God speed you Polish computer rockstar.

They were nice gaming machines; too bad the quality control was terrible. They mass produced them by hand and used electric screwdrivers which would often jump off the screw and slice through half a dozen traces. They still used them though, they just put sloppily done patches on the cut traces. The power supplies were awful too, many C64s have been destroyed when the regulators burned out and fried the RAM, SID chip, etc. Overheating was a problem too. Quality wise it was a pretty terrible machine, give an Atari any day. The Commodore 128 was an improvement at least.

rekoil: cman: Here's a fun fact: the BASIC Commodore used in their computers was licensed from Microsoft. MS made this dialect. MS was originally in the computer languages business before they got into the OS business.

Even better: Microsoft wrote the BASIC interpreter for the Apple II as well (Microsoft was the "soft" in "Applesoft").

I'm pretty sure Microsoft did the BASIC for all the 6502-based machines. I have an Ohio Scientific C4P (6502-based and still running) that also says "Microsoft BASIC" when it boots.

Microsoft also did the basic for the Motorola 6809 based TRS-80 Color Computer. Microsoft haters like to say that Bill Gates accidentally became successful by selling an OS he didn't even own to IBM but the only reason why he was even able to get in the door and be considered someone to contract out a rather important part of the PC was because Microsoft had a proven track record. I'm going to bet that the majority of home computers during the C64 era had a version of Microsoft basic.

Yeah, BASIC is how Microsoft got off the ground, starting with the Altair and just about every home computer made back then (Atari, Apple, Coleco, Commodore, HP, IBM, MSX, Texas Instruments, etc).

So now the C64 in my basement is actually worth something, right? RIght?

Still have all my Atari gear. Have one of the first 520ST's off the line. TOS was originally shipped as floppy since they didn't have the ROM's ready. Once they were done you were sent a set and got to put them in. Luckily my Dad is a radar technician and they went in smooth. Miss those days sometimes.

Skyfrog: Yeah, BASIC is how Microsoft got off the ground, starting with the Altair and just about every home computer made back then (Atari, Apple, Coleco, Commodore, HP, IBM, MSX, Texas Instruments, etc).

BASIC was their starting point. Microsoft had one other fairly big hit in the early 'home computer' era with Multiplan (their spreadsheet) which was the best available for the C-64 and the TI-99 (they also sold DOS and Apple II versions of Multiplan, but those two platforms had VisiCalc, Lotus, Appleworks, etc).

A a TI-99 owning family, it was sad that Tramiel's successful undercutting battle to kill TI (and Atari, etc) ended up leaving Commodore mortally wounded too, but respect for the man and his machines.

Load "*", 8, 1

and if that didn't work...

Load "?", 7, 1

As a kid, I had no idea what that was for. I just knew that was what I needed to do to load my games.

/"Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!"

A fair bit before my time, but I know my Mom grew up with a Commodore 64. I can guess with some accuracy that that initial exposure to personal computing is the reason she managed to successfully re-enter the work-force after 25 years and 3-children.

And also why I don't have nearly as many horrifying stories about playing tech-guy for my parents as other Farkers near my age might.

RIP Computer Man. I never used your product, but it paved the way for a world where I got to learn typing and email in elementary school.

\Actually had a Commodore Amiga for a couple years as a kid, for reasons I don't entirely understand as it was a relic even then.
\\Mom still reminisces about Pogo-Joe, which I guess was some kind of Q*Bert clone.

He set the industry back 20 years by submarining the Amiga with the mediocre Atari ST, all because he held a grudge.

Ahhh_Ennui: Virtuoso80:

/"Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!"

Destroy him, my robots!

My mom would always wonder what the Hell was going on in my room....

Link (new window)

cman: One thing I never got an answer for (and Google cannot handle its search parameters) is what happens when one types the following:

LOAD"%",8,1

The farking computer went apeshiat when ya did that

I don't recognize "%" in this context, but wikipedia (new window) says:

On the Commodore 64, entering LOAD "$",8,1 will flood the screen with garbage instead of loading the directory into BASIC RAM. This is because the drive assigns the directory a load address of $0401 (1025), which is equivalent to the start of BASIC for the Commodore PET, but corresponds to the default screen memory in the C64.

i killed hours playing space invaders and making colourful text dance :(


RIP

Relatively Obscure: cman: Coleco? LOL!

Wow, and I thought I was a loser


I know. I didn't get a say in it, but it was fun regardless.

If it's any consolation, though, I still think you're a loser. <3

The Adam had this cool high speed tape drive that was fun to watch until it broke. Then my Dad returned the Adam to the store.

Ghastly: Unfortunately Jack's business model was unchanged from the 70s and he and his sons were simply unable to deal with the changing markets of the late 80s.

