Windows 10 computers
- The limited memory and connectivity makes it possible to explore and find the limits
I'm not doing much with any of those now but I do have some very slow projects involving them. I need to fix them first.
I have a very different project going on right now, which is interesting only because I am limiting myself to a specific set of vintage parts.
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Well, that was interesting.
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I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ... this seemingly growing cult fanaticism to bring back the Commodore 64. I mean one company is even selling kits for $1,000 where you can build your own???
My first computer was a Commodore 64 back in 1982 and I cannot tell you how happy I was to get rid of it when I upgraded to a 128, then an Amiga, then into PCs, and now my 2019 MBP which literally has 500,000 times more RAM than my C=64 had ... and there isn't a single cell in my body that would even remotely be interested in seeing the C=64 again much less actually use one. I mean initially, I had to store my programs on cassette tape until the 1541 disk drive came out ... and computers were NOT fast back then ... I had to WAIT AND WAIT to load games or do bit-level disk copying ... it was a nightmare.
I'm sure these modern renditions cheat somehow and use solid-state storage so technically these enthusiasts are most likely not getting the full experience because I'm sure if they were, the whole thing would lose its luster rather quickly.
The only thing I can think to compare it to would be back when I was a teenager, I had a fascination for the '55, '56, and '57 Chevy Bel-Air cars. My dad owned a '57 for a few years before selling it to a cousin long before I was born, and to him, it was just a car that he had and got rid of. To me, it was a symbol of Americana when cars had grace and style that simply doesn't exist anymore in that classic way so I had a different perspective than he had on the matter ... is that kinda similar to this new penchant for the revival of the C=64? Because honestly, I don't get it ... they're absolute junk to me and as far as I was concerned and still am ... GOOD RIDDANCE!
You managed to load games from a datasette?
With our one, it was pretty much "hit & miss"-------about 15% hit & 85% miss!
I even bought a second datasette because I thought the original might be faulty----no joy!
Sitting there, waiting for the bloody thing to load, while it displayed multicoloured lines on the screen, which usually, either went to a noisy mess, or just sat there for what felt like hours.
Meanwhile, the kids, who had been wildly enthusiastic about the latest game, had given up & gone to do something else.
It was not till the same games came out in cartridge form, that they could just "go to the computer" & play "Frogger", or whatever.
The floppy disk drives were out of our reach financially when we bought the C64, & by the time they weren't, I had lost interest, so using the cartridges, it became just a "games machine".
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Old stuff like 8 bit computers, vinyl records and vintage cars are just fine if you are only playing around with them and have modern up to date stuff to go back to when you are finished. But if you grew up in an era when that was all there was then you know they could be a pain in the butt and you were just hanging for something better to come along. It’s like going for a camping trip in the wilds. Some people actually look forward to living in a tent with not much in the way of conveniences for a week or two, because they know that they will eventually be returning to their nice comfortable home. But tell them they now have to live in a tent permanently and see what they say!
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I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ... this seemingly growing cult fanaticism to bring back the Commodore 64. I mean one company is even selling kits for $1,000 where you can build your own???
Have you seen prices of vintage Porsches? Even the poor spec ones like Carrera CS https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1988-porsche-911-club-sport/
$150K for a cheapest model 911 at the time. Its main selling point being stuff not fitted at all, or replaced with VW Beetle parts to lower the price. "but its rare so totally worth it".
Or the prices on late 80 video games? Its all nostalgia driven. People with those specific memories are old and wealthy now. Not to mention 2020 invisible inflation, just take a look at ridiculous stock prices (TSLA, etc).
My first computer was a Commodore 64 back in 1982 and I cannot tell you how happy I was to get rid of it when I upgraded to a 128
Upgrade in what sense? 128 was not an upgrade, it was a C64 with some useless garbage parts glued in at twice the cost and none of the improvements where it counted.
The only thing I can think to compare it to would be back when I was a teenager, I had a fascination for the '55, '56, and '57 Chevy Bel-Air cars. My dad owned a '57 for a few years before selling it to a cousin long before I was born, and to him, it was just a car that he had and got rid of. To me, it was a symbol of Americana when cars had grace and style that simply doesn't exist anymore in that classic way so I had a different perspective than he had on the matter ... is that kinda similar to this new penchant for the revival of the C=64? Because honestly, I don't get it ... they're absolute junk to me and as far as I was concerned and still am ... GOOD RIDDANCE!
Dont even try driving a 930 (911 Turbo). Loud, switches in random stupid places, cheap creaking plastics, tiny boot with rag instead of boot liner. No power until 4000 rpm, then it kicks in and immediately reaches redline forcing a gear shift. Cant accelerate in corners, understeer until sudden snap oversteer. Porsche treated it as a dead end design expecting total switch to FF platform, almost 15 years with one small upgrade to a 70s car.
Current price: over $100K, double from 2010.
Now look at Electric Train sets, or vintage Radios, once expensive, now garbage nobody wants. People enthusiastic about them died off.
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What new trend? The C64 has never really stopped being popular. They made millions of them, they are iconic, a whole generation of engineers and software developers cut their teeth on the C64 and similar machines. The C64 was one of the more popular retro computers even 20+ years ago. It's perfectly natural for people to get nostalgic about the things they had as kids as they get older, some people are more nostalgic than others. You were happy to get rid of your C64 back in the day, just like countless other people were happy to get rid of their McIntosh tube amplifiers and other vintage HiFi gear to replace it with new solid state equipment. Then what is old becomes new again, and as the amount of it out there diminishes the value and enthusiasm for what remains increases. Classic cars are another example, when I was a kid in the 80s you could hardly give away 60s-70s muscle cars, they were just old cars, bulky cantankerous gas guzzlers that nobody really wanted. Then after most had long since gone to the crusher for a while anyway restored examples were fetching crazy prices and they are still prized collectibles.
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It's not quite new. This interest has been there for years already. Vintage computing in general has a solid "fan" base. And while I'm no "fan", I admit this often piques my interest.
But I've indeed noted a recent interest peak for the C64.
The answer to your question: you gave it yourself. In your first sentence. "I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ..."
It's always difficult to identify the initial spark of a trend, but what makes it exist and grow is obvious here. Youtube and social media. Once videos about some topic become popular, a lot of youtubers will want to make videos about the same topic. And bam, this gets viral. As you yourself said, if it weren't for all the videos and projects "all over the Internet", the C64 would likely still have fans but they would essentially remain silent and nobody out of their circles would care. So welcome to the 21st century?
I can't imagine someone spending a whole lot of time actually using one. They have nothing to offer compared to modern tech. 8 bit games might be fun for a few minutes, till they realize that they have an XBox one sitting next to that Commodore with Call of Duty just itching to be fired up! lol
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Name doesn't check out. :(
Tim
Which name would you be referring to?
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- It's possible to just about understand most everything about it, down to the registers and memory locations, unlike Windows 10 computers
Now THAT makes more sense to me ... an educational tool where it's still simple enough that most people who are technical-minded could comprehend it...
Still, though ... $4 gets you a Raspberry Pi Pico with a dual core 32 bit CPU. It could probably run multiple C=64 emulators simultaneously and maybe with thread sharing in each core and still run circles around that old tech. Might be fun to get a Pico running with 4 emulators operating independently of each other but all running at the same time ... then again ... that sounds like a headache to me. lol
I'm not sure I would even consider trying to make a C=64 into a light switch.
And modern pcs aren't that difficult to understand ... they just need to be understood as machines that have a crap load of different technologies each serving a specific need. I gave up trying to understand every aspect of a PC years ago. The knowledge didn't add any value to my work life and it simply changes too fast for anyone to be able to reasonably keep up with unless their full time job is rooted in, around and about PC hardware day in and day out.
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You managed to load games from a datasette?
