The Rise and Fall of Commodore
Here’s a book that I plan on picking up this Christmas season. On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore is a new history of the computer company that is responsible for me being the computer geek that I am today. I used that Commodore 64 until I went to college in 1994, and it worked just fine. That was back in the day when you were a geek and a “teacher’s pet” for typing up your homework. I always found typing to be quicker and less painful than hand writing long papers out.
Nowadays, the high school kids want to type like they do on their cell phones for credit. My, how times change.
Slashdot | The Rise and Fall of Commodore
It’s a sad truth, and the book describes this in an often bitter fashion, that the early history of computers seems to focus on Apple, IBM and Microsoft while Commodore’s massive contributions to the industry are routinely ignored. The common misconception that Apple started the home computing industry is simply wrong. Commodore was the first to show a personal computer, the first to deliver low-cost computers to the masses, the first to sell a million computers, and the first to arrive with a true multimedia computer. Fortunately this book sets a lot of the record straight.
And be sure to read through the comments thread after the review for a real trip down memory line. I can remember some of those PEEKs and POKEs and all the sprite programming and Jim Butterfield’s book and typing in long programs out of magazines and — kids today don’t know how easy they have it.
Or, how hard. We learned programs by looking at them on paper and then typing them in ourselves, then altering them to see what happened. Today’s kids just throw the demo CD in and play the game or run the utility. No learning. You can go to websites that offer tutorials, but then you download the code and run it and barely ever look at it afterwards. Darn shame, all of it.
November 20th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
I got a Commodore 64 for my Bar Mitzvah in 1983… although I was a prototypical 80s Geekboy, having spent 3 years programming BASIC on an Apple ][+, I absolutely *adored* my Commodore 64. The amount of programming and DB work you could do with it was staggering for such a relatively inexpensive piece of hardware (Does anyone else remember the Adventure Creator utility that allowed you to design your own text-based adventures?) Man this is taking me back.
These kids today, what with their, their event-based programming, visual editors, type-ahead functionality, object modelling… FEH! *makes vague but forceful Italian hand gestures*
November 20th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
I never had the chance to work with a Commodore, but I grew up on my uncle’s Tandy. I fondly remember the days of DOS and writing little programs in BASIC. I especially loved the programs in the magazines. Too bad no one has those anymore.
November 20th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
I was exposed to the Apple ][e and ][c in school. Learned LOGO and BASIC on those things. Then my dad got a luggable computer — I can’t remember the brand, but it was called the “ExecPartner”. Two 5 1/4″ floppy drives, internal thermal printer, orange monochrome screen.
And a BASIC program. Oh, the hours I spent programming on that, using, yep, the programs in magazines - Family Computing, COMPUTE!, ENTER just to name a few.
Man, those were great times, weren’t they?
November 21st, 2006 at 9:39 am
I’m right with you, Phil. COMPUTE!’S GAZETTE was the C=64 specific mag, as I recall. And I still have an issue of ENTER Magazine somewhere as a reminder of what the early days were like. So simple, so fun.
Matthew — Can’t say that I remember the text adventure creator, but I do remember a book I had at the time that taught the concepts behind text adventures, and how to properly parse sentences. (It all seems archaic now to me. I mean, Perl has so many simple regular expressions to do the same thing in two lines that took whole subroutines back then.) What were the commands? MIDCHR() LEFTCHR(), RIGHTCHR(). Crap, I’ve forgotten already. I wonder if there’s a C=64 programming guide on-line somewhere?