@bsrhoad proof that the c-64 you received in 1984 is what caused you to become a software developer. Also proud that you are successful in this field if you are in fact in the field. 🤔
Still remember getting my C64 on Christmas day 1983. I had asked for a VIC-20 because my school had one, and didn't even know the C64 existed yet. My dad spent a good portion of the night setting it all up after I went to bed. When I came down in the morning, it was running the Christmas demonstration software that most of the stores were using. Needless to say, I pretty much ignored my other presents for the next hour or so. But it turns out, even had I not gotten the C64, 1983 ended up being my favorite Christmas of all time. It's now the tail end of 2022, and I still have that C64, BTW. And it still gets regular use thanks to that SID chip. 😁 And I love the way Stewart pronounces Sega. "SEE-guh"
Still have all my C64 and all the tapes. No idea if they still work, but I remember going to Boots every Saturday with my dad to pick a new game from the £1.99 section, with the odd treat of him being nice and getting me one of the boxed(the £1.99 ones come in jewel cases, so you can tell at a glance which was budget and which was full priced) games from the £9.99 section. For Americans: Disk drives on a C64 were really rare in England due to the fact they cost more than the computer did here. It's really odd seeing so many disk games when I've only ever seen one C64 floppy drive despite knowing a few dozen guys who owned a C64.
@@fattomandeibu Yeah I think the disk drives in the UK were more expensive if I remember correctly, so most people stuck with the datasette. While the 1541 was cheaper here so we went with the disk drive and most software here in the US used that.
I still use my Commodore 64 all of the time. There are new games released monthly, and new and incredible hardware coming out all the time. Even the VIC-20 has new software and hardware coming out!
"Commodore 64, a little 8-bit machine that refuses to die", even today in 2024 I'm still playing new games with a C64 C, 1541 diskdrive and a 1702 monitor. What a great program The Computer Chronicles to watch, lot of great memories. Thanks to all behind this project to keep it alive.
19:00 Bill’s segment is the best. So chill and articulate, then he presses a key and drops the bangers. Had no idea the C64 could handle all that synth hooked up!
Even the SID by itself was impressive! And I wonder what these guys would think of some of the demos coming out of the demo-scene right now with SID and VIC-II sound and images that are extremely impressive. Robert Yannes, the designer of the SID chip, said that he originally wanted to have 32(!) voices, but couldn't make that happen for one reason or another. After he designed the SID chip he left Commodore and started his own company: Ensoniq, a synthesizer company. Can you imagine if he had been able to do the 32 voices like he wanted?
I can't stop watching this show. Especially the episodes from the 80s. Between the bad fashion, cheesy production values, and old tech I can't take my eyes away for long.
I love this show. Thanks to RU-vid for allowing it to be copyright free. It's great to watch tech from the time we we growing up! Fortunately I was an 80s kid and got to try a lot of this tech! Computing is in my blood!!
This show is *perfectly titled!!* Very near in future, we will look at this show as documentary on advancement of modern computers!! With SOOOO much going on with modern computer, why is there not "Computer Chronicles ^ 2.0(Squared)"??
You know it's really quite interesting the way it works, you put these pieces together like they were parts of a jigsaw puzzle, but you do it while they're falling so it creates this fast-paced gameplay experience! I've never seen anything like it before!
I still can't believe the Amazing things they had for the C64 in the 80's. We had gotten an Amiga 1000 around that time and started to neglect the C64 a bit so maybe that's why.....but wow!
When I had decided to buy an actual home computer during the 1980s I had around a dozen to choose from. After reading various articles in computing magazines I was clearly caught between the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64. So I chose the Atari 800, however a friend of mine bought a Commodore 64 and let me try it at his house. I felt like if I had the money I would have really enjoyed having both computer systems.
Wow that intro at Toys R Us brings me back. They had the worst quality control for their price tags on C64 games. I can remember swapping tags easily and getting an expensive game for cheap.