When the C=64 became the VIC-20 successor, they still had a lot of games on cassette. I occasionally used a cassette game here and there, but I was more interested in learning how to program, so I would store my programs onto tape. I was an audio enthusiast, so I had some high-quality chrome-doped cassette tapes and they were pretty reliable if I'm remembering correctly. I was also a stickler about keeping the heads and rollers clean and I even degaussed the heads from time to time - although that was probably over-kill.
I got my C=64 about six months before they released the 1541 floppy drive, but even that thing was slow as molasses. I owned a notch tool so that I could notch the other side of the disk, then purchase double density floppys and be able to flip them over and use both sides.
I even figured out how to read and write data directly to the sectors of the floppy when I had a C=128 with the 1571 drives. When I was 16 I used the disk sectors as raw data storage ... like a crude database. I use to store the data from my McDonalds check stubs straight to the sectors of the floppy drives. And I'm not sure why I did that other than I don't believe there was any kind of disk operating system outside of CP/M when that 128 was in Commodore mode, there was no way to use basic and read and write directly to a file, so I think reading and writing directly to the sectors on the floppy was the only way I could actually store information to keep it non-volatile. I vaguely recall having to format the information a specific way because of how bytes were structured on each sector. It did work though I remember clearly that it worked well.
Meanwhile, the kids, who had been wildly enthusiastic about the latest game, had given up & gone to do something else.
It was not till the same games came out in cartridge form, that they could just "go to the computer" & play "Frogger", or whatever.
The floppy disk drives were out of our reach financially when we bought the C64, & by the time they weren't, I had lost interest, so using the cartridges, it became just a "games machine".
Yeah the Commodore certainly set itself apart as a more advanced gaming platform than what we could get from ... say an Atari or a Coleco Vision or what have you. Having the keyboard and floppy storage in addition to joy sticks ... it opened up gaming ability that sealed consoles could never do.
But I wasn't really into games except for one or two. I was into understanding how to pirate games and I spent a lot of time on BBS's and even Compuserve once in a while either quasi-socializing or learning about anything I could get my eyeballs onto as far as modern tech was concerned. I just craved knowledge and practical application of the technology in every day life.
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Have you seen prices of vintage Porsches? Even the poor spec ones like Carrera CS https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1988-porsche-911-club-sport/
$150K for a cheapest model 911 at the time. Its main selling point being stuff not fitted at all, or replaced with VW Beetle parts to lower the price. "but its rare so totally worth it".
Or the prices on late 80 video games? Its all nostalgia driven. People with those specific memories are old and wealthy now. Not to mention 2020 invisible inflation, just take a look at ridiculous stock prices (TSLA, etc).
Exotic cars have traditionally been the exception to the norm where it comes to depreciation over time. If an exotic car has been well taken care of, at a minimum, the original owner can usually get back exactly what they paid for it, regardless of how many years they've owned it. Certainly that never happens with a Honda Accord ... it loses 20% the second you drive it off the lot.
Upgrade in what sense? 128 was not an upgrade, it was a C64 with some useless garbage parts glued in at twice the cost and none of the improvements where it counted.
HEY, it had TWICE as much RAM, and I could run GEOS on it! Also, the 1571 floppy drives were less than half as tall as the 1541 and they were a hell of a lot quieter. To me, THAT was an upgrade! I believe the 128 even had better graphics specs than the C=64 did but I'm not 100% on that.
Also, I can't remember now if it was the 128 or the Amiga that could boot into CP/M mode ... I wanna say that was the Amiga but there again, I'm not 100% on that.
Dont even try driving a 930 (911 Turbo). Loud, switches in random stupid places, cheap creaking plastics, tiny boot with rag instead of boot liner. No power until 4000 rpm, then it kicks in and immediately reaches redline forcing a gear shift. Cant accelerate in corners, understeer until sudden snap oversteer. Porsche treated it as a dead end design expecting total switch to FF platform, almost 15 years with one small upgrade to a 70s car.
It's funny ... as a teenager, the car I coveted the most was the 1986 Lamborghini Countach, which I think was around $250,000 at the time (so close to a million in today's dollars I'm sure). And back in 2003 I bought my first 350Z right off the lot. But it wasn't until about 8 years later when I was watching some program about Jay Lenno's exotic car collection and they were featuring his 1986 Countach and as they went down the specs of that car (horsepower, top speed, 0-60 etc.) they were almost identical to my 350Z which I only paid $32k for less than 20 years after the Countach was first engineered. I got a kick out of that.
Now look at Electric Train sets, or vintage Radios, once expensive, now garbage nobody wants. People enthusiastic about them died off.
I have my fathers electric train set that he had as a kid back in the 1950's... I never thought to look into what it would be worth. It hasn't been used since the early 1970s and it's in excellent condition.
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It's not quite new. This interest has been there for years already. Vintage computing in general has a solid "fan" base. And while I'm no "fan", I admit this often piques my interest.
But I've indeed noted a recent interest peak for the C64.
The answer to your question: you gave it yourself. In your first sentence. "I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ..."
It's always difficult to identify the initial spark of a trend, but what makes it exist and grow is obvious here. Youtube and social media. Once videos about some topic become popular, a lot of youtubers will want to make videos about the same topic. And bam, this gets viral. As you yourself said, if it weren't for all the videos and projects "all over the Internet", the C64 would likely still have fans but they would essentially remain silent and nobody out of their circles would care. So welcome to the 21st century?
I can't imagine someone spending a whole lot of time actually using one. They have nothing to offer compared to modern tech. 8 bit games might be fun for a few minutes, till they realize that they have an XBox one sitting next to that Commodore with Call of Duty just itching to be fired up! lol
Yeah, but you turn on the C64 and it said:
38911 bytes free READY.
If you turn on an Xbox that was't used for 2 weeks, you get a dozen updates, popups, logins, friend requests, deals on the store. Its all just noise. The C64, you turn it on, and it's ready. There are no notifications, no second program running in the background. Its the product of simpler times.
It is also the first computer that I've ever programmed. There were others, but this was the first one. And I only had to type to program it, there were no downloading compilers or anything.
I could program the C64 when I was 12, and I couldn't do the same with the 286.
And trust me, most people use the new-retro C64 few times when they get it, then it just sits there for a decade.
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I'm the absolute worst of the 64 retro users, a "period correct" user.
I have a 1764 REU boosted to 512K, two 1581s, a bunch of other drives like the SFD-1001 and 2031, and Super Snapshot, IEEE interface, 1351 mouse and a 1080 monitor.
I guess the exception I make to being period correct is the necessary use of a video upscaler if you don't have a monitor, given how heavy and rare these things are now.
I have most of the things I coveted as a kid. Things that were mythical or just plain out of reach back then. Maybe I'll be on the next episode of Hoarders, I don't know.
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I'm the absolute worst of the 64 retro users, a "period correct" user.
I have a 1764 REU boosted to 512K, two 1581s, a bunch of other drives life the SFD-1001 and 2031, and Super Snapshot, IEEE interface, 1351 mouse and a 1080 monitor.
Sounds like a Model T Ford engine with a DOHC 16-valve conversion back in the day.
https://external-preview.redd.it/kW-EECWIhuzHYDGxkVIDnikMPsV6Lo7CZaXRee1WjKk.jpg?auto=webp&s=ccd361ac5c70431627f86355a98624c2467d1bff (https://external-preview.redd.it/kW-EECWIhuzHYDGxkVIDnikMPsV6Lo7CZaXRee1WjKk.jpg?auto=webp&s=ccd361ac5c70431627f86355a98624c2467d1bff)
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Heh heh, if we stay in car metaphors, I wanted a 20MHz SuperCPU which would be this
https://images.cdn.circlesix.co/image/1/700/0/uploads/posts/2016/12/08487c028c96b44da41d3c9f74cb00e2.jpg
in car terms.