"Computers for the masses, not the classes"

By the time that Jack Tramiel left calculators and got into computers, he had been seriously and repeatedly farked over by the Japanese and by Texas Instruments. So by this point, he figured that the way to dominate the computer market was to uncut everyone else. But he failed to realize that his ultra-agressive pricing was undercuting quality and usability.

I firmly believe that had the Amiga not come along, Commodore would have gone bankrupt because of Tramiel's legacy. And you're right - he pulled a lot of the same stunts over at Atari after buying it from Warner.


mc6809e: He set the industry back 20 years by submarining the Amiga with the mediocre Atari ST, all because he held a grudge.

I disagree. Commodore management sunk the Amiga through a lack of innovation and canceled projects.

As example, I always thought that it was stupid that the Amiga 2000 did not come with a 14MHz 68000 and either an IDE or EDSI controller on the motherboard. It was an Amiga 500 with slots. How is this a flagship product?

Then there are the various rumors about the successor to the original Amiga chipset headed by Jay Miner. Some reports suggest that the chipset was fairly far through development when Commodore management balked at the idea of it needing expensive VRAM rather than inexpensive DRAM. How could such a project make it so far without upper management signing off on such a fundamental requriement?

With that canceled, you had the hastily developed ECS chipset. Oooh, you get a few new 31KHz progressive screen modes and a 1280px horizontal resolution at 2bpp (4 color). No deeper bit depths, no new audio modes, no faster I/O interfaces. And the A600 got a 7MHz 68000. Not a 14MHz 68000 or 68EC020... the same proc as the A1000 and A500. Meanwhile, PCs are now equipped with 80386s and VGA cards capible of 320×200×8bpp with 16-bit sound.

Lastly, you have the AAA chipset being postponed and postponed until it is likely to be dead on arrival and AGA is hastily developed instead. But the video specs trail PCs and the I/O and audio hardware is mostly unchanged from the A1000. So you get a few people too poor to buy PCs buying A1200s. Simply not enough to keep the company alive.

Gone like a 1541's alignment. Goodbye, Jack. You crazy, crazy son-of-a-b.

TellarHK: [lh5.googleusercontent.com image 500x282]
[lh4.googleusercontent.com image 298x400]
[lh5.googleusercontent.com image 298x400]

Gone like a 1541's alignment. Goodbye, Jack. You crazy, crazy son-of-a-b.

I'd kill for one of those 1571s and 1581s. My 1541-II died a while back, leaving my C128 to be a sad panda. I've seen those 1581 kits, but I don't want to steal a floppy drive from my A3000.

Dinjiin: TellarHK:
Gone like a 1541's alignment. Goodbye, Jack. You crazy, crazy son-of-a-b.

I'd kill for one of those 1571s and 1581s. My 1541-II died a while back, leaving my C128 to be a sad panda. I've seen those 1581 kits, but I don't want to steal a floppy drive from my A3000.

eBay can be your friend. If not Craigslist. I've gotten most of my gear at decent prices those ways. The C-128D and SX-64, though? Those were tough to find at a price I could afford.

/one more to complete the set...

load "midget_pr0n",8,1

Stig O'Tracy: Jocundry: Aw. I grew up using a C64. One of these day I'm going to buy one off ebay or something just for the memories.

NOT a good idea. I did exactly this a few years ago. Everything worked, but it all reeked of years of cigarette smoking, and I was unpleasantly reminded of how tedious just loading programs was. It was painfully slow and unreliable.

In a nutshell, the whole experience kind of killed my loving memories of the "old days". I tossed everything in disappointment. Moral: Keep Your Memories, not the hardware.
This. I LOVED my c64, and I'll never know another computer as well as I knew that little machine, but you can't go home again. Enjoy the memories.

Stig O'Tracy: Jocundry: Aw. I grew up using a C64. One of these day I'm going to buy one off ebay or something just for the memories.

NOT a good idea. I did exactly this a few years ago. Everything worked, but it all reeked of years of cigarette smoking, and I was unpleasantly reminded of how tedious just loading programs was. It was painfully slow and unreliable.

In a nutshell, the whole experience kind of killed my loving memories of the "old days". I tossed everything in disappointment. Moral: Keep Your Memories, not the hardware.

download an emulator, hard disk speed loading, no cigarette smell and all the memories...

Also download MAME while you are there and play about 6000 arcade machines...

ekdikeo4: Virtuoso80: Load "*", 8, 1

and if that didn't work...

Load "?", 7, 1

As a kid, I had no idea what that was for. I just knew that was what I needed to do to load my games.

/"Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!"

If I remember correctly, device 7 was for the Plotter device (i had one of those, because my dad thought "well it prints things on paper, it must be a printer"). Attempting to do a load from it would crash the machine.

DIP switches on the back (lower left?) set the device number (the 8 or 7 in your example).

