Commodore 64 Rebooted

[Biskit]

bought my first ever Desktop PC and Monitor

Stop it, all of you. This reminiscence stuff could soak up my whole damned day.

I'm now having flashbacks to my first contact with a PC. There I was, cocky PhD student, doing amazing thinks with BBC micros, HPs and a mainframe... and doing a couple of hours a week as a teaching assistant in the first year physics lab where all these kids (wow, at least three years younger than me) were learning basic BASIC coding on these new-fangled PCs.

 

[Cathbad]

Way back when, I worked for a well-known company in Florida (they advertised heavily, mostly on the back of comic books). Being the fastest/most accurate typist there (My actual job was type-setting), the Boss came to me and asked me to type up the corporate business manual for them. "No problem!" says I. He then points me to a Commodore 64.

Problem.

Why did he want me to type such an extensive manuscript on the cruddy 64!?

Couldn't do it. You know what happens when a 100CWPM typist tries to type on a 64? Not much. It's a lot of stopping and waiting for the damn thing to stop beeping so you can start typing again! It was just too slow. So damn slow.

My first experience with desktops was the Wang, in the US Army. By the time I'd loaded the two LP-size discs, I could have finished most projects on my Selectric 3!

Happily, they got better.

 

[HanaBi]

Ah well, when I was a lad......

Actually I used to buy some computer mags back in the 80s - "Computer and Video Games" and "ZX Sinclair" or something like that. I only bought them for the computer programs that were printed inside.

I would spend hours typing about 300 lines of code (assuming I could make out some of the poor print quality characters and syntax), thinking that this is going to be a truly awesome game due to the length of the code and that it was using lots of PEEKs and POKEs in the program.

However, once fully debugged I would start playing and quickly realise what a complete waste of time it all was.

 

[Parson]

We are a bunch of Geeks. Are we not? ..... I dabbled with a Commodore 64, and an Apple 2e (? ) two disk drives and no hard drive. Maybe it was some other re-iteration of the Apple. But my first real work with a computer came with a true Blue IBM 8088. A blazer at the the time, it is now so laughably slow that one wonders how any work at all was accomplished with it. ---- Ah, but I loved the days when the world used WordPerfect. I memorized a lot of the keyboard macros, wrote my own, set up my own keyboard shortcuts, and generally was about a mid-level user. Now the world is whitewashed with the ubiquitous Word, and everyone pretty much has to do things the Microsoft way.

(It still irks me that most of my correspondents send attachments in Word --- I have a copy in self defense, and for those attachments --- when they could send pdf's and everyone could open them.)

 

[HanaBi]

I had the good/bad fortune to have a play on the Apple Lisa, way back in 1983.

From a hardware pov, it was technically superior to the PC of the time. But its biggest drawback was price (just shy of $10,000 back then, or $24,000 in today's money); and as such the home and SME markets of the time stuck with their cheaper/inferior PCs.

But it was a great machine to use and code on (more info on Wiki); shame the price killed it stone dead.

 

[Cathbad]

loved the days when the world used WordPerfect

I loved that program!!

 

[Cathbad]

I had the good/bad fortune to have a play on the Apple Lisa, way back in 1983.

From a hardware pov, it was technically superior to the PC of the time. But its biggest drawback was price (just shy of $10,000 back then, or $24,000 in today's money); and as such the home and SME markets of the time stuck with their cheaper/inferior PCs.

But it was a great machine to use and code on (more info on Wiki); shame the price killed it stone dead.

I've no idea what the Wang was selling for, but I know it couldn't have been worth it. And since the Army bought a slew of them (back in '81 or early '82), I'm sure they charged the gov't a slew of cash!

 

[Parson]

I loved that program!!

I still use it (WP 8) because I can in a one person office. However in recent years the program hasn't been improved much and I will not upgrade. Sigh, joining the sheep.

 

[HanaBi]

I remember using WordStar back in the early 80s - a DOS based word processor program in the days when CP/M was the stardard OS prior to MS-DOS. But then of course WordPerfect blew WS away due to its superior portability.

Still a great program though

 

[DrMclony]

Wordstar was fantastic in its time. Wordperfect was great as well, but was never as user friendly.

 

[Caledfwlch]

Way back when, I worked for a well-known company in Florida (they advertised heavily, mostly on the back of comic books). Being the fastest/most accurate typist there (My actual job was type-setting), the Boss came to me and asked me to type up the corporate business manual for them. "No problem!" says I. He then points me to a Commodore 64.

