On the CNET Daily News Podcast, they went old school today discussing the Commodore 64 and the Apple IIe.
This podcast brought back a lot of memories for me because we had an Apple IIe in our house and it was fun to play with a variety of programs that Apple had out at the time. Appleworks were key, but it was fun to play our with basic and get the computer to do fun things.
But what was the best was going to some of my friends houses and the time and playing games on the Commodore 64. We would load up the cassette tape and wait 15 to 30 minutes for a game to load and then we would go at it for hours.
Recently, the Commodore 64 celebrated its 25th Anniversary. It is hard to believe that the Commodore came out that long ago. But it would have been the right time for me to be 13 years old. I remember how dedicated we were to get programs.
We would get magazines and the code for the programs would be in there. Several pages long. You would code a line and get a confirmation code. If the code matched the code on the screen, then you coded the screen correctly. I can’t even remember the magazine names now.
It is a lot different today than it was back then. I mean, the Commodore 64 had a screen resolution 360 x 268 and 64 KB of RAM.
The programs around today wouldn’t even be able to run on this system. But it did the job and launched the career or many programmers and computer geeks. It helped start the revolution amongst a wider audience than previous computers did. It was just affordable.
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