Thursday, May 06, 2004

Me And My 64 It was either 1982 or 1983 when I was given a Commodore 64.  It may not look like much, but looking back, that was one of those big turning points in my life.  One of those points where nothing afterwards is ever the same again.  The Commodore 64 was my first computer, and I just about wore that thing out.  The "64" refers to how many kilobytes of RAM it had.  At the time, 64kb was quite a lot, though after loading its operating system, you only had about 38kb free to work with.  That's not even enough to hold a decent photograph today, or any of the tests I've given this year. But the folks who programmed for the Commodore 64 sure knew what to do with that extremely limited space.  They came up with some neat games, though to those whose idea of an old game is anything made for Windows 95, the games for the C64 must look prehistoric.  Trust me, though, at the time they were fantastic.  I would play games like Jumpman Junior for hours with a level of enjoyment I rarely feel today. Even more fun, in a strange and sadistic kind of way, was typing in programs for the Commodore 64.  Mind you, when I had that machine, I didn't have a floppy disk or a CD-R to save my work to.  No hard drive, either.  Nope.  Best I had was a tape drive that used cassettes to save and load data.  So you might spend hours typing in the code for some game and then, assuming it worked, save it onto a cassette.  But then often times the code wouldn't work, so you'd spend hours going back through it to try and figure out what you did wrong.  Sounds mind-numbing in retrospect, but at the time it was almost magical to type in a bunch of numbers and symbols and have them add up to a game you could actually play. Which brings me to "Hey Hey 16k," a flash movie that brings back a whole bag load of memories of times when graphics were simple yet the games seemed to be much more fun.  Oh, and besides the games, you could also use that C64 for home finance, but who'd do something stupid like that?  The Commodore 64 was all about games made by such great companies as Epyx and Brøderbund, where your imagination was just as important as your quick fingers. Anyway, enough of this memory lane business.  Watch Hey Hey 16k a few times and try your best to get that song out of your head. Related links: MobyGames:  Check out their games browser for the C64 Commodore 64: Machine of Destiny 5:52:20 PM     |

© Copyright 2005 Alex L. Mauldin.