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I can't imagine someone spending a whole lot of time actually using one. They have nothing to offer compared to modern tech. 8 bit games might be fun for a few minutes, till they realize that they have an XBox one sitting next to that Commodore with Call of Duty just itching to be fired up! lol
It's pretty clear you're just not interested in retro computing and don't get the appeal, and probably like me and football you never will get it. Doesn't seem like there's much point in discussing it, it's something quite a few people are into and enjoy, if you don't that's fine, leave the vintage stuff for someone who is interested in it.
Personally I think emulators are rather boring, it's not the same, I like playing with real hardware and I'd rather play some classic games from the 80s-90s than COD on an Xbox any day. I pretty much stopped gaming soon after I became an adult, the only games I still play are the stuff I was playing when I was a kid up through being a teenager in the 90s. Newer stuff just doesn't grab me at all, total snooze fest, I tend to marvel at the graphics for about 5 minutes and then I'm done and I'll go play one of my early 80s arcade cabinets. If you enjoy it that's fine, play the stuff you like and don't worry about what other people like.
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Exotic cars have traditionally been the exception to the norm where it comes to depreciation over time. If an exotic car has been well taken care of, at a minimum, the original owner can usually get back exactly what they paid for it, regardless of how many years they've owned it. Certainly that never happens with a Honda Accord ... it loses 20% the second you drive it off the lot.
Old Civics and Integras trade around their original MSRP. Is Fiat 500 Gardiniera an exotic? Those are 15-20K Euro right now for a car you will spend 10 minutes in once a year for memes. Investment market is totally screwed, even real estate stopped being safe, people with money collect whatever now while Fed printers go BRrrrr.
HEY, it had TWICE as much RAM, and I could run GEOS on it!
GEOS and maybe two floppy copy programs being the only things that actually used that ram, and Geos wasnt really something anyone really wanted to use beyond 'hey thats neat' phase. Doing things in GEOS was a study in patience.
I believe the 128 even had better graphics specs than the C=64 did but I'm not 100% on that.
C128 had two independent graphics chips, the "new" 80 column one scrounged from a waste bin of another failed Commodore project and only able to work with RGBI (CGA) monitors. No sprites, text mode only. Once you count the cost of CGA monitor and FDD you already paid more than brand new Amiga/ST, or used XT.
Biggest scam was C128D, two graphic chips and 3 build in CPUs for the low low price of Amiga 500/ST. Some Commodore employee even said C128D cost more to manufacture than Amiga 500. Insanity.
Also, I can't remember now if it was the 128 or the Amiga that could boot into CP/M mode ... I wanna say that was the Amiga but there again, I'm not 100% on that.
Dead operating system from the 70ties. Why would you want to do that on a home computer?
C128 sounded and was marketed as C64 with 2x improvements, when in reality it was a basket case of old parts Commodore wanted to get rid of. Failed graphic chip here, obsolete Z80 processor there, sprinkle some old ram, double the price.
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Yeah, but you turn on the C64 and it said:
38911 bytes free READY.
If you turn on an Xbox that was't used for 2 weeks, you get a dozen updates, popups, logins, friend requests, deals on the store. Its all just noise. The C64, you turn it on, and it's ready. There are no notifications, no second program running in the background. Its the product of simpler times.
It is also the first computer that I've ever programmed. There were others, but this was the first one. And I only had to type to program it, there were no downloading compilers or anything.
I could program the C64 when I was 12, and I couldn't do the same with the 286.
I also programmed my C=64. It was my first computer EVER and it taught me many things ... and perhaps the most important things it taught me was about the nature of computer technology at its core, and also that the C=64 was just the beginning, and that when it comes to computers being fundamentally connected to our lives, it was going to be many years before they became the kind of tool that non-technical people would end up NEEDING in their every day lives ... and that only happened once interconnecting them became trivial and inexpensive. Because sure, your Xbox shoves a lot of stuff in your face ... but without that interconnection to other people, there is no way we would have games like Call of Duty which are the games that DOMINATE the gaming market. Because the truth is ... what makes a technology a success or a failure, is whether or not it connects us to other people. If you really think about it, that is pretty much universally true with anything in life that ends up completely changing the way we live.
I still say that the transistor was the one invention (or discovery depending on how you look at it) that changed the human race in such a phenomenal way, that no other technology invention has even come close to that claim. Where it has re-defined how people exist. I've been to third-world countries where remote village tribal communities rely on a transistor radio for information that they then use to make decisions about what will happen that day. Weather predictions and what not ... Only the transistor - as new technology goes - literally touched the lives of every human being on the planet regardless if those people live in high rise buildings or grass huts ... that one invention altered the way people live universally and no other technology has done that.
And trust me, most people use the new-retro C64 few times when they get it, then it just sits there for a decade.
OH I believe that ... which is why I'm kind of tongue in cheek mocking the fad... I suppose it only takes someone experiencing a C=64 before they very quickly say, "OK that was neat and all ... but I need to actually do something useful and this old bucket of rusted bolts isn't gonna help me do anything that I need to do today" ... a realization I came to in the 80's ... but only after using the technology for as long as I had to anyways.
I'm sure it would be the same with a restored '57 Chevy Bel Air ... after driving one for a few blocks and having to deal with so much play in the steering ... not having power steering ... or air conditioning ... or even dealing with a carburetor (EWE) and the hell those things use to bring on us ... it might be neat for a few days, but for daily use ... give me back my modern car and that old thing can just sit there and look pretty. :-)
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Personally I think emulators are rather boring, it's not the same, I like playing with real hardware and I'd rather play some classic games from the 80s-90s than COD on an Xbox any day. I pretty much stopped gaming soon after I became an adult, the only games I still play are the stuff I was playing when I was a kid up through being a teenager in the 90s. Newer stuff just doesn't grab me at all, total snooze fest, I tend to marvel at the graphics for about 5 minutes and then I'm done and I'll go play one of my early 80s arcade cabinets. If you enjoy it that's fine, play the stuff you like and don't worry about what other people like.
OH, I'm ALL ABOUT live and let live ... I was just trying to understand what the appeal is with this fad ... and I got some answers in here that I had not previously considered.
I adopted the opinion right after I graduated high school that "If you aren't learning, you're dying" - and from that ... epiphany if you will ... and onward, I've always made an effort to not do what seems to be our natural tendency which is to stay in what is familiar to us. The human brain relies heavily on what we know as the preferred way to exist vs. constantly changing and adapting to what we don't know. That of course has tremendous value to us as a survival mechanism, but it can hinder growth when we don't branch out and continue to learn new things and then adapt to implementing the unfamiliar into our lives. Because whatever that new thing is, someone, somewhere invested a lot of time and thought into making that new thing and bringing it to the rest of us ... so I always assume that there is something of value in that new and unfamiliar thing and that it would be in my best interest to find out what that is. So for that reason, I do love modern gaming. I was and really still am not a "gamer" as gamers go ... but I can spend an afternoon or evening ... or even a whole weekend striving to get better at Call of Duty if for no other reason ... so that I can have some bragging rights and show some youngsters that they don't own that space exclusively ... although I will admit ... the gaming platforms have gotten so incredibly fast and responsive that people with fast reflexes can and do dominate that space. But COD has gotten quite good at figuring out how to match players who are similarly skilled so that when you might have one or sessions where you just get clobbered, that never remains the trend because their software algorithms have finally evolved to level the playing field almost straight across the board.
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Old Civics and Integras trade around their original MSRP. Is Fiat 500 Gardiniera an exotic? Those are 15-20K Euro right now for a car you will spend 10 minutes in once a year for memes. Investment market is totally screwed, even real estate stopped being safe, people with money collect whatever now while Fed printers go BRrrrr.
Well, that's disappointing to know.