Problem.

Why did he want me to type such an extensive manuscript on the cruddy 64!?

Couldn't do it. You know what happens when a 100CWPM typist tries to type on a 64? Not much. It's a lot of stopping and waiting for the damn thing to stop beeping so you can start typing again! It was just too slow. So damn slow.

My first experience with desktops was the Wang, in the US Army. By the time I'd loaded the two LP-size discs, I could have finished most projects on my Selectric 3!

Happily, they got better.

I too am a 100 WPM Typist!
At 16 I left school, and began work in a local Printers, training as a Graphic Designer.
We used Windows PC's, when I started it was "486" machines. By the time I was 18, the two other Designers who trained me had one by one, left for pastures new, and a few months before my 18th birthday as the 2nd guy left, the guy who was the Printers assistant was moved to the "Design Department" as we called the little area at the back of the retail shop/customer service area, with a 5 foot bit of board giving us "privacy" from said shop. I hate "bigging myself up" but I was frankly a much better and faster designer/typesetter etc than him but he was put in charge as he had been with the firm the longest. He soon left before getting dismissed for various things, including the printing of 5000 20 page booklets which he refused to let me check over, and which was full of typos.
And I was put in charge mwahahahahaha!!!
Hence why, at just 18 in 1996, I was earning a wage the same as, many middle class professionals, & graduates starting their way up the ladder.
Got the Boss to agree to upgrading the PC's to 586's I think it was, the software running our invoicing/payment system was in DOS ffs!!
This guy, Bryn who had worked for national newspapers doing layout design & stuff had "come back" to Wales, setup his own design company, and would bring the jobs he took in and designed to us to print, we got on, & he would pop in and sit with me, and give me some adhoc training & advice with whatever I was working on - he was an awesome designer, and the Boss hired him to give me some training sessions at my request. These days im not a designer, but when I am working on my CV, or doing a poster for a friend, I still can practically see Bryn, sat next to me, big huge guy with a beard, smoking a Gallois with a cup of coffee in one hand, swearing like a soldier

He persuaded the boss to buy an Apple Mac, against my wishes I hated having to use a mouse with only 1 button. I can't recall why, but I preffered Quark Xpress on PC to Apple, never managed to get the sodding thing to connect to the Internet either, plus I had a nice 21" monitor, which couldnt connect to the Mac, it was total nightmare!
It broke down, HDD failure I suspect, didn't care, was just happy it wasnt working! Boss asks me, as I was also the "IT guy" fixing/building our PC's to fix it. "Can't says I - its a sealed case, it's impossible to fix yourself, can't even upgrade components, it will have to go back to Apple, dunno if it's still in Warranty.."
"I can open it, we can buy a new HDD from X shop in town" says he
"I know nothing about Mac's internals, and the shop wont stock Mac HDD's"
"don't worry I will sort it " says he
And to my horror, he comes back with a frelling Crowbar, and hammer, and proceeds to rip the sealed case to pieces. Goodbye guarantee!!
"right, fix it"
this is like 20 years ago, so I can't remember all the details, but I think, even then, Mac Products, even the tiny desktop cases used non standard screws etc so you couldn't even unscrew things without an expensive set of Apple tools, from a knock off company.

 

[Parson]

Wordstar was fantastic in its time. Wordperfect was great as well, but was never as user friendly.

True to a degree. If you took the time you could make WP do all kinds of cool things. It was designed for people who were in charge of their own computers and input. WP took it on the nose for that, because the large corporate users wanted standardization, so that if you did something one way on one computer it would be done the same way on another. ie I set up my WP to bold with alt O, I was using alt B to delete to the end of the line, both of which made sense to me, but someone who tried to use my WP was flummoxed almost immediately. But the killing blow for WP came when Windows was designed and WP was not ready for the enormity and speed of the switch and then for some reason WP never would work just right on it. In the days of Widows 95 it would crash about 2 or 3 times a week for me. (I've always suspected the Micro$oft did not share the complete code with WP, or alternatively the WP system of opening different documents inside the same program rather than the more clunky Word way of opening separate programs for each document wouldn't play well together.)

