Put Your Commodore 64 on The IntarWebs?

[John Thomas8]

[noblepa]

I still have a Commodore 128 sitting in a box in my basement. The 128 was the follow-on to the 64, with, you guessed it, 128Kbytes of Ram. It was otherwise very similar to the 64.

I wonder if those options will work on my 128. AFAIK, most 64 peripherals and programs worked on the 128.

[bill_g]

(sigh) I only had a Trash80.

[Reality Check]

Interesting. I never had a C-64 or Apple II. I looked at them but waited to buy an IBM clone. It was a Leading Edge Model D made in Korea by Daewoo.

[Foggy]

I have a factory reset Windows 7 machine, so clean I can't even run Windows Update on it. A sturdy and high quality gaming desktop, the Gateway FX6840, and it is in like-new condition. The only use I have for it is putting CDs and DVDs on flash drives. Optical disks are obsolete, but we have quite a few remaining.

I recently bought a book published in 1917. Original format - ink on paper. Still works great.

But everything digital becomes obsolete at an accelerating rate.

[Reality Check]

(sigh) I only had a Trash80.

We had a TRS-100 at work. If you recall it was a portable computer with a keyboard and an 8 line X 40 column LCD display. I had no idea who bought it or for what purpose but I found some uses for it. I could use it to test some badge readers we had that communicated over a serial port at 110 baud. I also wrote a little routine in Basic that allowed the machinists to do motor alignment calculations that had to be done when installing motors on pumps.

I think it ran on AA batteries so it was truly portable unlike most of the early portables that required 120 VAC. The external storage was on cassette tape.

[noblepa]

I have a factory reset Windows 7 machine, so clean I can't even run Windows Update on it. A sturdy and high quality gaming desktop, the Gateway FX6840, and it is in like-new condition. The only use I have for it is putting CDs and DVDs on flash drives. Optical disks are obsolete, but we have quite a few remaining.

I recently bought a book published in 1917. Original format - ink on paper. Still works great.

But everything digital becomes obsolete at an accelerating rate.

I remember hearing a story about 15-20 years ago, when NASA was looking for a replacement for the Space Shuttle fleet.

Someone seriously suggested that they build more Saturn V boosters. The logic was that it was proven technology, so it wouldn't have a huge R&D project and it was more than powerful enough.

The problem is, no one could find the plans. Then someone (might have been at the contractor who built them-Rockwell?) found a cabinet full of IBM card sized plans, the kind with a cutout for what was essentially a 35mm slide of one drawing. This allowed for about 50 characters of identifying information to be punched into the card, so that the cards could be sorted or selected, using the unit record equipment of the day.

For whatever reason, NASA nixed the idea.

Another story. My brother retired from Lockheed Martin (he started when it was Martin Marietta) in Orlando.

As an aerospace contractor, they were early adopters of CAD technology, AutoCAD software in particular. Unfortunately AutoCAD was not very good about maintaining backward compatibility. That meant that new versions of AutoCAD could only read their own files from the most recent couple of versions. If the file was too old, even though it was a valid AutoCAD file, the newest version of the software couldn't read it.

Government contracts for military aircraft often have requirements that they provide parts for many, many years. I think Boeing still provides parts for the B-52, which last rolled off the assembly line in about 1959. That means that they have to keep engineering drawings available, essentially forever.

So, they decided to create a special lab to help. Whenever a new generation of the high-end Sun workstations that they used came out, they saved a few of the old workstations. Some were kept as a source of spare parts, but some were kept in running condition. The lab had workstations running every version of AutoCAD, so when the production engineers needed drawings of a 30 year old part, they could access it.

[MN-Skeptic]

My sweetie was always one to save original boxes and packaging, so here's my Commodore 64, photos taken today. There's a local site which takes old computers. I should drop it off there. -

Commodore 62 -a.jpg (141.79 KiB) Viewed 971 times

[tek]

My first 'PC' was an LSI-11/VT-100. I went to work for DEC right out of college, and they had an employee purchase deal. When I was a TA in grad school, I used it to create solution sheets.. by taping ditto masters to the paper in my dot-matrix-printer (which was non-dec, so I had to hack some hardware to get it to work).

My second PC was an AT clone bought from an ad in Computer Shopper^*, and the rest is history.

^* Remember Computer Shopper?

[mojosapien]

The PET preceded the 64 if I remember right?

[northland10]

I'm guessing I can't run the internet on a VIC-20? I never had one myself so had to learn to play in BASIC on Commodore PETs at school and then transfer that learning to the display VIC-20 at Meijer Much of the staff when I was there did not know how to stop a simple basic program running in a loop.

[Danraft]

I had an Interact (sold by Ward’s) in ‘81. Tape drive, 64k. Old games in Basic like Adventure (with Wombats) and Hammurabi etc. It also had joystick inputs to play Atari style games. Very primitive.
Later, a Kaypro which had its own screen (green on black) that could do spreadsheets and word formatting.
Yeeks…

[neonzx]

Oh boy, The Commodore 64. YES!

