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- Hacker News
- I had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.by wateralien
- Back when writing 500 lines of code by simply typing it line by line from the "handover" booklet the C64 shipped with. Then running it and it magically made a frog-game appear where you hit "space" and the tongue of the frog needs to catch a fly. Then forgot to save on the 5,25'' disk and everything was gone. Good times :)by donmb
- Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
Long, strange trip.
by georgemcbay - Greetings, fellow old people.by wateralien
- To whom it may concern, I believe the year was 1987 or 1988. (I was around 9ish, I think.) My brothers and I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 amidst trash beside a country road. In the box, even the manual was in good shape.
This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written.
The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive.
I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.)
This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
by neogodless - Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
by mkovach - I happened to be the oldest teen in a new subdivision, so I earned a bunch of babysitting money from parents who no longer had to drive 20 minutes to pick up and drop off a sitter for date night.
So I was able to pre-order the C64 before it was released, which earned me a "free" tape drive to actually store programs--the disk drive had to wait a bit. But my serial number was something in the 700s.
I programed it, even if I never became a programmer. But having early and strong intuitions about computers paid off for years to come, and set me up enjoy being an "early adoptor" of things to come, rough edges and all.
by msabalau - I owe my entire identity to this little machine. First laid my eyes on it in 1983, then unexpectedly got it from my uncle in 1984. It immediately opened my eyes to this new world of computer technology and sucked me right in.
Between games and writing first code in Basic, something magical was happening. Over the years it defined how I think, and ultimately who I am. Thank you C64 and thanks to everyone who worked on it
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