Posted on 06/27/2006 1:25:59 PM PDT by Smogger
FRESNO — Robert Bernardo spent a week this spring traveling the Pacific Northwest, trying to save part of yesterday's future.
The high school English teacher swung through Portland and Astoria, Ore., and then on to Ethel, Wash., to drop off a collection of antiquated computers — a PET8032, three VIC-20s, an SX-64 portable and a Commodore 128D.
Then on his way home to the Central Valley town of Visalia, Bernardo packed his white Crown Victoria with three more SX-64s, boxes of software and a couple of printers.
With any luck, this agglomeration of decades-old circuit boards and dusty disk drives will allow Bernardo to reboot a handful of computers made by the long-defunct Commodore Business Machines.
In an era when a home computer's power is measured in gigabytes, Bernardo still counts kilobytes as a devoted Commodore user 12 years after the last machine was assembled.
Once the largest personal computer maker in America, the company behind the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 introduced millions of people like Bernardo to the digital age. The company went out of business in 1994, but its legacy survives in dozens of Commodore clubs around the country.
Bernardo presides over the Fresno chapter.
Bernardo presides over the Fresno chapter.
Never mind that the VIC-20 has so little usable memory — just 3.5 kilobytes — that it can store only a couple of pages of text in its buffers. Or that Commodore hardware was notoriously clunky and buggy. Bernardo still manages all his e-mail on a 1980s-vintage Commodore 64.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I miss my Amiga :( It took nearly half a decade for my stupid PC to catch up. And don't you Atari ST and Mac users start hating. You know the Amiga smoked your computers back in the day.
-Eric
LOAD "*",8,1
Ah, yes...did my first PEEK and POKE on a VIC-20...
I have an Atari 400 & 800 up in the attic that I kept for the superior games after I got my first 8088 PC.
I thought some collector might be interested in them, but there's still worth nothing on e-bay.
But if there is an avid Freeper out there, I might bewilling to...
Amiga's were great and ahead of their time for graphics and design back in the 80's.
My ex-wife had 2 of them for her fashion design department at a major fashion manufacturer.
Why did they disappear?
My first computer was an Amiga 3000. Great machine, but the lack of software for some purposes was frustrating. It had a 100Meg hard drive, I couldn't imagine ever filling that puppy up! :)
Gave all my Atari junk (except the 400 that's wired to my TARDIS console) to a "computer museum" run by a local computer store, only to find out a month later that they were driven out of business because despite having sold 300 PC's to the local school district, they only owned ONE copy of Windows98!
That was a big ouch.
My first computer was a TRS-80, aka Trash-80. I had the premium model: Level II Basic AND 16K!
There is a TI-99 up on the shelf and a couple VIC-20s and a Capsela 500 in a box in the closet. VIC-20 made an excellent controller.
This guy needs to get out of his mom's basement.
I had an IBM PC Jr...anyone remember that disaster? U had to plug in a basic cartridge so the computer could run programs...was hilarious.
The challenge in those early days was to find something useful to do with the computer beyond attempting to store your recipes on it.
Because the people that ran Commodore Business Machines were idiots. It was my first lesson that superior tehnology, no matter how much more advanced, does not trump marketing and business strategy.
Ever run into the dreaded "BASIC CART" bug that let you key information for hours, only to COMPLETELY and TOTALLY lock up beyond any hope of recovery? Boy, those were the days!
Was there something "different" about Commodore monitors? What are my chances of getting the VIC-20s to display something eventually?
I remember writing many engineering programs on a Commodore 64, using the tape drive alone...
Way ahead of its time and with the Commodore user-friendliness.
I always wondered why they dropped the ball on the Amiga.
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