I loved the C64. I still have fond memories of Mail Order Monsters, Bard's Tale III, Ultima series, Saboteur, Maniac Mansion, Telegard, so many fun games. I like the looks I get from the kids when I tell them I had some games on cassette tapes, lol. The bugs and glitches were great too. Like in Ultima IV, if you are in the overworld, take out the overworld disc and put in the dungeon disk. Walk until it needs to load the next map chunk and you'll get a wildly F'd up terrain made of dungeon parts. You can usually find a way through, and if you find a treasure chest you can loot it forever - they never empty or disappear. Then in Bard's Tale III, if you go to the utils menu during the intro song and choose "transfer a character", the game doesn't give a hoot what disk you actually use when it says to insert your character disk to transfer a char from an prior BT game. So I popped in Ultimate Cookbook recipe disk, lol. The names of the available characters were gibberish and if you tried to take them out of the camp in your party, they'd be uncontrollable and go nuts and slaughter you. But the part that made it valuable is they were typically LOADED with gold and had all sorts of nice items on them you could snatch :)
As a 14yo teenager, I saved all my money from my paper route and other odd jobs for over a year in order to afford a C64, floppy drive and TV monitor (setup on a switch so I could watch TV too). I still remember the smell of that computer when I first pulled it out of the box...
This is a great episode of the show given it was right at the top of the curve for the C64. From then on the Amiga got much cheaper and other 16bits took the market. The Genesis / Megadrive in the following year really made a dent in 8 bits. GEOS esp for the 64 / 128 showed how much the system could be pushed. A classic.
How does a kid growing up with a name like Max Toy get his revenge on all his adolescent bullies? Become the president of the greatest 80's computer and rake in the cash! 😀
My dad bought the original Spectrum Holobyte version of Tetris for our Apple //e. I always thought that was the first platform (that's what I told my Gameboy friends at school who thought they discovered it first). Very interesting to learn nearly 40 years later that it was a C64 game.
Ah, such great memories hanging out with my friends playing games on the old C64. We'd connect to the local BBS to see what they had, at the mind-boggling speed of 300 baud! Yes, you too can download a 16k program in about an hour! Anyway, I think my original C64 is sitting in my mom's attic. As for GEOS, it is surprisingly full featured considering the resources it has at its disposal. Luckily it can make use of expanded memory, acceleration (like with the CMD SuperCPU)* and even hard drives! Unluckily, it came out right around the time other windowed OSes were coming out, such as for the Amiga, Atari and Macintosh. * Using GEOS with the CMD SuperCPU (which runs 20 times faster than the default CPU) and expanded memory is a RADICALLY improved experience.
I remember begging for a mouse, GEOS 2.0 , a modem and a printer after I saw GEOS 2.0 at a computer store in the summer of 1988. I had tried an entry level mac at school and wanted a similar OS for home. I was very pleased with the purchase of GEOS 2.0, still impresses me today. I used it for GeoPaint and GeoWrite mostly and the spell checking , fonts. Then with the 1670 1200 baud modem learned about the burgeoning BBS life, chatrooms, sysops, message boards, empire turned based games, downloads, ccgms color , some very artistic bbs surfing was had, and I made a few petscii drawings myself. I have 3 fully functioning C64s today, my kids will learn programming on them.
Oh that floppy drive that it had. It was slow as molasses in January. In a class by itself. I remember one game that had me switching from one floppy to another every 2 minutes, and one of those minutes was just waiting for the disk to be read.
The 1541 had an inherent bug that made it slow that was fixed in the 1571 drive. 8 bit guy covers this if you search for him on youtube. I never knew that before watching one of his videos about that.
@@fitfogey Given how much development work is still ongoing in the C64 community, I wonder if we crowdsource a patched version of the chip, though that would probably also require reverse engineering and modifying Commodore Basic 2.
@@abdulazizalserhani7625 Right I wasn't saying there weren't workarounds. My point was just that it had a bug that made it that slow. Again, 8 bit guy talks about all of the workarounds like fastload, etc.
