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When I was around 12 years old, a group of 3 friends decided we wanted to create computer games on the 64 (and later 128). We started to learn about sprites and how to do rudimentary animations. Nearly every day after school we'd share some new thing we had learned the night before. We'd pool our knowledge. It was such an incredible time. Do you know what phrase I NEVER heard during those days? "What, you didn't know that?" I loved that collaborative feeling. If my friend was having a hard time understanding something, I just figured out a different way to explain it. It's such a far cry from the nonsense I see in the various software dev communities today. Perhaps it's because none of us felt like there was a competition between us.
This is exactly it one thousand times over. The C64 was a gateway drug and everybody that was 'into it' really was a kindred spirit.
C64 BASIC has ingrained 1 evil in me. "goto" Atleast once a month I'll be working on some script and I'm stuck but a little voice in the back of my head will say: "a goto would fix this part you are stuck on!" And damn if that doesn't reverberate into the past.
I went the hardware route. I bought additional hardware for my C64. First the 1541 (5.25" floppy drive), then the 1581 (3.5" floppy drive), then a 300/1200 baud modem, then a 2400baud modem.
I've been hardware hooked ever since. I'm now a sysadmin working with *nix servers.
I tried programming. I really did. I meticulously copied one of the sample programs out of the back of the C64 manual. It never worked.
You could also theoretically understand everything (with enough time and patience). Down at least to what all the chips in the C64 did, if not even the transistors inside them. That's what I miss, the feeling I was in control of my computer. Now the complexity is so high I feel like I can barely scratch the surface.
> Do you know what phrase I NEVER heard during those days? "What, you didn't know that?" I loved that collaborative feeling.
There was also far fewer variations of things to confound that info sharing. You had a c64, or 128, or Atari 800? You had the same everything as everyone else - same manual, same BASIC, same registers, same books available. You didn't have to worry about what version of something you had, or whether something got upgraded, or what video card you had, etc.
When there was a disagreement about something, it generally wasn't hard to at least point to a common base to start from.
It really was an amazing time. Seeing that bootup screen with the blue on blue still turns on that feeling of, "Exciting discovery awaits".... Prior to accidentally taking "Computer Science" in school (it was that or drafting), I had no idea what it was about. It was like trying heroin for the first time. Commodore Pets at school and a year later, I worked my ass off all summer the save up to buy a C-64 when it first came out. Parents chipped in for the tape recorder.
I had that experience. We were an apple2 middle school and a bunch of us would stay after and work in the computer lab. I wrote a little game in low res graphics. We'd trade tips. Lamentably the teachers weren't much help. We'd ask the music teacher who would be in there sometimes as he seemed to have some good knowledge ("music and the apple 2 wasn't easy.. you could "click the speaker" and by doing so rapidly you could get tones..)
We had access to "Nibble" magazine which had a lot of printed code. I got my "sound" routines from that. Between that and "Beagle Bros." programs. It was fun. We never figured out machine code...We got the basics, but it was just too much.
Though we just had each other as our lab wasn't internet enabled (as was the style in the early 80s)
Another thing was not having the perspective of what was possible or not, no such thing of "you have to use X to do Y".
Well said. Perhaps it was also because you and your friends had the humility to realize that it was you who didn't understand something a few days earlier. Helping others to learn and working with a group where learning is allowed and nurtured is incredibly important.
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. ... There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21627-the-best-thing-for-be...
> Do you know what phrase I NEVER heard during those days? "What, you didn't know that?" I loved that collaborative feeling.
If someone says "What, you didn't know that?" about something they only learned yesterday, they're being a jerk. Because this was all new to all of you, it became harder to feel like saying that.
Where there times when people who discovered sharing an interest were more keen to mine into each others insights or differences, than of late? Where people generally keener to increase and test and propagate their outlooks in person. Perhaps just my own foibles or relative age, but in later years it seems more contentious to conversationally dig into and challenge others takes on their subjects of interest. Its a though as individuals we have no call to query an others interest, no more than to pleasantly listen and affirm them. Perhaps with interests now developed more through information technology, where contrasting perspectives are already collected and competitively marked, it has become harder to be intellectually generous and curious in person.