First computer I owned as a lad. I learned to code on that 64k box. (think about how little memory that is -- most JPG photos are larger than that today).

One of my friend's dad was an electrical engineer and he added a toggle switch on top to overclock the CPU.

I wrote a rudimentary Zork style text-based adventure game (never completed -- it was part of teaching myself to code).

Also, graphics coding on the C64 (I think the graphics were called "sprites"?) was fun to learn too.

I still own it, but it's up north in the storage area of one of my relatives. I'll have to go pay it a visit sometime.

[Dr. Ken]

I'll be more impressed when she can post to the fogbow from it. I used to have a c64 all the way through when I sold it in 99 when I went to college. I used to program on it as a kid. Also had that games service that was the predecessor to aol.

[Chilidog]

Peek
Poke

Aaaarg!!

[qbawl]

Peek
Poke

Aaaarg!!

Apple][ forever!

[Reddog]

My sweetie was always one to save original boxes and packaging, so here's my Commodore 64, photos taken today. There's a local site which takes old computers. I should drop it off there. -

You should be able to find a forever home for that!

Just the original package should be worth quite a bit. I looked up my first “computer” (Digi-Comp I)and found a clipping of just the advertisement selling for $7.95. The “computer” itself sold for $4.95. I learned binary from it. I could use to add 011b+100b.

As for the C64. I wrote my first program when I was taking DC Circuits I, to do a Gauss-Jordan elimination for network analysis. I couldn’t use it for homework or tests, but used it to check my work. Writing the program helped me to do the problems better.

Later when I took circuits II AC the program was obsolete because it couldn’t do complex numbers. The best calculator I have ever had (HP 28s & HP 48) could do complex numbers natively using determinants. They could also do binary math natively, which helped in digital logic.

[mojosapien]

oh..it was the VIC-20 before the 64.

Should I have the bones of Nipper outside my door?

[Reality Check]

I'll be more impressed when she can post to the fogbow from it. I used to have a c64 all the way through when I sold it in 99 when I went to college. I used to program on it as a kid. Also had that games service that was the predecessor to aol.

Not related to the C-64 but last week I was tinkering with a mid 2000's Dell Studio laptop that has 4GB of RAM and a dual core processor. A couple of years ago I replaced the mechanical drive with a SSD and put in a dual band WiFi card. It actually ran Windows 10 pretty well for such inadequate hardware. I got it out to catch up on 8 or 9 months of Windows and other software updates since the last time I turned it on. Now it runs as slow as molasses on a cold winter day.

I was tinkering with the idea of loading Chrome OS Flex on it but I cannot get the Google Chrome OS recovery media creator to write to the only 8GB USB thumb drive I could find lying around. Has anyone tried Chrome OS on an older machine?

[somerset]

IMSAI 8080

[Fortinbras]

God, how I miss my C-64! I could write and amend programs on it. I had two excellent word processing programs (limit 7 pages but these could be chained), and a couple of games I liked. I bought up all the C-64 publications I could ... and I was mentioned in a couple of books!

But in 1999 I needed internet connection so I sold the entire package - computer, printer, and books - and bought a Windows 95 PC. Since then I have been coerced into replacing the Windows PC every few years to keep up with the technology. I can't program, I can't find games I like, but I can surf the web. Every now and then I mope for my old C-64.

[Kriselda Gray]

The first computer system I learned on in High School was an IBM Punchcard - I don't recall the model. The next year, we got Apple ][s. I also got to play around with a Mac when those first came out (my then-boyfriend's dad got one. He let me use it for school papers.)

A few years later, I got introduced to the local BBSs from a friend with a C= 64. After spending several weeks driving out to one or another friends' places and to use their computers so I could see what was happening on the BBSs, my then-boyfriend (different one) loaned me his C= 128, so I could stay connected. After he and I broke up I finally talked my parents into getting me my own computer - an Amiga 500 that I LOVED dearly! Multitasking! Such a radical concept at the time. None of my IBM/PC clone friends could do that!

I didn't get an IBM clone of my own until a couple of years after that, using it to run a BBS myself. When I stopped being able to easily get stuff for my Amiga I gave in and got a second clone. I got my BBS hooked into FIDO (I forget what it stood for but it allowed BBSs all over to share their messages) as well as PODSnet (the Pagan/Occult Distribution System) where I first learned about Heathenry (more commonly called Asatru at that time.)

Those local BBSs were also where I met my future husband. He was 16 or so and I was 22-23ish and we got to be friends first online and then met in person through the local chapter of the Star Trek fan club, Starfleet (if anyone else is familiar with it) though we didn't become a couple for about another 6 years.

So, computers have been a big part of my life Even now, they're the only way I get to communicate with anyone other than my hubby or my caretaker...