[vicshannon]

I still have an Apple II+ with two floppy drives.. woohoo!

[pkcable]

The C64 used cassettes, I know I had one! I also had an Apple IIc, which had a 5.25 floppy. I was a computer guy, from the early 80ies!!!!! Probably before some of you were born. Not all of you though.

[kill_9]

YUP! they had a 5.25" disk drive and also 'loaded' programs through standard reel to reel tape recorders (remember THAT!)

I too bought mine at ToysRUs. We even had one at work hooked up to make labels.

Believe it or not, you can now purchase an upgraded version
Commodore USA

Damn you! Now I will have to buy a Commodore VIC-20 (VIC-Slim) after visiting the provided website. Oh, my venerable Commodore VIC-20 (original) is safely stored in its original packaging.

[lophreaque]

Only played around with the C64.
My computer of those days was the Rockwell AIM65, a 6502 development system (same processor as the C64) with 4k of DRAM, a 20 character LED display and a keyboard. Tape interface for "mass" storage, of course.
A UART and bus access on the edge of the pcb and I was in business.
Ah yes, the good old days. No OS at all, only an assembler and an optional Basic interpreter, which I think I owned but never used.

[lophreaque]

I think you mean cassette tape recorders, because I'm fairly certain reel-to-reels were never standard equipment with C64s, at least in North America.

Any tape medium would work. Would be ironic to use a digital recorder. Wonder what mp3 encoding would do to the data...

[PineappleUnderTheSea]

I opted for the Coleco Adam, simply because I had the ColecoVision that would attach to it. 80K of power, much more than the paltry 64K on the Commodore. It came with 2 high-speed tape drives and a daisy-wheel printer.

It wasn't very good, though. In '86, I got the Amiga 500. That thing rocked: stereo output, multitasking, tons of games!

[pkcable]

I'm surprised that they don't sell Amigas given how popular they were. Years after they were discontinued, people continued to use and support them. They very much had a cult following!

[shootsscores]

All this retro talk reminds me of a conversation with a friend of mine sometime in the early or mid 80s. He was an IT guy who was working on a contract to overhaul data handling at a very big hospital. He said that they were installing two massive hard drives with a capacity of 1 gig EACH!

[Smiley88]

I'm surprised that they don't sell Amigas given how popular they were. Years after they were discontinued, people continued to use and support them. They very much had a cult following!

there were several outfits who tried to revive the Amiga and failed. You can get the Amiga emulator for most OS right now.

I still have 3 Amigas in my garage. 1000, 2000 and the PPC version

[mapsonburt]

Any tape medium would work. Would be ironic to use a digital recorder. Wonder what mp3 encoding would do to the data...

MP3 encoding wouldn't have any trouble at all. The data stored on cassette was really only using a few tones anyway (not like the hundreds and thousands in a typical sound) but I suspect you know this...

I had a Commodore PET computer as my first one... it had 4K, a HUGE case that flipped up and had a metal arm that would hold it open (like a Ferrari at the time, a built in 8" green 40x25 (text) monitor and a built in cassette recorder. You turned it on and would get a flashing command prompt then you had to type "Load xyz" and put in the appropriate cassette to run the program.

The only difference between the 4K and the 16K was that the 4K had 8 little 1/2" holes drilled in the mother board where the RAM chips would go. I got some RAM chip sockets and wired them into the motherboard with my trusty soldering iron... and presto, a 16K one! The thing cost me about $1100 when I first bought it.

I spent days entering programs from BYTE into the the thing or porting programs from other platforms for the machine. It had an IEEE-488 port on the back which was much better than the serial or even parallel ports of later machines as you could daisy chain devices to it. Built many different interfaces for it over the years I had it.

Adventure was definitely my favorite game on it though... PLUGH! Ah... 6502 assembler. I remember you well!

[axe50]

Ahh the good old c64.

I don't know why I still remember this, but here's my c64 nostalgia

poke 53280,0
sys647358
load "$",8


:O)

[CdaS]

What did the C64 cost?

[kwelamnp]

I was given Steve Jobs book for Christmas and it has brought back many memories.

Only old guys need read further :

My first computer (if you could call it that) was a Sinclair. But I took it back and swapped for an Apple ][ clone. The Apple I wasn't really a computer. Just some parts to allow you to build your own. It was amazing that the Apple ][ clones turned up so soon after the real thing appeared. They wouldn't run, because they were missing the eprom that contained the firmware. But those were available.... Later we had an Apple ][e too. Those boxes had all kind of unthought of add-ons in the expansion slots (that Jobs didn't want!). I think we had over 1MB of additional RAM on an 80 column video card. Programs could finally load into memory instead of run off floppy disks. We also had a cpm card that expanded business sotware options We ran our business accounting on the ][e for many years.

Re those 8" floppies. For engineering, we had a TRS Model 16 that had two such drives. We ran Fortran programs on that, that we previously had to pay for mainframe time to run.

BTW, us Apple owners used to be a bit snobbish and looked down on the likes of Amiga and Commodore and others I have forgotten! Even on IBM for that matter who's initial efforts were not too exciting.

[lynxs_claw]

Favorite games were jumpman, loderunner and castle wolfenstein (2D not 3D).. "Achtung" .. Awesome.. Those were the days

[uncaringbear]

My 8 bit childhood was spent with the TRS-80 Colour Computer. It started of with 4K of memory which I eventually upgraded to a whopping 64K. Later in university, I went the way of the Amiga. Things were simpler back then, but I miss that sense of excitement and discovery when everything was still new.

[pkcable]

What did the C64 cost?

around 500-600 dollars