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Now, for something completely different. Reflections on the Commodore 64

Written by Translator on July 20, 2008 – 8:45 pm -

Crossposted at http://Dailykos.com

A comment the other day jogged my mind to remember my Commodore 64 computer. How many of you used one years ago? To jog your mind, it had 64k memory, hence the name. No graphic interface, no mouse, just a keyboard.

I wish that I had not discarded it, along with the printer and the 1451 (as I recall) single sided floppy (5.25″) disk drive. It would have been better to keep those items in a box for posterity, but what can I say?

The C-64 was probably the first computer that was really available for the masses. It was easy to use (for the time), had a huge 64 kilobyte memory, and understood BASIC, so you could program it yourself. There were even some third party programs that actually worked well.

The C-64 was an integrated keyboard, processor, and associated memory and motherboard components, and would let you plug it into a TV to use as a monitor. You could add the single sided floppy disk drive, which was really essential in those days before flash memory or hard drives. One of my professors called the 5.25″ disk the “clipboard of the ’80s”. That is pretty apt. Does anyone out there have any 5.25″ floppies left?

I bit the bullet and bought one on a graduate student’s meagre stipend because my chemistry department used Commodore PETs for all of their office and laboratory needs, and doctoral candidates were allowed to use the main office and the NEC Spinwriter to print their dissertations.

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on a Commodore 64, using Steve Punter’s WordPro 3. WordPro took up half of the memory, so only a couple of pages could be written before the save to floppy had to be done. That required for me to keep a ledger of what the filenames of all files, because there was a “global link” command that had to have all of the names and addresses perfect, and the eight character limit.

I got them out of sync once, and my friend Bruce, a computer geek of the day, assisted me in recovering them. Folks, get a CD or DVD and back up your critical work. It was not as easy with single sided floppies and no graphic interface. Bruce could actually write and read machine code, so he was a great help.

Anyway, I finally got it done and ran into formatting problems. Our department insisted on strict compliance with American Chemical Society protocols for references, and I had hundreds. The ACS used a lot of semicolons in their protocol. Unfortunately, WordPro did not have a semicolon built into it, just colons, question marks, commas, periods, and exclamation marks.

One thing that WordPro would allow was a backspace, so I constructed a semicolon from a comma, and backspace, and then a superscript period, with a space following to get everything back on track. It had to be typed in by hand every time, and some references has three or four each. Lots of keystrokes to perform, and now we just hit the semicolon key and Word, or WordPerfect, or even Notepad knows what you mean.

At least the graphics were easy. You just left a space and drew them in by hand using a template and Rapidograph pens (I still have my set, given to me by Mrs. Translator as a birthday present, at a cost of $32, a princely sum then), then put the paper back in the Spinwriter to put the bolded, underscored numerical labels on them.

Looking back, that technology seems so crude as not even to be significant, but it was. Think of the compromises that have to be made with only 64K total memory. Want a picture? Better use four or eight bit ones, and small ones at that. So what if horizontal lines look like stairs? Want words? Use half of your memory to run the program, and the other half to buffer the actual words and attributes (yes, the attibutes had to be keyed in as a series, and closes. Imagine this Kos site where, for example, bold, has to be typed in with opening and closing attribute characters, rather than just highlighting and clicking. Remember, a mouse at the time was a household pest.

One thing worth noting is that the brain center of the Commodore 64 was the Zilog 80 (”Z-80″) microprocessor, one of the most advanced in its day. It is too bad that it never got modernized, because it worked really well with very small memory caches to tell it what to do. It is interesting that the developer of the Z-80 actually worked for Intel whilst they were developing the “8080″ chip, that made the IBM PC possible.

Do not despair, though, because the Z-80 is alive and well in many medical instruments, perhaps your car, and in lots of other digital devices that require efficiency, accuracy, and not gigaflops of processing. Sort of like the turtle and the hare, it was a reliable turtle. I will stick around for a bit for comments and questions, but know that I am not a techie, so will probably be able to answer questions about coding, etc. Warmest regards, Doc.

Tags: 5.25 inch floppy, Commodore 64, Computers, Teaching, Z-80, Zilog 80
Posted in Diaries |