Commodore 64 turns 25
Lincoln passed along this post about the beloved Commodore 64 turning 25 years old:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/12/07/c64/index.html
As some of you know, that was the machine that launched my lifelong interest in computing. Hell, at a young age I even wanted to work for Motorola because of the 68xx architecture (although the C64 used the MOS Technology equivalent 65xx). Ironically, when I started working at Motorola 10 years ago, I worked for the guy who was the design manager for the 68xx chips. Talk about full-circle.
Anyway, to those who started their foray into computers with the Commodore, I thought you would be interested.
Cheers,
Matt
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Comments
heh. w00t!
heh. w00t!
I started out with a
I started out with a different 65xx based machine, the Apple II. I think I've got a C64 and a 1541 that someone gave me a while back somewhere out in my shed though.
Yes, I had a 1541 and a 1571
Yes, I had a 1541 and a 1571 (double-sided). Those were monster drives. Some games actually had a copy protection that would knock the drive out of alignment if it detected the software was copied. That's hard core.
I liked the Apple II - we had them in middle school. However, it always frustrated me that the delete key didn't actually delete characters while in BASIC. Instead it produced some half-shaded square. WTF?
Matt
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The reason for the alignment
The reason for the alignment troubles is that the earlier Commodore drives used a mechanism with a set-screw on the positioning pulley. Later they switched to a cheaper mechanism (the drive frames inside were actually plastic instead of aluminum on the later ones) which left off the set screw as a cost savings measure. I actually knew a guy who drilled the pulley on his, tapped the hole and put in his own set screw. My biggest complaint with the 15xx drives was the horrid serial bus interface which was painfully slow even if you added one of the 3rd party upgrade products. Unfortunately it was the result of another cost-saving cut -- earlier CBM machines used IEEE interfaces, but Commodore left those off the VIC-20 and C-64 and thus the 15xx drives. The serial bus was really just a couple pins off of a general purpose PIA chip, no wonder it was slow.
The reason for the issue you ran into with the Delete key (which generated ASCII 127, not Backspace which is ASCII 8) is that the earlier pre-//e keyboards didn't have that key. The BASIC in the ROMs wasn't changed much when they upgraded the hardware until much later revisions. There were ways around that though. Anyone who spent a lot of time wrangling BASIC code on the Apples usually used something like GPLE or the Beagle Bros' equivalent which gave you pretty sophisticated line editing features. Sadly schools rarely had or even knew about such things.
Ahh....the C-64, the only
Ahh....the C-64, the only thing I remember is many sleepless nights waiting for games to load from tapes, but when they finally did oh what joy it was! Of course, once I moved on to the Amiga500 I though I was in heaven!
Maciej
www.chipcrunch.com
Yes, those were some long
Yes, those were some long delays waiting for games to load. I had Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 for C-64 on cassette tape. Took half an hour to load, and sometimes it would crash the machine instead. If I wanted to play WWII Flying Ace, I had to flip the tape over and wait another half hour. Ugh.
Waiting for slow web pages to load doesn't seem so terrible anymore.
Matt
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The Commodore cassette
The Commodore cassette interface only ran at 300bps I think. Of course the stock 1541 only ran at 1700bps, which isn't exactly smoking fast either. Especially when you consider the Apple II cassette interface which almost nobody ever used ran at 1500bps and the Disk II had a parallel interface that was mostly speed limited by the rotational bit rate of the floppy disk itself. It was really too bad that Commodore cheaped out and dropped the IEEE-1488 parallel interface the earlier PET and CBM 4xxx/8xxx machines had. Of course those machines cost 3-5x the price of a C64, albeit they were also built like tanks.
When I worked at BPI Systems
When I worked at BPI Systems we wrote the accounting package for the Pet. Back then it was a real promising operating system and in a war with CP/M for os supremacy.