Learned coding on a c64 as a 6y old.
it broke when it was 14.
parents were happy that I do not waste so much time anymore on the computer. so no computers for me any more. I think they never understood what I was actually doing. Coded some nice games and also a "use your joystick as a music instrument".
also party and girls became much more interesting at that point in my life.
with 19 I needed a job - as I became a father myself.
Applied for a dot come job. Started coding again. Found out that not much has changed. Code was still code and with enough trial and error, lots of reading and thinking about a problem you could figure everything out.
So thx C64, you thought me a lot.
Screen does not start at 0 so your poke won't place anyhing on screen (actually, address 0 is the PORT register on the 6510 iirc).
POKE X CHR$(209) is not valid syntax, POKE takes a memory address (in decimal) a COMMA and the value (0-FF) in decimal.
Also.. CHR$ converts an ascii value to a character.. you don't want that here..
Also.. the character color has not been set under the ball, so it won't show up on most of the screen-area..
Screen memory starts at 1024, color memory at 55296 so to show your ball, you'll do
POKE 1024,209 POKE 55296,1
Also, you should use 81 and not 209, since the machine is in uppercase mode, and 209 is the inverted circle in that mode.
Why spend the time to write an article with examples that do not actually work?
It’s kind of interesting to remember that those 8-bit computers essentially booted up in a BASIC REPL. Starting an input line with an number was adding to your code, otherwise, whatever you typed would be executed immediately. I remember being confused about how Pascal worked because how did you input a program without line numbers? The whole concept of a programming editor was alien to me.
The early PCs and BASIC provided such a simple and effective computing environment where any newbie could start reading the online manuals (known today as built-in manuals) that came with BASIC interpreter and start writing some simple code immediately into the integrated editor that also came with BASIC!
I think the loss of a simple, integrated and interactive programming environment like BASIC has been a tragedy. Is there anything like BASIC today that any child, secretary, or grandmother can pick up and learn with as little hassle as possible?
Thrilling. I am old but not normally prone to nostalgia. This site gets across the instant gratification one felt with the C64. I started with a Vic20 and soon chafed at the 3.2K (or so) RAM limitation. Obtaining the C64 was a quantum shift. As others have pointed out, the instructional materials were abundant and often good. Tomas Petricek's lovely site is also a model of interactive instruction.
When he explains
PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
When I wrote my first compiler in the 80s I made sure you could run a program that simple. I am somewhat surprised that only Python and arguably Javascript give you that kind of immediacy. With all the advances in languages it constantly surprises me that there's no universally available language that lets you start out so quickly.
Daniel Schiffman just started a video series about coding in Apple ][ BASIC on a vintage machine:
Just love the minimalism and simplicity of BASIC.
I tried to program in Scratch and Scratch Junior with my 7 years old and it's just overwhelming for me as an adult software developer not to mention a child. Click here, move here, this container and that, not to mentions the browser/mouse issues.
I don't understand why it's so popular, maybe it's because that's the only application they teach kids in schools?
I'm thinking about just booting up my old 486 PC and show MS Basic.
One thing I recall from learning C64 BASIC when I was in 6th grade was that, back then, any sort of documentation was difficult to get your hands on. I was given one BASIC programming book as a birthday gift, and it was made clear to me that was all I was gonna get. Technical books were expensive back then, at least for my family they were.
This is beautifully done. I'll see if I can coax my kids into trying it.
However, this gives a lot of credit to Commodore for something that was completely standard at the time on all 8-bit computers (and then some). The real credit belongs to Dartmouth BASIC [1].
Especially when considering the original context (very very limited machines), the genius of the BASIC model (not so much the language) is something to appreciate.
Interestingly, John G. Kemeny, one of the two behind it, used to work for Richard Feynman and is one of the "martians" [2]
Good times. I owned an Amstrad CPC 464 - a Z80-based competitor to the C-64.
It had Locomotive Basic which was quite a bit more advanced than C-64 BASIC.
It had instructions like AFTER delay, timer GOSUB line or EVERY time, timer, GOSUB line for example.
