On Friday, April 08, 2011 07:30:26 Mark Wallace wrote: > Anyone under age 30 is too young to remember the 64. It only had about 20k > in free memory and had to be booted up in comand line.
Yeah, the BASIC interpreter took up a lot of the space, but it could be unloaded and replaced by a boot loader program. > There was a > program named Geos that was able to get it to run your word processor, > address book etc, by making up a floppy work disk (5 1/4 inch variety) > first and then running the routines from the disk. Mine took about four > minutes to load up a primitive word processor, but forget about desk top > publishing, even one picture would out run it's memory. Loading a big program from tape took over an hour. You could have a long lunch and still have to wait some more. And, of course, that was assuming the load from tape was successful. > I found mine in the basement late last year and donated it to Goodwill. > There is already one in the Smithstonian. You could use a regular TV set > as a monitor and I had an electric typewriter that it could print through. > Don't even ask about graphics. I think that AOL actually got it's start > creating online access for commodore, but there were only about 1100 web > sites on planet earth. > > The founders of Google and Facebook were in diapers. > > It cost me $600 at Target. I remember buying mine for about $110 from Sears Robuck. > That was the cheapest computer out there. Prior to the C64 I had purchased a TI 99/4A for $50. Originally they started at $500 but eventually TI decided to dump the lot at a big discount. The C64 was better, though. > Computers had a lot of selling expense because the salesman had to show the > average guy what they could be used for. > > The nice thing about the good old days is that they are long gone. > > Mark -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium May 4 - Inkscape Jun 1 - Zimbra Jul 6 - Jul 2011