You know, I still have a Sinclair down in my basement.

ComicBookGuy: You know, I still have a Sinclair down in my basement.

SHUN the non-believer!

My first civilian job after the service was in a Commodore dealership in Fla. Yeah, a commodore dealership. C-64 had just been released, Vic-20's still selling strong. Then the double whammy. IBM's PC and the decision by Commodore to sell C-64's at discount department stores (K-Mart) The big chains would sell the things retail for less than a dealership could buy them wholesale. Dealerships dried up, support for the machines disappeared. I switched over to a Computerland as a service tech, learned the IBM PC/DOS, and never looked back, but it was the C-64 that launched my computer career, though I could not even afford one while I worked at the dealership.
I have fond and not-so-fond memories of the buggy devices, the noisy video, the 40 column display and the fragile power supplies. I like nostalgia as much as the next guy but I will not be hunting Ebay and plunking down $$$ to nourish the long-ago memories anymore than I'd scan Craigslist to find a couple of goats to mow my lawn.

poke 53281,0
poke 53280,0

\\paint it black

Dinjiin: G
With that canceled, you had the hastily developed ECS chipset. Oooh, you get a few new 31KHz progressive screen modes and a 1280px horizontal resolution at 2bpp (4 color). No deeper bit depths, no new audio modes, no faster I/O interfaces. And the A600 got a 7MHz 68000. Not a 14MHz 68000 or 68EC020... the same proc as the A1000 and A500. Meanwhile, PCs ar ...

People who purchased an a1200 also purchased an 68030 accelerator and a HD.

I agree with you, the a1200 should have come with a HD and 4MB of fastram. But that aside, people actually did purchase these parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AzVsiGnT0s

One large problem was IMHO that demos/games didn't work on NTSC a1200s. So the scene was PAL based, and Americans purchased PCs.

POKE 59458,62

The death poke...

I have a guy who calls me every month to change his BASICA program. We couldn't print after Win2000, so I save the reports to disk with html pre tags and spawn iexplore.

I've been telling him for a decade that we need to move to a more modern platform. He even has other apps in VBasic, but won't pay to have me port this one.

We tried putting it on a terminal server, but it BASICA strobes the keyboard all the time and spikes the processor to 100%.

Good times.

Dont get me wrong. I loved the C64, but are we seriously mourning the death of a businessman who was openly a douchebag and dishonest? It was his trademark way of doing business. He damn near ruined his own name at some point.

spawn73: People who purchased an a1200 also purchased an 68030 accelerator and a HD. I agree with you, the a1200 should have come with a HD and 4MB of fastram. But that aside, people actually did purchase these parts.

Of the many Amiga 1200 owners I personally knew, most got a memory expansion kit, some got hard drives and a few got CPU accelerators. If you mainly used your A1200 for games and word processing, there wasn't much reason to get an '030 or '040 processor card because almost everything was written for the lowest common denominator. Heck, some AGA games couldn't be installed to a hard drive. It was a joke.


spawn73: One large problem was IMHO that demos/games didn't work on NTSC a1200s. So the scene was PAL based, and Americans purchased PCs.

For Kickstart 2.04 and 2.05, there was a utility that you could use that would reboot your Amiga in either NTSC or PAL mode. Kickstart 3.0 and 3.1 had a video selection screen right in the early boot utility.




If you had an RGB or Multisync monitor that could handle both 50Hz and 60Hz, you could play demos and games in either video mode.

Dinjiin: spawn73: People who purchased an a1200 also purchased an 68030 accelerator and a HD. I agree with you, the a1200 should have come with a HD and 4MB of fastram. But that aside, people actually did purchase these parts.

Of the many Amiga 1200 owners I personally knew, most got a memory expansion kit, some got hard drives and a few got CPU accelerators. If you mainly used your A1200 for games and word processing, there wasn't much reason to get an '030 or '040 processor card because almost everything was written for the lowest common denominator. Heck, some AGA games couldn't be installed to a hard drive. It was a joke.


spawn73: One large problem was IMHO that demos/games didn't work on NTSC a1200s. So the scene was PAL based, and Americans purchased PCs.

For Kickstart 2.04 and 2.05, there was a utility that you could use that would reboot your Amiga in either NTSC or PAL mode. Kickstart 3.0 and 3.1 had a video selection screen right in the early boot utility.

[www.gregdonner.org image 400x300]
[www.gregdonner.org image 400x300]

If you had an RGB or Multisync monitor that could handle both 50Hz and 60Hz, you could play demos and games in either video mode.

Ah, I did not know this was available, the PAL/NTSC function.

Most AGA games were cracked and released as HD versions, I think Superfrog being the first by Triangle.

But yeah it was a joke. Game companies didn't really increase their sales by the pirated versions being more user friendly.