With fast-loaders you could make the 1541 up to 10 times faster! But then it would still be like one third the speed of the Apple II's disk drive, though. :)
Hmm when seeing this kind of video, I feel like going back in time. On the other hand, would I really want that? I think I would go nuts. It's a shame I cannot go there and try for a month or so :D
As a comic relief, yesterday i did presentation on my employers monthly developer Teams meeting, about how to do C development for C64 nowadays :D cc65 is the compiler and i just showed how incredibly slow Basic is compared to compiled C-language.
@@NuntiusLegis Jep, i mean the basic basic V2 basic that is basically in use when you do not have compiler for it :) Is there basic compiler for C64 that uses basic dialect without line numbers? I'd like that.
I loved the C64, but to see a show promote GEOS in 1988, a good 2-3 years after the AMIGA OS, Windows 1.0 and the Macintosh were around, is kind of funny in retrospect.
If you notice, Gary’s right cheek is swollen and looks like makeup is covering up a bruise. He got into bar fights towards the end of his life, ultimately ending his life in one. I wonder if this is an example of that.
Presenter says like its unexpected new titles are still coming out for the machine... Fast forward 35 years and not much has changed, new games are still coming out except nowadays they are generally better!!!
Was Max Toy any good for Commodore? Trying to read up on him but not much info out there on what things he actually did for Commodore, whether good or bad. Appears he was the last in the revolving door until the infamous Medhi Ali arrived to take the throne. Toy's predecessor was Thomas Rattigan, who it seems may have had some good success but was terminated. And before that was Marshall Smith, who is well known to have fully authorized the total destruction of the LCD machine, which if it had moved forward we know in hindsight it would've been a smashing success. But again, can't really find much on Toy.
First off, what a name for a president of a "totally not just a game machine" computer company: Max Toy xD Am I the only one who wants to see a collab between Bill Morrow and LookMumNoComputer on a muxed-SID 64/128? And yes, the C64 was my second computer, after a CoCo, both in the early 90s. Being a poor kid then was awesome for learning programming. Got a computer with no storage devices, no software, and an old spare tv? cool. guess you are learning BASIC, and maybe a few cool PEEK/POKE locations... Then there's the warnings to everyone NOT TO TURN THAT COMPUTER OFF xD ah, good times
2:40 I remember wondering how they pulled off GEOS in the 64K of RAM available once you got a handle on the 6510's bank-switching, as well as whether or not they offered the "SDK" to create one's own GEOS apps.
Reminiscing about watching this show triggers two reactions: 1. Computers really were lame and pitiful back in the day. 2.(and this one wins out) It was the bestest, coolest computer gear at the time, and I WANTED IT ALLL!!!!!
Stewart Cheifet: "Is the C64 really a game machine and not a real computer?" Max Toy: "Well it would be easy to say that, but it is much more than just a toy." Stewart Cheifet: "Counterpoint: your last name is literally Toy".
Keep in mind a cheap encyclopedia print set was like $1000 back then. A good set such as Britannica was several thousand dollars. Very few regular people owned a set for their home, they were mostly just sold to schools and libraries. So while $1100 sounded like a lot, it was just a matter of time (like in 10 years) before technology caught up and put an end to these print text dynasties. So quite a historical thing here.
It's important to remember that this was new technology at the time. And manufacturers had to struggle with supporting different interfaces like SCSI. The irony is that optical media from this era still works fine. It is archival quality, something that shows how different the times were.
2:38 - "The award for popularity must go to the Commodore 64, a little 8-bit machine that refuses to die." "DIE!" C64: "I REFUSE!" PLA chip: "Well, 'refuse' is such a strong word..."
This is why I get annoyed when people say they are too old to learn computers. These old cats were the ones who helped pioneer computing. My programming instructors decades ago were in their 60s. Just be honest. If you're scared, or not interested, that is fine. Just be honest.
that zx spectrum sucked. especially with that crummy expansion unit on the back. I remember spending hours programming the stupid thing from a book and just moving the unit slightly caused it to reset or crash and lose everything. not to mention the crappy keyboard on the thing.
COMMODORE 64 I HACKED IT! YES! I hooked up a switch to the 6502 halt command to copy cartridges! I had fun with that computer. Copy C000 and up to a tape!