Posted on 12/07/2007 7:44:13 AM PST by meowmeow
Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.
Millions of Commmodore 64s were sold in the 1980s.
"There was something magical about the C64," says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden.
He remembers the day he first laid eyes on his machine back in 1984.
"My father brought it home together with a tape deck, a disk drive, a printer, and a couple of games...I used to sneak home during lunch to play [on it] with my friends."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I miss it too. Better than anything today, especially LOONIX. I had this great game where you roamed around on some prison moon planting pylons to release gasses trapped in this prison moon. I think you had to plant 10 pylons.
Reagan Nation/Generation X BUMP
ZORK!!! What a great game! The graphics in my head were better than any on the new game consoles...
I actually DID solve ZORK, except for ONE thing. There was a little “clockwork bird” inside the egg that was always broken when I opened the egg, and it must have been worth 5 points, because that’s all I lacked to have all the points.
I did have help, though, another guy where I worked and I would go home every night and play it at our separate homes, and compare notes the next day.
That was a lot of fun.
Those old text games were terrific!
You can download it for free from here...
8^)
But seriously, was I the only one whose first experience on a computer was a Commodore PET with the cassette tape?
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
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LOAD 8,1
Did I get it right?
Only if you had a cassette disk drive. :-)
THANKS!!
Yeah. There was one on the University’s mainframe when I was in college called “Adventure”. Did you ever play that one? It was very similar to Zork, but it came first.
OH COOL!!! I know what I’m doing this Christmas vacation! Thanks SISU kid!
No but in high school (pre C64) we played something called “Camel” that was a very simple text game.
Played most of the Infocom games on my Amiga back in the mid 80's. My favorites were "Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy" & "A Mind Forever Voyaging"...
Those were the days....
8^)
LOAD? We didn’t get to that for a couple of weeks!
My wife and I are both engineers and her folks bought us a C-64 for our first Christmas together. We stayed up till about 2am on Christmas eve writing a program in BASIC that bounced one of the PET characters (a circle) back and forth and top to bottom from the borders of the screen. We put in variables to change color, speed it up and slow it down, and I think maybe flash or something.
It was a historic accomplishment, but without a storage device, we had to turn off the computer and lose the program! It was painful, but we got a disk drive a couple of weeks later. Neat memories
Never heard of Camel. Was it a role-player, like ZORK?
Dual floppy drives. Still seems like I’m missing something.
Plugh!
Just typing "LOAD ,8,1" without a filename would look for a cassette drive, which 99.5% of C64 users didn't have. You'd have too put "LOAD FILENAME,8,1" to look on your disk drive. I'd love to know which drugs I've done that cause me to remember that but forget where I put my keys an hour ago.
bump
Yes - a very simple one with maybe only a dozen command options. I think the computer was a Tandy? Or something that began with T.
OK, Bill - remind me. I don’t recall that...
Tandy would work. Or maybe a TRS-80 (Tandy/Radio Shack) There was also a Sinclair build-it-yourself a friend of mine built. IIRC, Sinclair was associated or produced by TIMEX.
C64=the greatest game machine ever made!!
"You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all alike..." AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!
T80? aka “trash 80”
I still have a couple of C64’s, a 64C, a C128, and several VIC-20’s, all in working condition. Lots of Atari’s also. I wish I had the room to set some of them up.
Imagine what their kids will be amazed by!
Gunship...man, I loved playing Gunship. I was a stone cold killer—Did the primary and secondary missions every time and then went looking for targets of opportunity on the way back to base. Of course, I like Battlefront and the other military/military sci-fi shooters that are out these days. Last year at Christmas, my 8 year old killed me with a rocket launcher in Halo, and I whacked my nephew with an M-1 sniper-style in Medal of Honor Pacific.
Good times...good times.
I absolutely loved the graphics we could do with Graphics Magic..and the BBS’s in my area were a blast.
The golden years indeed..
The Discovery Channel has been airing a series this week on teh rise and evolution of computer games. The series starts with Pong and ends with modern 3-D battle sims. So many fuzzy memories.
Ah! I hated those passages. And even more, I hated those passages.
Are they worth anything? We’ve got a couple of C64s in the attic, and I’ve thought about selling them. I think one works, and the other could be spare parts...
I read years ago that when the new C64 hit the market there were hundreds of thousands of the older VIC20 computers piled up in the warehouses, and nobody wanted them. They all got scrapped.
There's mountains of old electronics thrown out every year and only a small percentage of it has any value to any one, either as scrap or as a collector's item.
When she got to high school, the teacher couldn't believe she could type 80wpm and could skip typing class! (Tested her three times).
OK I gotta ask... What would you use for monitors? If I remember right, they used oddball connectors.
Can I assume those will run on a PC?
Or are we talking strictly Commodores?
I had the cassette drive on a TI-99/4A. The “drive,” of course, was a wire connected to the output ports of a 1972 boombox.
13” tv set
I used to love playing f19 stealth fighter.
You have to let the thief steal the egg, or you can just give it to him. He has the fine skills needed to open the egg without breaking the contents.
Then, of course, when you kill him in the Treasure Room, you can take both the egg and the bird.
And no, I didn't figure it out myself. I think someone told me the answer to that one.
Anyway, if a person didn't have the proper type of Commodore split video monitor they would have to use the RF modulator output and a color TV set. The video quality would suck and would frustrate any one used to the sharp video quality of an IBM PC or similar computer.
Actually, the C64 had flashes of brilliance. Assembly language-style programming was made accessible to BASIC through “PEEKs” and “POKEs,” meaning you could actually write BASIC programs to directly enter memory into RAM locations. I/O devices shared memory locations directly, with no drivers, so you could PEEK and POKE your way to anything. It had virtual memory backwards: The drives were slow as hell, but the memory transfers were decent, so you could use RAM memory expansion packs as a virtual hard drive. It had a GUI desktop before PCs did.
I’d still like to know what fastrun did. It was software that made the hard drives function 10 times faster.
Camel or MULE?
The MULE looked like a Camel. It was an early colonization game.
AH! Of course! I think he was described as having “nimble fingers” or some such thing... Thanks!
Oh well. Guess I can’t quit my job just yet...
There was another role-playing game called Infidel, I think. You had to find a pyramid buried in the sand, then find a sarcophagus. My cousin and I solved that one. Shocking ending to it, for a 12-year-old.
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