GEOS and maybe two floppy copy programs being the only things that actually used that ram, and Geos wasnt really something anyone really wanted to use beyond 'hey thats neat' phase. Doing things in GEOS was a study in patience.
What I remember was that I could type in a word processor (of sorts) and the font on the screen looked like the font that was printed on my Panasonic dot matrix printer. And to ME, that was amazing because before I had my Commodore, I used a typewriter ... and not a fancy electric one either ... it had a carriage return handle on it that I had to pull in order to get to the next line on the page.
I'll never forget the time when I took the head apart on that dot matrix printer because I wanted to know how it worked. What I didn't know when I did that, was that there was some special machining that went into the assembly of those heads ... that printer never worked again and it took me months to save up for a new one. lol
GEOS also introduced me to spreadsheets ... which I had no knowledge of nor experience with before then. Also graphical file browsing on the floppy ... I can't remember though if drag and drop was part of GEOS ... I'm thinking probably not but then again Apple did have drag and drop back then I think when the first Machintosh was introduced so maybe it did.
Remember Aldus Pagemaker? Boy they owned the market in their space for several years in the mid to late 80s.
C128 had two independent graphics chips, the "new" 80 column one scrounged from a waste bin of another failed Commodore project and only able to work with RGBI (CGA) monitors. No sprites, text mode only. Once you count the cost of CGA monitor and FDD you already paid more than brand new Amiga/ST, or used XT.
Biggest scam was C128D, two graphic chips and 3 build in CPUs for the low low price of Amiga 500/ST. Some Commodore employee even said C128D cost more to manufacture than Amiga 500. Insanity.
Well, as I mentioned in another response, I did download a schematic from Compuserve one time that was literally made with ASCII characters (think ASCII art, only with a schematic), and it showed me how to add a second SID chip to my C=128 so that I could have true stereo sound (three voices in the left speaker and three in the right). A local Commodore shop was able to order the SID chip for me and I got other parts like capacitors and I can't remember what else from Radio shack, and one night I ripped that thing apart and I think I either piggybacked the SID chip onto the main one or I glued it down somewhere and used bus wire to solder the connections of the added chip to the existing one. That was 1986 and I was 16 years old so the details escape me, but I do remember starting around 9pm and not finishing until around 3am. There were programs that you could download from Compuserve and even some BBSes that could take advantage of the second chip, but the only way I used it was with these true stereo MIDI files that people posted to Compuserve ... movie theme music and popular hit songs that someone converted into 6 voice midi format with a synthesizer no doubt and I could load those music files into a special player and sit back and hear true stereo sound from my 128. The theme music to Beverly Hills Cop for example started out with the keyboards playing that melody and between the left and the right channel, there was about a 15 millisecond offset with an echo so that the sound bounced between the speakers and added depth to it and the MIDI file re-produced that perfectly. I was impressed with it and loved that I was able to make the computer do something that it was never designed to do and certainly something that few people would even bother doing.
Dead operating system from the 70ties. Why would you want to do that on a home computer?
C128 sounded and was marketed as C64 with 2x improvements, when in reality it was a basket case of old parts Commodore wanted to get rid of. Failed graphic chip here, obsolete Z80 processor there, sprinkle some old ram, double the price.
CP/M was my first exposure to a DOS style operating system. I do remember spending a lot of time trying to find something useful to do with it, but ultimately giving up. I didn't get my first PC until I was 22 years old and I traded my Amiga with attached 20 meg hard drive for the PC because obviously by 1993, the trend towards PCs was in full force so I knew I needed to get on that bandwagon. By the time I was 25 I was already a network engineer and I've had a good career ever since.
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I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ... this seemingly growing cult fanaticism to bring back the Commodore 64. I mean one company is even selling kits for $1,000 where you can build your own???
My first computer was a Commodore 64 back in 1982 and I cannot tell you how happy I was to get rid of it when I upgraded to a 128, then an Amiga, then into PCs, and now my 2019 MBP which literally has 500,000 times more RAM than my C=64 had ... and there isn't a single cell in my body that would even remotely be interested in seeing the C=64 again much less actually use one. I mean initially, I had to store my programs on cassette tape until the 1541 disk drive came out ... and computers were NOT fast back then ... I had to WAIT AND WAIT to load games or do bit-level disk copying ... it was a nightmare.
I'm sure these modern renditions cheat somehow and use solid-state storage so technically these enthusiasts are most likely not getting the full experience because I'm sure if they were, the whole thing would lose its luster rather quickly.
The only thing I can think to compare it to would be back when I was a teenager, I had a fascination for the '55, '56, and '57 Chevy Bel-Air cars. My dad owned a '57 for a few years before selling it to a cousin long before I was born, and to him, it was just a car that he had and got rid of. To me, it was a symbol of Americana when cars had grace and style that simply doesn't exist anymore in that classic way so I had a different perspective than he had on the matter ... is that kinda similar to this new penchant for the revival of the C=64? Because honestly, I don't get it ... they're absolute junk to me and as far as I was concerned and still am ... GOOD RIDDANCE!
As you say here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/networking/what-nas-boxes-run-on-open-source-software-that-can-be-compiled-by-the-user/msg3482342/#msg3482342 (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/networking/what-nas-boxes-run-on-open-source-software-that-can-be-compiled-by-the-user/msg3482342/#msg3482342)
"Some of us like grape, some of us like strawberry".
They're fun systems to play with, you can access everything, repair, build add ons, modify them, program them easily without having half a dozen laers of obfuscation between you and the hardware.
If you don't like them that's fine. Nobody is forcing you to give up your fruity rip off laptop, in fact I'm pretty sure some of the retro computing guys also own fruity rip offs too.
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Nobody is forcing you to give up your fruity rip off laptop, in fact I'm pretty sure some of the retro computing guys also own fruity rip offs too.
I assume you are referring to my new MacBook Pro, which happens to be engineered by a company that has the highest engineering standards in the industry, which runs an operating system that is far more capable and flexible than Windows has ever hoped to be, though I still hold out hope that one day Microsoft will see the light and realize what a REAL computer should be able to do and how it should behave for their customers. Novel Directory Services to this day, had capability in it back in the late 1990s that Active Directory has never even come close to emulating. And NOT for the better either... Active Directory is a nightmare and is not even half of what a network directory SHOULD be from an administrative point of view.
MacOS - being built on BSD Unix is hands down the most flexible, and most secure operating system available in the consumer market space ...
And that thieving rip-off company is only worth these days a little over TWO TRILLION dollars ... or about one-fifth of the entire US federal budget ...
Boy they must be lucky to have emerged as the most successful computer company in human history given that they steal from everyone else ... hu?
LOL - PLEASE ... don't spew ignorance like that on the Internet ... educate yourself on a topic before you spew ignorant assumptions about it in front of the whole world. It's just bad form. You might start with learning about which technologies Apple actually introduced to the world vs. how many Microsoft has ... I'll give you a hint and just say Microsoft scores a big fat goose egg in the "actually has contributed new and useful technology into the computer space" category... Windows was a late-to-market attempt to offer what the Machintosh had already been giving people for at least 8 years. It was NEVER designed as its own operating system from scratch as it ran as software in DOS. XP was merely a merger between Windows NT and Windows 95 which still had hooks into DOS in the KERNEL ... not that such a fact is really all that significant except that DOS was also a rip-off of Unix and a VERY BAD one at that ...
Bill Gates was nothing more than a really talented programmer who merely copied technology that already existed. He simply had ruthless business sense and better marketing skills and got lucky with his business model.
But today, Apple is worth like 2.3 TRILLION dollars while Microsoft is less than half of that. so unless you have something of real value to say to back up your uninformed anger towards Apple, then just move along ... but if you have something tangible and meaningful to say that would justify such a position, then I'm all ears ... and certainly, I'm reasonable and willing to concede to valid points on a matter... bring it on!