The PET had an IEEE-1488
The PET had an IEEE-1488 GPIB interface which allowed it to transfer data from the floppy drives at a reasonable speed like the Disk II interface and the parallel interfaces used on most CP/M machines. Unfortunately the disk drives for the PET and CBM 40xx and 80xx series machines were very large and expensive. Probably the biggest limitations of the PET were the lack of a decent and easily accessible expansion slot system like the Apple II and most of the CP/M machines had which limited versatility. Lack of color, sound and bitmapped graphics hurt their sales, but weren't big deals for most business apps in those days. The C64 fixed the graphics and sound limitations of its predecessors, unfortunately they left off the IEEE-1488 interface, real UARTs for serial I/O and a bunch of other things that limited its usefulness for serious business apps. Also the C64's physical construction and build quality was very poor compared to Commodore's previous machines. It is unfortunate that Commodore didn't build a machine with the best features of the C64 and its predecessors, because it would have been worthy in its day.
The Amiga, now that's the
The Amiga, now that's the ultimate!
It could have been a great
It could have been a great machine had not Commodore botched completing it (rushed to market before it was ready) and totally blew marketing it. They also cut a lot of corners, especially on the original 1000 model and all of the low end models (500, 600, 1200) after it. The 2000, 3000 & 4000 were somewhat hamstrung by limitations imposed by maintaining compatibility with the older and lower end models and were fairly expensive. And unfortunately, Motorola didn't keep up performance wise with the 68xxx CPU family, especially once they teamed up with Apple and IBM on the PPC. Commodore had enough financial troubles by then that they were never really able to engineer their way out of a lot of their troubles.
The thing that made them interesting for a lot of people, the tight integration of the video chipsets which made them attractive for use in NTSC and PAL/SECAM video editing ultimately led to limitations compared to what happened with video cards on the PC and Mac platforms which weren't limited by TV standards. Nowdays with everything going to HD, NTSC isn't even that relevant. Of course in 1985 HD 1080p would have boggled people's minds.
Agreed.
Agreed.
The C64 had a great keyboard
The C64 had a great keyboard just like the Apple //. Don't you miss the days of the great keyboards like the PS2 ones? Today, mostly on laptops, you get a crummy chiclet keyboard. I looked at every laptop at Fry's the other day for a laptop with a decent keyboard. It doesn't exist.
Actually I thought the C64
Actually I thought the C64 keyboard was pretty horrible compared to the ones on the PETs (barring the original PET 2000 which had one of the worst keyboards ever) and CBMs, horrible cheap feeling construction. The original Apple ][ and ][+ keyboards had their issues too, Apple didn't really come up with a good keyboard until the Apple /// and later the //e. The last variants of the //e and the extremely rare ///+ keyboards were actually probably the best keyboards Apple ever made. The /// and ///+ keyboards had a really cool feature I've never seen on any others... dual speed repeat... if you pushed the key down normal, it would wait to start repeating, just like normal... but if you pressed the key all the way down past where it clicked it went immediately to repeat at a faster speed. That may have only been true of the arrow keys and a few others... but it sure was nice. Probably too expensive to make those key switches.
As for laptops... yeah, most of the keyboards stink. I like the ones on older model IBM ThinkPads unfortunately I don't think the same quality is there on the new Lenovo ThinkPads. Dell, HP, etc., laptop keyboards are all usually not so good in one way or another. My current main laptop is a Microstar. It is better than average as far as laptop keyboards go from the standpoint it is a 17" widescreen laptop so the keyboard is full width, however it is still short travel and the layout isn't perfect in a few spots. I use an external keyboard on the Dell D610 I have to use some at work because the built in keyboard is so awful.
Lenovo - Thinkpad and
Lenovo - Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad lines have good keyboards. Pay a little more, but a major reason to buy one.
It's surprising that the
It's surprising that the laptop makers don't get this... even the 24" Acer laptop had a so so keyboard. The big laptops are being used as desktop replacements so I'm surprised they don't include a desktop worthy keyboard. Even Apple doesn't get it when it comes to laptop keyboards, though I haven't yet touched a MacBook Air.