 

[Dave]

Getting more than a little off topic, but a major problem for archivists that want to keep old records is that all the old working machines capable of reading these formats are getting rarer. They have to go on eBay and buy them, if necessary, digitise the records, and then store them in a more modern format. There are archives stored on old media - magnetic tape, cartridges, documents on discontinued WP, music on minidisk, records and reels, film on Betamax - that could be lost forever. And electronic records can get corrupted (I know this from my own photos.) You need to keep copies in different places and periodically compare them, preferably using checksum. You never had to do that with real photographs stored in the attic.

There were some Commodore 64 kids teaching counting programs that my children used to love that I haven't seen anywhere else. Also, someone mentioned those "Egg" games earlier. I spent hours playing the "Dizzy" versions.

 

[Biskit]

In the days of Widows 95 it would crash about 2 or 3 times a week for me.

Word wasn't exactly stable either. I used it for report-writing at work - not always the happiest of experiences. Regular saves were essential.
Now I'm 'retired', my machines run linux and I use OpenOffice.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Getting more than a little off topic, but a major problem for archivists that want to keep old records is that all the old working machines capable of reading these formats are getting rarer.

Yeah, I recently had to buy a Mini-DV VCR off ebay to digitize the last of my old camcorder tapes. Some of which are copies of old Hi8 camcorder tapes that I made so I could digitize them over Firewire. And some of those Hi8 tapes are copies of VHS camcorder tapes from the space shuttle launches I used to go to.

At least now they should be readable for as long as there's a Mini-DV codec. And they could always be copied to an uncompressed video format if need be, without losing any more quality.

 

[HanaBi]

By coincidence I've just ordered from Amazon a "InVaFoCo Cassette to to MP3 Converter player". Only about 20 quid, but should help me digitise to mp3 all my old, old, old music cassettes that I was considering chucking up until a few days ago.

 

[Vertigo]

By coincidence I've just ordered from Amazon a "InVaFoCo Cassette to to MP3 Converter player". Only about 20 quid, but should help me digitise to mp3 all my old, old, old music cassettes that I was considering chucking up until a few days ago.

I went through that process a few years ago but sadly by today's standards the quality was pretty dreadful and there were several that I couldn't persuade to run at full speed, despite repeated full rewinds and winds (presumably too gunked up with age) and they tended to surge between several different speeds, none of which appeared to match to proper one. You'd probably have to pay good money for the electronics to duplicate that sound effect today!

 

[Caledfwlch]

Getting more than a little off topic, but a major problem for archivists that want to keep old records is that all the old working machines capable of reading these formats are getting rarer. They have to go on eBay and buy them, if necessary, digitise the records, and then store them in a more modern format. There are archives stored on old media - magnetic tape, cartridges, documents on discontinued WP, music on minidisk, records and reels, film on Betamax - that could be lost forever. And electronic records can get corrupted (I know this from my own photos.) You need to keep copies in different places and periodically compare them, preferably using checksum. You never had to do that with real photographs stored in the attic.

There were some Commodore 64 kids teaching counting programs that my children used to love that I haven't seen anywhere else. Also, someone mentioned those "Egg" games earlier. I spent hours playing the "Dizzy" versions.

This has been a massive problem for some major UK Banks/Financial Institutions, costing them many millions.

Back in the late 90's they started digitising, in very poor quality loan/credit card contracts, and shredding the paper copy - despite experts in Archiving & UK Law warning them that this was a very bad mistake.

Get to the early naughties, and the rise of the Internet, and Consumer Help forums, and the banks were stuffed. Ordinary people, especially those in debt began learning that to "prove" a debt, ie go to Civil Court and get a judgement forcing the debtor to Pay, and if not, the Creditor has options such as using Bailiffs etc the bank must provide a copy of the original signed agreement, the poor digitised copies did not in any way meet the appropriate Legislations requirements, so, the banks were taking people to Court, and they were getting the Court Cases cancelled, because the Finance Company was in breach and couldn't legally speaking, prove a debt was even taken out, never mind, owed! As that raised publicity, a whole lot more people, often crippled with huge credit repayments, but currently making their payments, sent off for a copy of the "original agreement", and on receipt seeing it was also a non legal copy realised they could stop paying, and there was nothing the companies could do - thus even more money lost to the banks.
All to save the banks a few pounds in storage, and not paying experts to set up their digitisation systems and hardware.

It is why, there have over the years been major attempts by finance institutions and the Legal profession to shut down the major user run Consumer Rights & Help websites in the UK, sometimes trying through legal means, or attempting to force the ruling govenment to "do something" with legislation against these sites, but most often through highly questionable means.

