Is Commodore poised for a comeback?

ZDNet ^ | December 16, 2005 | Ina Fried

[supercat]

In 1985, the Amiga was the best personal computer on the market. Period. Best graphics, sound, OS, could multi-task. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology. Still amazed that it never really took off.

First of all, it took a long time for the Amiga to get a useful but affordable hard drive, and even longer for it to get a useful operating system. Having one shared memory pool for all applications with no means of reclaiming memory when a program quits is incredibly bad design. Further, the Amiga's video memory bandwidth took way too long to grow beyond 3.58 megawords/second. This was adequate for 320x200 graphics, but limited the usability of 640x200 graphics.

[sadimgnik]

"And the special effects for Babylon 5."

But only for the first season or two.

JMS eventually moved to a Silicon Graphics system ... but I am still impressed at the early Amiga stuff - most notably, the Vorlon ships.

(Crusade's just been released here on DVD - $50 for the entire run. Hmmm. Might have to buy myself a set, while waiting for Serenity - which is not available here until a week AFTER my birthday in February :-( )

[Richard Kimball]

Why do you have to flame like that for no good reason? He never said it was THE first computer porn, it was the first HE had seen.

[Fierce Allegiance]

Why do you have to flame like that for no good reason? He never said it was THE first computer porn, it was the first HE had seen.

Good point. Sorry wormwood.

[smith288]

LOAD "*",8,1

[Central Scrutiniser]

You are going to kill me.

I bought an original Odyssey I game system at a rummage sale, the game that you had to put plastic sheets on the TV for the graphics.

The first system ever.

I got rid of it after a while, thing is worth many hundreds now.

[smith288]

**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****
 64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE

READY.
_

[Semi Civil Servant]

I remember the first time I fired up Cinemaware's Wings on my Amiga. I couldn't believe the graphics of that opening sequence. I didn't see anything that good on a PC for a decade.

[Tex_GOP_Cruz]

I still have my VIC 20 in a box in the basement. I took it out this summer when I moved and it still works!

We got a C64 when I was in elementary school. I rescued it from the garage a few years ago. Even though it endured a few Texas summers, it booted up with no problem. I had a lot of fun with that machine. I remember messing with BASIC, in addition to playing commercial games. I was surprised that the hundred some kb 5.25" dual-sided disk drive was still functional, too. It now sits in a box in climate controlled comfort.

[expatguy]

LOL 300 baud Im sure.

I'll never forget the day when I upgraded to the lightning speed of 1200 baud!

[backhoe]

That device was called an "Acoustic Coupler."

Yep, and modems ( modulator & demodulator were where I first encountered UARTs ( Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter ).

I can't remember exactly, but there was some damn chip- a 16640?- you could replace with a faster chip in hopes of goosing the transfer rate, back in the days of DTST software for DOS.

[chasio649]

Agree.....

[IslandJeff]

M.U.L.E. and JumpMan!

Problem with the C64 emulators, ROMs, etc., is that I've forgotten how to run the OS. I remember "LOAD" with arguments, but that's about it. Both game titles are impossible to play without a configured joystick (those brain cells are LONG gone...).

Now if someone imaginative would port such great, parsimonious game designs to something like PC or Xbox, they'd have a built-in nostalgia market. Sigh.

To think of all the studying I should have been doing...

[listenhillary]

I'm full of typos today. 10MB

[listenhillary]

Bad case of the typos

[Central Scrutiniser]

I can't get the emulators to see my F keys on my keyboard!

Can't play.

Damn. Its a multimedia keyboard.

[Myrddin]

I had the pleasure of selling the first 10 TRS-80 computers in San Diego county in September 1977 from the Radio Shack store in Mission Valley. I would have purchased one as well, but I had just spent $500 buying a BSA 500cc single cylinder dirt bike.

[IslandJeff]

I can't get the emulators to see my F keys on my keyboard!

Did C64 recognize ASCII standards? Geez, for something that's barely 20 years old some of this stuff seems like archeology.

[Myrddin]

Before I could afford a decent scientific calculator, I was using a 4 function Radio Shack calculator and performing square roots by successive approximation. The "rich" kids on campus (UCSD) had HP35 or HP45 calculators. A few people had TI-30's.

My college graduation present was an HP25. I wrote my first "software" on that calculator to replace some of the genetics crossover frequency tables from the Schaum's study guide. I passed that code along to one of my professors who needed finer granularity than the published tables offered. That was about 10 million lines of code ago. Time flies.

[Central Scrutiniser]

I think its my non standard keyboard.