Shows what is possible in a resource constrained device.
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I was and always will be a C64 kid. What an era though.
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I guess that in many ways we are experiencing a similar era now with Arduino, 3D printers etc.
I loved the C64 , but I don’t remember many people coding on it at home though. With the ZX81 you pretty much had to as there was not much industry to sell ready made software.
I had an Amiga later on and used that to do graphics and music etc, but I can’t remember coding on it ever.
Radio Shack had programming lessons on a TRS-80. I took some classes in school as well and we used external audio cassettes to load & save our programs - kinda like a modem with a tape instead of the phone line.
Later on we got the versions with floppies - didn’t have games like this though.
I played a joke on my teacher once - I told her my computer display was broken:
10 cls
20 goto 10
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@ mhectorgato - I had a Dragon 32 which was very similar to the TRS 80.
ZX Spectrum for me, but did plenty of C64 work even learned 6502 assembly. To this day I still tinker with Z80 assembly.
I recall them being referred to as TRASH-80
My first computer was a Commodore VIC20 with it’s 3.5K of RAM and a sticker on the box saying “upgradable to a massive 16K”
After this it was a BBC Micro and that was a great machine as I could now use the IO port to control stuff. Not quite as small as the NETMF offerings but it was a good learning exercise and all done in machine code in those days. Probably the last time I have ever done machine code from the complete application.
After this I bought into the Acorn Archimedes which was the forerunner to the ARM processor that’s now almost universal. Even at the then 4MHz it was a fast machine compared to the machines of the time. Even now I still work with ARM cores but now they are 250 times the frequency.
@ Dave McLaughlin - Your post reminded me, we had a BBC micro at school, it even had one of those acoustic coupled modems… We where going to start WWIII.
Sadly I did not do much with it, so All I remember is the VDU command.
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@ Dave McLaughlin - [quote]My first computer was a Commodore VIC20 with it’s 3.5K of RAM and a sticker on the box saying “upgradable to a massive 16K”[/quote]
:dance: me too; bought the modem cartridge so I could use it a terminal into university network (if I recall correctly, top speed was a screaming 300 baud). Later got the added memory, used casette tapes for backup…
But the best is: I still have mine and it still works!!
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:dance: That’s my first machine, starting in June 1977. SC/MP Processor with 1 MHz, 4 KByte Ram (I think) , programmable only in machine code. Monitor: Some 7-Segment diplays.
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I learned on a Commodore Pet 2001 at school and eventually got an Apple II+ at home. If you wanted a video game, you would find a magazine with the code, type it in, fix typos, save to cassette, and play.
I also remember doing yard work to save up for an assembler. That made coding so much easier! No more inserting NOP blocks (so you could make minor changes without recomputing all the branch distances by hand).