I don't know all the details, but the largest site "Consumer Action Group" is the biggest thorn, and always has been, and at one point, a Company, or consortium of company bought out 2 of the sites senior Admins, then had them make all sorts of claims of dodgy dealings and behaviours against the Sites owner, I don't know if it ever went as far as a Court, but the claims didn't stand up to much scrutiny.

The reason the Legal Profession is also against these sites is they are costing it an absolute fortune - once, people would have to engage a Solicitor for even fairly basic Court Cases, both defending against, or suing someone, but with the info available on these sites, ordinary people are able to represent themselves in Court on issues that are not complex, thus, Solicitors are losing their bread and butter.These Sites have also spearheaded campaigns and raised awareness of improprieties and unlawful behaviour carried out by Debt Collection Companies, and their pet Solicitors, seeing some major figures in that world be closed down by the Regulators, and several Solicitors being dragged before the Legal Board, and having their Licence to Practice in the UK Revoked.

The most famous was ACS: Law - who were working on behalf of a couple of media companies doing the sort of thing the RIAA gets up to in the States, sending threatening "invoices" accusing the victim of illegally downloading pirate media. A Campaigning legal firm took on a couple hundred people in receipt of ACS Law letters, and working with the consumer rights sites built a class action defence. The result was ACS's attempt to get a Court Judgement against the victims failing, swiftly followed by the owner of the firm being made bankrupt, and his license to practice as a solicitor/lawyer revoked.

 

[Ursa major]

I still have my old Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro B and Atari 2600 Games Console, up in the loft someplace.

Setting aside the Commodore PET on which I learned to program in BASIC (but didn't own or even take home), and various remote machines (ICLs) accessed from work, and on which I learned to program real-time applications, my first computer was a Tandy** TRS-80 II (with a whole 32k of RAM and an 12K ROM containing the O/S and BASIC).

After that, I had a BBC B (later upgraded to use floppies), followed eventually by an Archimedes and then a RISC PC. I also had a laser printer (cheap at a mere £999...) -- one that used the computer's 32-bit processor to construct the images, transfering them as bit patterns down a ribbon cable -- which I used to produce diagrams that I then took to work and pasted (with real paste) into documents, hiding the edges with Tippex and photocopying the relevant sheets to produce the "original". At that time, I was still writing documents using vi, formatting them with nroff. (Very few people*** had access to a PC back then.)

I still have, somewhere, all of these machines, plus a dead Dell Laptop with Windows XP (from 2002), an HP desktop running Windows XP (which may still work), and a "back-up" Dell laptop (running Vista), used only a few weeks ago (once I'd loaded 400+ days of virus checker updates...). Both my current machines -- an HP Windows 7 All-in-1 and an HP Windows 8.1 laptop -- seem to be on their last legs, so they may soon be joining the others (including the PCW 9512; see below), waiting for someone to discover them when the house is cleared. (Or I could load up the car and take them all down to the local tip....)


** - Radio Shack in the US

*** - In a separate division of the company, my mother had, before she retired, been using a Mac (probably a 512K, but she may have started on a 128K), with its enormous 9" screen, to create large drawings; as a Drawing Office Assistant -- half-way between a Tracer and a Draughts(wo)man -- she'd previously used a large drawing board, pencils/pens and various tools. Only later did she get a home machine, an Amstrad PCW 9512 (with a daisy-wheel printer), on which she wrote a novel. (Yes, I'm not the first in the family to do so... and not the first not to be published.... )

 

[Caledfwlch]

At the printers, the Boss decided to clean out one of our store rooms upstairs - this was about 99, I had disc backups of work going back to 1994, which was enough we thought to cover returning customers - it was unlikely someone was going to turn up saying hello, "I last came in 1995", let alone the same for 1994, "can you do an identical print run of x job" so the Shop Minions, ie the useless students/ex students serving customers, doing boring stuff like stapling raffle ticket books etc where going to go up, bring down all the boxes marked as "jobs" but check each one, and any box not marked jobs, or marked jobs but with IT/office equipment, or manuals, books, discs etc was to be brought down to me in the mighty "Graphics Department" for inspection. I had it cosy by then, the walls were covered in posters of Cybermen, Borg, Daleks, the Tardis etc

I found in one box a price guide and some invoices - something like 8 megabyte of RAM for A 486 pc was £500+ couldnt believe the cost difference, even then