In fact, why don't you google the term "Winrot" and learn what that's all about then find me the equivalent phenomena in the Mac operating system...
:-)
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Nobody is forcing you to give up your fruity rip off laptop, in fact I'm pretty sure some of the retro computing guys also own fruity rip offs too.
I assume you are referring to my new MacBook Pro, which happens to be engineered by a company that has the highest engineering standards in the industry, which runs an operating system that is far more capable and flexible than Windows has ever hoped to be, though I still hold out hope that one day Microsoft will see the light and realize what a REAL computer should be able to do and how it should behave for their customers. Novel Directory Services to this day, had capability in it back in the late 1990s that Active Directory has never even come close to emulating. And NOT for the better either... Active Directory is a nightmare and is not even half of what a network directory SHOULD be from an administrative point of view.
MacOS - being built on BSD Unix is hands down the most flexible, and most secure operating system available in the consumer market space ...
And that thieving rip-off company is only worth these days a little over TWO TRILLION dollars ... or about one-fifth of the entire US federal budget ...
Boy they must be lucky to have emerged as the most successful computer company in human history given that they steal from everyone else ... hu?
LOL - PLEASE ... don't spew ignorance like that on the Internet ... educate yourself on a topic before you spew ignorant assumptions about it in front of the whole world. It's just bad form. You might start with learning about which technologies Apple actually introduced to the world vs. how many Microsoft has ... I'll give you a hint and just say Microsoft scores a big fat goose egg in the "actually has contributed new and useful technology into the computer space" category... Windows was a late-to-market attempt to offer what the Machintosh had already been giving people for at least 8 years. It was NEVER designed as its own operating system from scratch as it ran as software in DOS. XP was merely a merger between Windows NT and Windows 95 which still had hooks into DOS in the KERNEL ... not that such a fact is really all that significant except that DOS was also a rip-off of Unix and a VERY BAD one at that ...
Bill Gates was nothing more than a really talented programmer who merely copied technology that already existed. He simply had ruthless business sense and better marketing skills and got lucky with his business model.
But today, Apple is worth like 2.3 TRILLION dollars while Microsoft is less than half of that. so unless you have something of real value to say to back up your uninformed anger towards Apple, then just move along ... but if you have something tangible and meaningful to say that would justify such a position, then I'm all ears ... and certainly, I'm reasonable and willing to concede to valid points on a matter... bring it on!
In fact, why don't you google the term "Winrot" and learn what that's all about then find me the equivalent phenomena in the Mac operating system...
:-)
Wow, 14 lines of ranting in response to a throw away comment, I guess you're not that easy going but are a bit of a fool because you believe the Official Fanboi Histories of Apple.
I'm going to leave it as an exercise for you to work out which one or more of your statements show you up to be clueless about the history of Apple, Microsoft, Novell and Unix.
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C64 and C128 fans have carried through, but people upgraded to an Amiga or PC clone rather than a C128, the market back then was heavily driven by children for gaming and the C128 had a small selection of native games at the time and back then the C64 with disk drive wasn't cheap either, it made little sense to spend even more for a C128 to the average punter.
The C128 also was not heavily marketed, I went to the IBM PC as the education market was heavily canvased at that stage by the big players. But I got to use the Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, C64, Apple IIe, BBC Micro and Archimedes, Apple Mac and IBM PC at different stages during education.
I don't hold anything against these models but I would hate to be the guy who kitted out a school with C128s or Amigas. The Apple Mac or the IBM PC would have been the way to go. Industry was using IBM PC/Clones in this part of the world aside from the media/design holdouts on Apple products.
Back in the early PC/C64 days, in my school at least, we were taught 'computer science' so the underlying skills learned could transfer to whichever platform if you were minded to put the effort in, there wasn't the focus on learning an OS and applications, it was more platform agnostic.
It was a bit of a gamble to try and predict which platform would be dominant in the marketplace but eventuially, as you know, the home computer market died and all the quirky, different, innovative home computers vanished in favour of the beige boxes of the Mac or PC.
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OH, I'm ALL ABOUT live and let live ... I was just trying to understand what the appeal is with this fad ... and I got some answers in here that I had not previously considered.
It's not a fad, retro computers have been popular for decades now, the C64 never really went away, popularity waned for a bit and then it came back. Eventually everyone who is old enough to have grown up using them will have died and popularity will drop again but nothing does last forever so that doesn't really fit my definition of a fad. Fads are something that pop up out of nowhere and become all the rage for a few months up to a year or so, then there is some gray area, but if you look at things in broader terms, nostalgia has never gone out of style.
Those of us who are into retro stuff do not stop learning about modern things, it's a form of recreation. Someone else brought up the camping analogy and I think that pretty well nailed it. I have no desire to get rid of modern comforts and go live out my life in a tent in the woods. Once in a while though it's nice to get away from the hectic modern life and go back to the basics for a few days, disconnect and unwind. I can have the best of both worlds, experiencing the parts of the past that I enjoyed without giving up modern conveniences and comforts. I'm not using a Mac SE to track my finances, but I do get it out once in a while and spend a day playing around with old software. I can still grab my modern laptop any time I want, I can have my cake and eat it too. Like visiting a place you enjoyed going to as a kid, it triggers memories and good feelings.
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The C64 is simply the greatest and most sold home computer of all times.
This means that most people using a computer in the 80ies have had contact with this computer.
Some have their life and career setup by this computer.
I still own my original C64 with all periferals and I have restored it (broken PLA, broken R/W head on 1541, broken belts on Datassette). I went on and bought a wedge type C64, a C128 and a C128D. I own an extra 1571, a 1084S, apart from other hardware.
Why?
Well, some people collect coins, others collect stamps, many on this forum collect test equipment. Why not collect vintage computer? I own other vintage computers like: ZX81, ZX Spectrum 48k, Silicon Graphics Indy and O2. I collect programmable calculators, too.
But there are more reasons:
1) The C64 is one single computer, where you can actually understand how it works. From CPU to PLA, from disk drive format (tracks & sectors) to RAM layout. You can understand EVERYTHING in your free hobby time. Including direct access to VIC and SID. Sure, you can program a modern PC with C, C++, Python, Java, etc. But you will never 100% understand what is going on. What I have learned due to the C64 served me well to understand the theory behind many of the PC technologies.
2) Some people are sentimental, others are not. I am a sentimental person and my life is filled with big losses. My mother died when I was 13. That year my father bought me the C64. Not to make up for it, of course, but I know he spent a lot of hard earned money to give me something to keep my mind busy in these troubled times. I am not sure if he ever understood how important that was for me. I won't go into details of my life story, but yes, the C64 has had a major impact on my life. How could I not own one (or a few of them)?
3) Some people would have loved to have some particular vintage computer (or other stuff), but could not afford it back then. Now, as a grown up, they can. And some will buy them to see what they missed out.
4) Restoring and repairing vintage gear is really satisfying as a hobby. Not too complex, but with some degree of dificulty. The reward can be great: a C64 looking new and fully working!
5) Dads wanting to show their kids how gaming was in the 80ies.
6) Games were not bad at all! While today you have amazing games like GTA V, RDR2, etc., I often don't have the patience to go through a whole training course (which is what the first level normally is). On a C64 you switch it on and load a game and you are ready to go.
7) Collecting vintage computers is an investment: prices are going up, as there are fewer devices available and the demand is increasing.
Hope that gives enough reasons.
And yes: a modern PC is no comparison to the C64 in terms of CPU, memory, etc. But that is not the point.
And yes: VICE can 99.99% emulate all aspects of a C64. But the experience is not the same, staring with the missing keyboard labels.
Regards,
Vitor
PS: It annoys me a lot when a thread goes offtopic with rants. Please stick to the subject and be polite.
