4 ms·
It was just last week that you saw the Commodore 64 ad on TV. Now that MASH was over, you were in the market for something new to do on Monday nights. This Comm
by hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
It was just last week that you saw the Commodore 64 ad on TV. Now that MASH was over, you were in the market for something new to do on Monday nights. This Commodore 64 thing looked even better than the Apple II that Rudy’s family had in their basement.*
Alternative version:
It's 1983 and your dad decides to buy a personal computer. The C64 is too expensive at $595, so he buys a VIC 20 (introduced at $295, probably $200 by '84).
You plug it in to the television downstairs and, after mentally tuning out the hum from the RF converter, you start to enjoy gems like GORF and Radar Rat Race (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1LRkON9XTOk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1LRkON9XTOk).
You try to read the included user manual, with its helpful computer chip themed cartoon mascot explaining things like strings, but none of it makes sense because you're eight. You and your sister spend hours reading aloud and typing in bytecode listings from then-popular computer magazines. Imagine spending an hour transcribing hex codes, only to type the run command and have it crash.
If, on the off chance you found the errors and got the program to run, you'd find it was wildly over-hyped in the description. You didn't want to waste your work, so you'd save it to the tape drive that used audio cassette tapes.
A few days later, you'd try to load the program from the cassette tape and find that it was corrupted. I never once got a saved program to load from that thing, it only successfully read commercially published software.
The nostalgia is largely inaccurate. It was an era of immense frustration. And I never saw any C64 television ad, probably because we only had three television stations and no market to speak of for personal computers.
Incidentally, there's no way the kids in Stranger Things would have had those high end walkie talkies. They'd have had the crappy ones that only work to maybe 100 yards and emit static nonstop.
- jacquesm 8y agoSounds to me like you had a broken tape drive.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoI had a VIC-20, was about 12 and took to it like a duck to water. The tape drive worked flawlessly, though it did take ten minutes to find and load a program. One long-form magazine program I tried never worked right, even after finding and fixing some bugs myself. But we neighborhood kids had hours upon hours of laughs plugging our names and bad words into the sentence generator program's DATA lines.
- drewg123 8y agoImagine spending an hour transcribing hex codes, only to type the run command and have it crash This is basically how/why I learned how to program. I had a knock-off Apple II clone (Franklin Ace 1000), and I'd type in BASIC games. I was terrible at typing and often made mistakes. I learned the basics of debugging when trying to get those games working. In a lot of cases, just getting the game working was far more fun than actually playing it.
- GlennF 8y agoThe tape drive may have been too close to the TV. RF power from some old tube TVs could interfere with the tape drive. I used to move the tape drive as far as possible from the TV when loading/saving.