Commodore 64 turns 30 218
will_die writes "The Commodore 64 came out 30 years ago and to celebrate this the BBC went and got two groups of kids to try out an old system, complete with tape drive. It's sure to bring a few grins to people who had one of these old systems. From the article: 'The Commodore's ability to display 16 colours, smoothly scroll graphics and play back music through its superior SID (sound interface device) chip - even while loading programs off tape - helped win over fans, but it did not become the market leader until the late 1980s.'" Last spring a modern version of the C64 was released.
Re:Its just basic! (Score:4, Insightful)
Best Slashdot thread ever. Period. :)
Re:Remarkable (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more probably because there are now eight thousand layers of software between you and the machine.
C64 made my career (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought one to play games and explore in 1983, but programming in BASIC was too limited, though I wrote a few simple "apps" that way. One day I saw a listing in a magazine for a Space Invaders implementation and it was basically raw hex that had to be POKEd in. The source was listed, in assembler, and I had that light-bulb moment where the bridge between the electronics and the code came into focus. From then on, I never wrote in BASIC. Instead, I bought the MIKRO assembler cartridge and wrote various utilities and games in assembler. I also made an EPROM programmer that plugged into the cartridge port so I "saved" my efforts to EPROM instead of tape and just booted straight into them via the cartridge port.
It was timely. During the 80s most of the hardware I worked on as a designer migrated from discrete logic to microprocessor-based designs, and thanks to the C64 I was well-placed to keep up and even lead that trend. I moved on to the 8051 and then the 68000, but I never forgot the importance of the C64 and the 6502 in that learning.
Re:Remarkable (Score:5, Insightful)
^^^ Amen.
Amount of time it took a 6th grader to figure out that POKE 53281,0 turns the screen black: about 5 minutes.
Amount of time it took me as an adult ~20 years later, with ~7 years of postgraduate professional development experience, to figure out how to create a JFrame, open a JPanel on it, and fill it with black: about 3 hours, and that was with a few years of Java experience already under my belt. I shudder to think what would be involved trying to do it in C++ under Windows with MFC.
30 years ago, the essence of programming a Commodore 64 could be boiled down into a book with 500 pages, and made comfortably accessible with the addition of 2 or 3 more good books. Now, the fucking EULA pdf ALONE rambles on for close to 80, and a fairly complete set of books documenting nothing but J2SE 7 (with comprehensive treatment of Swing) would fill a bookcase, and a comprehensive set of books with everything you need to know about Windows to do anything from write miniport drivers to create .net webapps would fill a building the size of my childhood's small town public library.
Plus, expectations of artistry were much lower. You could write a program that created an 8x8 smiley face in 2 colors. You weren't expected to master DirectX or OpenGL and learn about 47 different shadowing modes, or read a book the size of War & Peace on T&L theory. You didn't even have to be much of an artist. It helped if you were, but when you're dealing with the world one 8x8 custom character at a time, artistic finesse really didn't add much to the equation.
Ditto, for music. You could get a piece of sheet music, and your main programming task was figuring out how to efficiently represent frequency+duration with a finite number of DATA statements. Today, you practically need to have the background knowledge of a professional recording engineer. Even in the Amiga era, the hardest part about dealing with SoundTracker was the fact that it crashed like a third-world discount airline. Learning to use SoundTracker itself took maybe an hour, and learning how to play it back with assembly was almost a no-brainer.
I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.
Re:Remarkable (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with "peak" age of anything. It's all about having tons of time free, and very few interests that are focused such that you'll spend 12 hours a day doing something that you'd not have the time or patience to do nowadays.
Re:Useless nostalgia. (Score:4, Insightful)
For many of us, our C64 wasn't "some little thing in our life" -- it WAS our life, or at least a staggeringly huge and important part of it.
Not only did we use it daily, to the nearly complete exclusion of almost everything else during summer, weekends, and vacations... back then, your computer defined everything about you that mattered in ways that make iPhone-vs-Android look like a pissing match. Back then, if you owned a c64, every single one of your friends did, too. If they didn't, you would have drifted apart by virtue of no longer having any shared interests. I remember sleep-overs in various living rooms with a half-dozen 1702 monitors, mountains of 1541 floppy drives (copying away all night), and barely enough room to walk. And one opened-up1541 with connectors exposed, so we could copy those few wacky games that required read errors that could only be created by yanking out the connector at the right moment in time.
Oh, and the floppy-notch cutter.
Re:Remarkable (Score:4, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with "peak" age of anything. It's all about having tons of time free, and very few interests that are focused such that you'll spend 12 hours a day doing something that you'd not have the time or patience to do nowadays.
12 Hours a day doing something interesting. Wow, those were good days. Now I'm exceptionally lucky if I get 12 minutes to spend on the same task without interuption.
And to prove my point the phone rang while I was writting the above sentence.