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Anyone know where I can buy a PDP 11/70? It's tax time!
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Oh and on a more serious note, the vintage computing world allows
1) learning new things as people create new peripherals for the old machines
2) same but for creating replacement parts in CPLDs or FPGA
3) allows a cottage industry for some people to make pocket money with their hobby, ie selling parts or even making new software like 8 Bit Guy
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Please imagine that I am typing the replies on this
[attach=1]
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Wow, 14 lines of ranting in response to a throw away comment, I guess you're not that easy going but are a bit of a fool because you believe the Official Fanboi Histories of Apple.
I'm going to leave it as an exercise for you to work out which one or more of your statements show you up to be clueless about the history of Apple, Microsoft, Novell and Unix.
I was born in 1970, I LIVED the history. I was a Novel CNE in the mid 90's. I actually know how Novel Directory Service excelled in areas that mattered and Active Directory is a mere shadow of what NDS was. I've been a network engineer for 25 years.
I stand by every word I said ... unless you care to quote me and then offer evidence that shows I'm wrong. I'm a grown up, I can admit when I'm wrong ... so please, enlighten us.
Facts: Machintosh had a GUI YEARS before Microsoft. I know because I was there.
DOS is a rip off of Unix and Windows is a rip off of Apples GUI. Xerox actually had the first GUI in an operating system called ALTO back in 1973. Apple brought the GUI to the main stream and infected the education system with their computers as a marketing plan...
Look at technologies like SCSI, Firewire, USB and even Thunderbolt ... look at who brought those technologies into the main stream ... it wasn't Microsoft, know that!
And not that it matters, but I hated apple until Steve Jobs re-designed their OS building it on BSD Unix. That was during his time away from Apple after the board fired him... but then a few years later brought him back because they were on the verge of bankruptcy ... after they brought him back, he brought with him his new BSD based OS and shortly after that they went to the Intel processor. Thats when I started using a mac exclusively. I was tired of all the hours I had to spend keeping my Windows machine running properly. I needed a real computer that didn't suffer from winrot (its a real thing ... look it up) so that I spend more time helping my clients. And Ive never gone back.
Any Network Engineer worth his salt usually has a MacBook Pro as his main computer ... because Macs are serious operating systems and can do things that Windows can't.
PERIOD!
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Back in the early PC/C64 days, in my school at least, we were taught 'computer science' so the underlying skills learned could transfer to whichever platform if you were minded to put the effort in, there wasn't the focus on learning an OS and applications, it was more platform agnostic.
When I was in Jr. High, computer classes used Vic 20s and they taught some basic programming. In high school, I remember learning a programming language called "FROG" or something like that. It was different ... weird ... very high-level language ... almost natural linguistic terms that you used to make it do things... but it was also laser-focused on being a language intended to create graphics and not much else. More of a novelty in my opinion.
In college, when I took electronics ... during the digital electronics portions of that degree we had to learn machine language in hex on Motorola 68000 processors. They had these devices where you put the chip into a socket and it had an LED-based display much like what you would see in an HP calculator from the early 70s. and it had 16 main keys on it ... 0-9 and A-F and you coded programs one hex string at a time. Then when you got your program loaded into it, you executed it to see if you did it right or not. I was definitely about as RAW as you could get in terms of learning the fundamentals of computers. We even had a full semester of boolean algebra after the semester on logic gates - or maybe both were taught in the same semester ... can't remember but I do remember it lasting a long time, and our instructor was an absolute idiot. He was a guy in his 30's who started teaching because he couldn't cut it in the real world actually doing things with the technology ... a real piece of work that guy... several students petitioned the college to fire him because he was a liability for us students ... he didn't know the material, he couldn't answer questions ... he was worthless.
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Eventually everyone who is old enough to have grown up using them will have died and popularity will drop again
LOL - you youngsters ... you seriously make me laugh. I'm only 50 .. I've got AT LEAST 30 to 40 good years left in me ... I'm not gonna be dying anytime soon ... statistically that is. I mean I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, but my generation (Gex X) has still got quite a few miles left in them.
:-)
but nothing does last forever so that doesn't really fit my definition of a fad. Fads are something that pop up out of nowhere and become all the rage for a few months up to a year or so, then there is some gray area, but if you look at things in broader terms, nostalgia has never gone out of style.
Well, I'm sure that there are still surfers who live at the beach who are unemployed and still wear VANS with checkers on the side of them ... but that style was still just a fad in the 80's. The reason I'm calling this C=64 thing a fad is because prior to just a few years ago, there was no mention of bringing back the C=64 nor was there any cult following of that platform ... none that had a voice out in the mainstream anyway. Sure there have always been people who have liked and used them since they were first sold, but not on this kind of scale which is why I'm calling it a fad ... and it will die as fads do once the majority of those people exhaust all they can from the platform and realize it's not very useful - and I KNOW there will be exceptions ... but the cult following will fade and it will cease to be a fad when that happens.
This is my opinion ... so please ... feel free to think I'm an idiot, you wouldn't be the first ... and when the facts end up proving I am an idiot, ill be the first one to agree with you. :-)
Those of us who are into retro stuff do not stop learning about modern things, it's a form of recreation. Someone else brought up the camping analogy and I think that pretty well nailed it. I have no desire to get rid of modern comforts and go live out my life in a tent in the woods. Once in a while though it's nice to get away from the hectic modern life and go back to the basics for a few days, disconnect and unwind. I can have the best of both worlds, experiencing the parts of the past that I enjoyed without giving up modern conveniences and comforts. I'm not using a Mac SE to track my finances, but I do get it out once in a while and spend a day playing around with old software. I can still grab my modern laptop any time I want, I can have my cake and eat it too. Like visiting a place you enjoyed going to as a kid, it triggers memories and good feelings.
I can respect that and I can comprehend it too. To each their own - absolutely! I don't begrudge people what makes them happy. Just not my cup of tea is all ... and no where in my posts have i ever suggested that people should not be doing this ... I merely wanted to understand the appeal in it.
Mike
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The C64 is simply the greatest and most sold home computer of all times.
No argument there‼
This means that most people using a computer in the 80ies have had contact with this computer.
I just turned 50 less than a year ago... I was 12 when I got my C=64 ... I'm not gonna be 80 for a few more decades yet ...
:)
I still own my original C64 with all periferals and I have restored it (broken PLA, broken R/W head on 1541, broken belts on Datassette). I went on and bought a wedge type C64, a C128 and a C128D. I own an extra 1571, a 1084S, apart from other hardware.
Why?
Well, some people collect coins, others collect stamps, many on this forum collect test equipment. Why not collect vintage computer? I own other vintage computers like: ZX81, ZX Spectrum 48k, Silicon Graphics Indy and O2. I collect programmable calculators, too.
My favorite calculator of all time was the HP 16-C ... I used it in my junior college days until it got stolen and I couldn't replace it cause HP stopped making them for some reason (to my knowledge they are STILL making and selling the 12C for some reason ... why not the 16C? HU HP? WASSUP WITH THAT? :-) ... The 48Gx was nice too. I love RPN ... just feels more natural in my brain for some reason.
But there are more reasons:
1) The C64 is one single computer, where you can actually understand how it works. From CPU to PLA, from disk drive format (tracks & sectors) to RAM layout. You can understand EVERYTHING in your free hobby time. Including direct access to VIC and SID. Sure, you can program a modern PC with C, C++, Python, Java, etc. But you will never 100% understand what is going on. What I have learned due to the C64 served me well to understand the theory behind many of the PC technologies.
