Gaming Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today's kids make of it?

[Notebook]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19055707

Primary school is a bit young for this?

N.

 

[TMac3000]

Ah, my first computer.
And what a great one it was

 

[Notebook]

Had an Amiga 500, still have in fact.

N.

 

[Artlav]

Wrong country, a bit too short on age.
I can remember playing on something like ZX spectrum or a soviet clone of it.

 

[streb2001]

I was using a towered-up Amiga 1200 until 2001. Never owned a 64 though, I was always a Sinclair fan in the 80s. The 64 does seem to have a good spec though but it never seemed to take off in the UK.

 

[Quick_Nick]

Wish I was around for the C64. CS teacher still knows all about it. I've messed with Atari 2600 emulation the last couple years; the 2600 having the same processor as C64 but with different modifications.

 

[Fabri91]

Too young to have seen one being used, but we still have one here, and at least ten to fifteen years ago, it booted!

 

[Mojave]

Well, I've only used one in my lifetime, and that was to help my Dad fix it. It was his brother's Commodore 64; and I thought it was very interesting. I'll never know how to use it, since it is beyond my time, I still use the Atari 2600 computer system, which is a subject for a different topic.



SE

 

[KC013]

My first "computer" was made by Timex, followed in order by a Commodore 64, Commodore 128, an Amiga 1000, a Mac IIci, a Mac Quadra 840av then dozens of PC's. The Amiga 1000 still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when I think of it. I often think of what the operating system might have become if it had been adopted as mainstream. It was amazing fro it's time though. Multitasking from a floppy!

 

[spaceranger]

The C64 was my first computer, had a great time with it. I think it's interesting that the C64 is being re-released as a Windows/Linux compatible system, with a custom Linux distro that emulates the original C64. The hardware isn't very impressive nowadays, but it could be a fun little toy.

Commodore 64x

 

[marcheenek]

That was my first computer too! Countless hours of fun with my friends, I remember one had to use a tiny screwdriver to adjust the tape drive's head.
I also learned Basic on C64 and written simple games and programs.

 

[Screamer7]

I vividly remember that day my father bought a C64.
I hardly could wait to get home to open the box and unpacked it.
And right from the boot up screen, I fall in love with computers.
I remember starring at that blue screen with the cursor blinking ready.
And I still remember some of the poke and sys commands!
Poke 53280,0 or sys 64738 any one?
One of my first challenges was to master the sprite graphics.
Then to learn it,s basic language.
And today it is still in working order, although I do not switch it on any more.

 

[Mister Kite]

This is what I saw the first time I started up my first computer.
Immediately fell in love.
An Amiga 1000 with a whopping 256 KB, extended with another 256. and two external floppy disk drives.
Oh, the luxery!

I'm getting old. :lol:

BTW, somebody told me that the first shuttle flew on Amiga DOS because it was a lot less likely to crash than MS DOS.
Any thruth in that?

 

[jedidia]

I always wished I had one (C64), but my Dad got an IBM 0086 of the first generation instead. The thing was awfully expensive, had no hard drive, but interestingly enough a ram-expansion to run DOS 3.6 but monochrome display. I was always jealous of all the games the C64 could run and the computer at our home couldn't...

 

[Spacethingy]

Epic machine. Awesome sprite graphics, tape drives - as used by CERN, may I add...

What do today's kids make of it?
"uh... so, it doesn't do Facebook, right? So... what's the point?" :lol:

 

[Tommy]

I still have my C-64 (with two 1541 Floppy drives). I still use it from time to time as a controller - thanks to the openness of the design.

If you bought the (extra) Programmers Reference Guide, between it and the standard manual you had complete electronic schematics and a complete memory map - including the kernal and Basic interpreter. It was designed so that you could modify any part of the OS, modify or add to the interrupt routine, etc. Commodore went well out of their way to make that platform easy for 3rd party software and even hardware devs to work with.

A machine shop I worked at had a closet full of the allegedly "portable" version - the SX-64. They used them for a controller on an automatic surface grinder, so they bought up a lot of them to ensure they had "spares". I'll add that this shop was owned by a family, and one of the sons was a programmer. Our workstations (where we wrote the programs for the CNC machines) were Amiga's running custom software.

At the time it came out, it's competitors were all much more expensive, "greenscreen", and had no sound. Same with the Amiga, well ahead of it's time with a math co-processor (optional on the IBM) and dedicated graphics ship (which no-one else had).

It's truly unfortunate the the management was so incompetent and ran the company under - it was the best of it's time as far as design and usability.

 

[ex-orbinaut]

Was more of a Spectrum guy, myself, but yeah, had a couple of "sessions" on a friend's C64 around '86-'87, in the UK. There was some coding magazine out at the time, too, "Input", I think, which focused mainly on the C64. My only Commodore's were two Amigas.

The last C64 I ever saw was here in Ecuador, '96, and had been bought for the equivalent of 78.00 USD. Worst part was the buyer was ripped off. It was not working.



[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZfl-MU8DeY"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZfl-MU8DeY[/ame]

 

[Mister Kite]

BTW, somebody told me that the first shuttle flew on Amiga DOS because it was a lot less likely to crash than MS DOS.
Any thruth in that?

Well,....sort of:

 

[dbeachy1]

I loved my C-64! Grew up learning BASIC and 6502/6510 Assembly Language on it (and playing tons of games).

I don't have the computer anymore, but I still run CCS64 on occasion when I'm feeling sentimental.

 

[Linguofreak]

BTW, somebody told me that the first shuttle flew on Amiga DOS because it was a lot less likely to crash than MS DOS.
Any thruth in that?

No. First of all, they ran on two completely different sets of hardware, and so didn't directly compete with each other (rather, the hardware platforms they ran on competed with each other).

Secondly, the hardware they ran on was not at all up to the task of being a flight computer for the Shuttle.

The shuttle used the IBM AP-101, which was an IBM System/360 variant, so if it used any "DOS" operating system, it would have been DOS/360, or something like it. (It's far more likely that it used its own custom software, though).

Also, keep in mind that DOS just means "Disk Operating System", and that, outside of a given hardware line, the different "DOSes" are completely different and unrelated operating systems, no more related to each other than any one of them is to, for example, Linux.