The MacBook Air is pretty
The MacBook Air is pretty crippled without an optical drive and it doesn't fare that well compared to the Toshiba and Sony ultralights. Thin is ok but it isn't everything.
Wii meets
Wii meets C64
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/21/c64-games-coming-to-wiis-virtual-cons...
M.U.L.E. <- one of the best
M.U.L.E. <- one of the best games (and music/chiptunes) ever.
http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/M.U.L.E.
One of Warren Spector's favorite games, as well as a game from the early days of EA when they actually treated devs as rockstars.
http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Warren_Spector
http://junctionpoint.wordpress.com
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070216/fleming_01.shtml
C64 was also my first system (at 8 months old!)
I hope that the old games like M.U.L.E. get picked up by Wii or GameTap soon.
I love M.U.L.E.! It was one
I love M.U.L.E.! It was one of my favorite games on my Atari 800, on which it could support up to four players.
The game helped to put Electronic Arts on the map, and has the best "market" (buy/sell) interface I've seen in any game. The music was great.
Did you know that it was created by Danielle Bunten Berry, who was (R.I.P., due to smoking and lung cancer) transgendered (born a man)?
Some of you might enjoy this
Some of you might enjoy this article from Tech Republic which shows the innards of a C64:
http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-13636_11-188095.html?tag=nl.e09...
A C64 was my second
A C64 was my second computer. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who started out with a Sinclare (Timex/Sinclare).
I started out with an Apple
I started out with an Apple ][+, but I had a Timex/Sinclair that someone gave me later on. Mainly only useful/interesting because it could be easily powered off a 9V battery and in those days not many computers could do that. The keyboards on Timex/Sinclairs were truly awful though, one of the worst ever, and they were generally pretty limited in what you could do with them. FWIW, I think I have a C64 and 1541 out in my shed somewhere... I've got a bunch of Apple II family machines of various sorts that need new homes also... :-)
I guest that means that BIFF
I guest that means that BIFF must be 40 now.
Yeah, he'd have to be...
Yeah, he'd have to be...
I recall the TI 99/4a had
I recall the TI 99/4a had those crappy touchpad keyboards that were pure hell to type on. I rented one from our local library, and it was horrible. I don't remember if the Sinclair had the same keyboard.
My first computer was the VIC-20 in third grade, and my second was the C=64. Next was a 128, and then to an IBM AT clone in early high school. Those were good days.
Early TI 99/4a models had a
Early TI 99/4a models had a really crappy membrane keyboard, later models got real keys. The Timex-Sinclair keyboard was not only a membrane it was also very tightly spaced due to the small size of the unit and because it didn't have many keys each one had a whole bunch of stuff multiplexed onto them.
TI really improved with its
TI really improved with its own PCs, but incredibly they changed a priority bit so that you could only use software written for TI/PCs. Stupid!
Yes, you never knew if you
Yes, you never knew if you had truly hit the key with those membrane keyboards. I had bartered with my mom at that young age; I washed and dried the dishes, and she typed in programs (she could type). After one bout with the 99/4a, she refused to type in any other program on that keyboard. Thankfully it was just a rental. The C= keyboards were much nicer, relatively speaking.
Yes, just about anything was
Yes, just about anything was nicer than those awful membrane keyboards... It was just a totally different world back then. Sometimes I miss it, some things about it though I am glad are gone. It sometimes boggles my mind how much more powerful the typical computer is these days compared to what we had back then. On the other hand, I think that people who didn't grow up dealing with making things happen on those machines is kind of at a disadvantage. Their knowledge of how things really work sometimes seems so superficial.
Computer history buffs might
Computer history buffs might like my Computer Tree. (Unfortunately, it has quickly grown to the point that it's difficult to view in some browsers, so I provide a link to a PDF version.)
In creating my table, I learned:
In 1984, Commodore's founder bought Atari and intended to acquire Amiga Computer and release the Atari Amiga.
Funny how things worked out...
- John
Oh, the TRash 80! Hard to
Oh, the TRash 80! Hard to believe it was ONLY 25 years ago that we settled from this. Oh wait, we still settle...