I would take exception to that comment but only to a point. When I write Java code, I could break down for you what the Java interpreter actually does under the hood. I know it interprets the code into machine language and it interfaces with the operating system's kernel which then interfaces with the drivers that exist between it and the hardware. Where that detail stops, of course, is in the actual explanation of what the drivers are doing with the hardware they support ... what I do know is that at the lowest level, that software is feeding instructions to other processors (in the case of a graphics driver) or sending out commands over a USB port or throwing packets out onto the NIC ... and my Java program would most definitely be supplying those functions with what they need to know in order to do their job so that everything flows along nicely.
I've never directly coded the hardware in a C=64, but I have written directly to the sectors of the 1571 floppy before with a make-shift database program I made in 1987 ... I never heard of SQL until about 1997.
2) Some people are sentimental, others are not. I am a sentimental person and my life is filled with big losses. My mother died when I was 13. That year my father bought me the C64. Not to make up for it, of course, but I know he spent a lot of hard-earned money to give me something to keep my mind busy in these troubled times. I am not sure if he ever understood how important that was for me. I won't go into details of my life story, but yes, the C64 has had a major impact on my life. How could I not own one (or a few of them)?
Your father was a good man, no question about it! And sorry you had to experience that kind of loss at such a young age ... that had to be extremely difficult and without question, it altered your life and your development and is very core to who you are now. And it sounds like your dad stepped up and did what every decent father should do in that situation so thank god you had him.
And THERE IS NO QUESTION ABOUT IT ... I would NEVER have been as successful in my career as I have been had I not had the Commodore 64. Elon Musk also had a C=64 as his first computer ... and look at how successful he is. But for me, personally, it was a tool, not a friend. :-)
4) Restoring and repairing vintage gear is really satisfying as a hobby. Not too complex, but with some degree of dificulty. The reward can be great: a C64 looking new and fully working!
I can definitely see the appeal in that - absolutely!
5) Dads wanting to show their kids how gaming was in the 80ies.
I spared my kids the "when I was your age" talks because I remember how much I hated them when I was a kid.
6) Games were not bad at all! While today you have amazing games like GTA V, RDR2, etc., I often don't have the patience to go through a whole training course (which is what the first level normally is). On a C64 you switch it on and load a game and you are ready to go.
Then I don't recommend EVER trying World of Warcraft if you lack the patience to learn something that has infinite layers in infinite directions ... HOWEVER, World of Warcraft does what no game ever did before it ... the first time I was in a live 40 man raid on Molten Core ... I was pinging off the walls because it was just so intense and the success or failure of that 40 man raid depended on each person knowing their character, knowing their skills, and implementing their skills properly and with the right timing ... because 1 person screwing up could and did wipe the whole raid. It is an INTENSE way to game where interconnecting with other people becomes mandatory ... so it can be engaged as a loner sport, but when you want the real marrow from the game, you have be socialized with others. And for THAT, I think WOW is amazing.
7) Collecting vintage computers is an investment: prices are going up, as there are fewer devices available and the demand is increasing.
as a general rule, I tell people that electronics are NEVER an investment so buy them for the service they offer you if you need or want that service, but by no means should you ever consider the money you spend on electronics as an investment. It's more like going to vegas with your spare cash that you deemed as cash you could lose without consequence.
What you're talking about is more like antiquing or any collector sport where supply and demand change the true monetary value of the thing being sought after.
Hope that gives enough reasons.
YES, well done sir! That was indeed insightful for me and I appreciate you taking the time to write it.
And yes: a modern PC is no comparison to the C64 in terms of CPU, memory, etc. But that is not the point.
This MacBook Pro that I bought last month has 32 gigs of ram ... that is literally 500,000 times more ram than my first computer had (the C=64). Could you imagine how much that amount of ram would have cost back in the 80's? I'm thinking probably in the billions!
And yes: VICE can 99.99% emulate all aspects of a C64. But the experience is not the same, staring with the missing keyboard labels.
Regards,
Vitor
PS: It annoys me a lot when a thread goes offtopic with rants. Please stick to the subject and be polite.
Sorry, but when people say stupid and ignorant things, I have to post corrections because I'm not a fan of ignorance breeding ignorance ... someone has to set the record straight or we'll just end up with a bunch of stupid people on the Internet saying a bunch of ignorant things ... and I'm not ok with that! Not on my watch at least and certainly not on my thread!
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I still say that the transistor was the one invention (or discovery depending on how you look at it) that changed the human race in such a phenomenal way, that no other technology invention has even come close to that claim
A bold statement. Are you dismissing the steam engine, the electric generator, or even the screwdriver (favoured by Witold Rybczynski). And computers predated the transistor and are the real game changer, one wonders if transistors hadn't been invented would an alternate technology have taken its place. Cold cathode valves, optic switches, who knows.
I had an interesting work exercise interfacing a C64 with a packet switching network via 2400 baud modem. Just the parallel port and bit bashing. Some of the input had to go to the printer. The printer was fussy about timing so the program had to estimate how long a carriage return would take. Amazing it ever worked. I really loved doing that sort of project, pushing the 6502 hard and doing real work. Today's systems are so wasteful of resources.
I agree the Apple ecosystem has some benefits compared with Micro$loth, but I use MS because it's cheap. This machine still running W7, paid $250 many years ago. Latest machine is an i7 with W10, monitor, keyboard mouse SSD terabyte drive etc cost $600 a year ago second hand. It just ran out of warranty. Can't get that bang for buck from Apple. But I recommend Apple to anyone with more jingle than brains, it does look after them.
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I agree the Apple ecosystem has some benefits compared with Micro$loth, but I use MS because it's cheap. This machine still running W7, paid $250 many years ago. Latest machine is an i7 with W10, monitor, keyboard mouse SSD terabyte drive etc cost $600 a year ago second hand. It just ran out of warranty. Can't get that bang for buck from Apple. But I recommend Apple to anyone with more jingle than brains, it does look after them.
Plenty of very intelligent people out there who just don't know computers or have any interest in what goes on under the hood. I don't think it's fair to suggest they're low on brains, they just have brains more optimized for or occupied with other things. I don't fault them for that.
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Plenty of very intelligent people out there who just don't know computers or have any interest in what goes on under the hood. I don't think it's fair to suggest they're low on brains, they just have brains more optimized for or occupied with other things. I don't fault them for that.
Yes, it wasn't very kind of me. And you said what I meant - Apple is good for people who don't care how a computer works but want a reliable tool and are prepared to pay a premium for the benefit. Unfortunately Microsoft seem to think people have time to learn new ways of doing old things, so every 6 months an icon changes, a menu item moves, etc. Maybe it will get so bad people will find that Linux is moving in the right direction, becoming more user friendly and move away from M$. Linux has a little way to go. But with many people using computers as their connection to the net, and Firefox, Libre Office, Thunderbird providing most of their needs, maybe Linux will take over. At one time their was only one computer company - IBM. The rest were also ran. Maybe M$ will go the same way.
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I've seen the videos ... I see bits and pieces of it in various nooks and crannies all over the Internet ... this seemingly growing cult fanaticism to bring back the Commodore 64
Sorry, but when people say stupid and ignorant things, I have to post corrections because I'm not a fan of ignorance breeding ignorance ... someone has to set the record straight or we'll just end up with a bunch of stupid people on the Internet saying a bunch of ignorant things ... and I'm not ok with that! Not on my watch at least and certainly not on my thread!
Bit like the pot calling the kettle black I think. Don't reply to me, I'm just pointing out it's not "your" thread you just asked for community input. If you get a difference of opinion or if people think you are ranting they might start giving you subtle hints (like this post). This is not a call to arms to justify your opinion all over again, it's just that your looking a lot like inciting the whole thing soliciting opinion and then doubling down on those who disagree. So again people can take or leave opinion so it's just best to state your case (not about OS wars) and then move on.
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Yes, it wasn't very kind of me. And you said what I meant - Apple is good for people who don't care how a computer works but want a reliable tool and are prepared to pay a premium for the benefit. Unfortunately Microsoft seem to think people have time to learn new ways of doing old things, so every 6 months an icon changes, a menu item moves, etc. Maybe it will get so bad people will find that Linux is moving in the right direction, becoming more user friendly and move away from M$. Linux has a little way to go. But with many people using computers as their connection to the net, and Firefox, Libre Office, Thunderbird providing most of their needs, maybe Linux will take over. At one time their was only one computer company - IBM. The rest were also ran. Maybe M$ will go the same way.
I don't want to totally hijack this thread but for many years I really liked Windows. 9x had warts but they were an immense improvement over 3.1 and NT4. Win2k was superb and after a few patches and tweaks XP was quite good as well. Vista got a bad rap mostly due to the hardware most people owned not being up to the task but once that caught up it was actually quite solid. Win7 was essentially Vista with a few tweaks and improvements and was excellent. Win8 was... well my impression of it was I didn't know what the hell they were thinking but it was "Windows" in name only and virtually unusable. Win10 fixed many things but made other things even worse and was a steaming turd when initially shoved down everyone's throats, the first thing that comes to mind whenever I think of it now is the endless stream of updates which are a nuisance.
My employer issued laptop is a Macbook, overall I quite like the OS, it's essentially a full Unix system with a very polished UI on top of it, I spend quite a bit of time in a bash shell familiar to any Linux users. Unfortunately the lack of hardware choices is what really bothers me with that. I don't even mind the price, I keep my computers for a long time and I could afford it, but there are just too many flaws in their offerings and no viable alternatives for me to spend my own money on one. The MBP I have sacrifices too much to be thinner than necessary. The battery life is not stellar, the complete lack of any ports besides USB-C and a headphone jack is obnoxious and I am forever using dongles for everything. The keyboard is crap, it takes nothing more than a tiny grain of debris to make a key start missing strokes. The touchpad is absurdly huge, it constantly gets in the way and I only ever use about 1/4 of the area in one of the corners. The touchbar is also a useless gimmick, I really wanted to like that because I love OLED displays in general but a few years in and I'm firmly in the camp of wishing I had a row of physical function keys like the older models. I bump the touchbar accidentally more often than I deliberately use it, and one of these days I need to take it in for service because there's been a flickering white square on one side for a long time now. It beats having to use Win10 but I wouldn't by one for myself.
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strangely on topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTCvkswrsWY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTCvkswrsWY)
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EEE-GADDS ! Just look at your response volume here!
I liked the full comprehension you can achieve, or nearly full, plus I've always viewed the C-64 as a showcase for the 6502 processor.
I had seen and used the Z-80 processor and gained a bit of relief: Saw my C-64 with 6502 as a bit of 'relief', from formality... Yes that's the term I've been reaching for, "A BREAK FROM FORMALITY".
HAH!
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C64 is only the worlds second best Personal Computer of all time (C128 is of course THE best Personal Computer of all time :) ), okay I am obviously a true die hard Commodore fan :)
I still own several C64s & C128s and use them regularly. There is something about seeing a piece of technology pushed to the Nth degree of its limitations >:D
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I feel called to the blackboard, because I also noticed more and more C64 popping up in in my infobubble and got infected with retro computing. I stumbled upon Jan Beta YT channel and he actually made me realize that it's not that hard to fix C64 and there are people still vastly invested in different projects revolving around this 8-bit grandpa.
For a couple of years I occasinally reminded myself about Commodore when talking with my friends or coworkers. They all loved it and had good memories, nostalgia kicked in often - "those were the times". For me it's a long overdue plan to actually get a working one. I was thinking about either finding my old C64 and fixing it or buying one, just to have it and be able to show my daughter how computers looked and worked like when I was her age. Also it's fairly simple construction by todays standards, so it's easier to learn and comprehend how computers, digital electronics, etc. works. As someone mentioned before, all the knowlegde is available online, there is a community still fixing, modding, developing new stuff, even new games are written and demoscene is still active, pushing ~40 year old hardware to its limits.
Anyway... after a short investigation with my brother we concluded that our old Commodore should still be somewhere in our family home, so I went there and found it. It was just lying there in the basement for the last 27 years. My girlfriend rolled her eyes when she saw what I brought with me, but ultimately she admitted to have fond memories of plaing Giana Sisters on C64. Right now I'm searching for 6526A CIA chip and hopefully that's all that was broken and soon I can bring it back to life :D As someone who decided to fight boredom during pandemic lockdown to learn electronics, this is a fun way to learn stuff that I find interesting.
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An Arduino, or another MCU is a better way to learn than an old PC.
Then you can use what you learned to make something for an old PC.
Old computers are easy, you don't need to deal with multi layer boards, impedance match, high speed signals, and other complicated stuff like that.
Have a little lab today, with few cheap chinese gears, is the same as have ultra expensive equipment back in the 80's.
But it's true. It's a speculative bubble. Feeded by people in middle age crisis, and sellers who grown up the market to make more money.
Internet (YT mostly) and eBay had amplified the phenomenon.
Today whatever old crap is sold as gold.
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An Arduino, or another MCU is a better way to learn than an old PC.
Then you can use what you learned to make something for an old PC.
Yeh, Arduino and derivatives are also fun to work on and learn, but it doesn't have that sentimental value. Also for me the limitations and shortcomings of C64 are the most interesting parts.
Old computers are easy, you don't need to deal with multi layer boards, impedance match, high speed signals, and other complicated stuff like that.
There's your answer. Complicated stuff will come later. For you it's probably a knowledge that you can't imagine an EE without, but I'm just a beginner hobbyist and it's simply not worth time and effort right now to dig into those topics when I still need to learn and comprehend basics. The kind of stuff that e.g. Ben Eater shows on his YT channel.
Speculative or not, the same deal is with old cars and their enthusiasts. Quite often their construction is ridiculous by today standards, but some people still love it and tinker with it. You don't reason with hobby ;)
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An Arduino, or another MCU is a better way to learn than an old PC.
Those are completely different things with a very different learning value.
Vintage computers - as long as you get technical of course and don't just stick to powering them on and playing - will teach you something about computer architecture, CPUs, digital logic, memory... things you can pretty much only learn in books these days and not put into practice, unless you study advanced digital logics or work in such a field. But for amateurs? All of this has become abstract.
Arduino is all nice to expose people to technology and embedded design, can get them to do fun stuff in a relatively short time, but the overall learning value is pretty low IMO - at least if you don't go any further.
Then you say "old computers are easy", and your argumentation all falls apart. If you bother to study vintage computer schematics, again you'll learn a lot more than you'll ever do using a ready-made arduino board, plug in some wires and fire up an IDE with a bastardized use of C++. From a hardware POV, since your last argument talks about that, what will you learn from studying the schematic of a typical arduino board? There's basically an MCU, a couple passives and possibly some regulator. What does it have to do with impedance match, multi-layer boards and high speed signals? Nothing. Most of those boards could have been designed 40 years ago (minus the MCUs that didn't exist as such back then), but contain so little that the learning value is next to none.
You can't compare to current complex computers which are indeed, in general, much too complex to fully grasp unless you're a specialist. Vintage stuff still give you the opportunity to actually learn something while still being accessible to the amateur.
Unfortunately, your reasoning looks like what the current trend of our society is: since advanced technology is much too complex for the masses, just give them dumbed down stuff to learn. Then the more advanced stuff will be for an elite. As though there was no middle ground. I just think this is wrong, and will even in time kill innovation.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Lets see if 40 years from now how many people remember anything about arduino.
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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 (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html) and Pascal, (http://www.eprg.org/computerphile/pascal.pdf) 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/microsoft-open-sources-gw-basic/) yeah Bill it's a bit too late and it's in ASM lol.
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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.