Giving you a sense of multi-threading all the way back in 1984!
I spent quite a bit of time translating C-64 BASIC code into Locomotive.
Learning on an 8-bit computer, diving into Z80 assembly and understanding how the thing works on a very low level is a useful skill to have.
Memories of being 10 and writing a C64 program to generate D&D character stats and generally dumb stuff like handling dice roles and random encounters. Felt like magic.
Growing up with one of these, I really thought that a career in computer programming was going to be more or less like getting stuff to work on a C64. Shame it isn't.
Couldn‘t agree more with the author and in fact, I started to code on the C64 with my son around three years ago, for exactly that reason.
There are educational coding environments, but you will never understand the underlying computer model, just by playing with them.
And no setup whatsoever. Python was supposed to be that simple, but we’re past that, obviously.
I think nowadays the equivalent is to buy an inexpensive handheld PyGame console and write one's own games using Python. It at least teaches a more useful language and shields the internals from the user. As a bonus users get a hang of general game programming process by using a library.
I'm thinking about buying one for my best friend's son and teach him PyGame programming.
For myself I prefer something more bare metal, such as asm or C game programming. I think there is probably a NON-CARTRIDGE handheld somewhere to quench my thirst but need to find it.
This blue screen brings so much nostalgia. It was such a limited computer, but as a kid, it felt like it has unlimited potential with many secrets yet to be discovered.
I just picked up my first C64 last weekend at the midwest vintage computer festival. It needs a little work because it's one of the revisions with the weak video output, but otherwise it's in great condition.
I can't wait to start playing around. Seems like a great sandbox to finally get comfortable with assembly. I think I'll try diagnosing the issue this weekend if I can muster up the energy.
This makes me sad on a regular base. The C64 was my first computer when I was like 16ish. I spend nights and weeks learning programming with Basic and did some really cool things like a text editor (of course besides playing games like Gianna Sisters or North and South).
But I was young and didn't see how important that was for my development. So I never took care of archiving or even backups, ultimatily I just got rid of the discs while moving or cleaning up. I don't even remember. No this old "Brotkasten" is catching dust in the drawer.
Nowadays I really miss my early work and take a lot more care when it comes to backups and archiving my work.
//EDIT No wait, my first computer was some kind of weird robotron my father brought home some day. This thing really fascinated me, I wasn't able to do much on it, because there was no documentation and of course I had no internet. But I really loved the green letters on the black screen.
Me too. Learned programming on c64.
Wrote a D&D character generator. Worked pretty good.
Messed with sound a bunch. Apocalyptic chords.
Hacked up freeware games.
Made lots of generative art
Poked random stuff till the machine crashed prettily
I never did any C64 programming when I was a kid. Hearing the Commander X16 might be ready for manufacturing soon, and it being C64 BASIC compatible (except POKEs), I decided to go through some old guides for the C64 but used the X16 emulator to do them. My absolute favorite was a course originally on VHS "Commodore 64 Introduction to Programming" I found on YouTube, there's 2 levels[0][1].
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3bDa5z_B1M [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJDYoVgrtOs
Love the points made in this article and the way it was presented with an inline emulator.
If it weren't for "War Games" and the vic-20 (and later the c64), I would've ended up on a very different path.
People today really underestimate BASIC. If you look at computer magazines from the 1970's, it was massive.
If you put out a new computer in the mid-70's, you had to include two things: an assembler, and BASIC.
Floppy disk? Optional. 16K of RAM? Optional. If you didn't have BASIC, your new machine was doomed.
Small, mid- and even some larger-sized businesses ran in BASIC. If you didn't need a mainframe, your business was running on assembler or BASIC.
I can understand why Microsoft made so much money back then, porting BASIC to every platform from calculators to minis.
I wrote almost exactly this on C64 in the early 80's. The problem was that you couldn't see the ball moving very well because the pokes happened so rapidly compared to the rest of the code that it was a quick blink of the ball. It didn't look as clean and tidy as it does in this emulator. Also, my 12 year old brain wasn't smart enough to think of double buffering, or to draw the new position before erasing the old.
This is how I first learned programming, but on the C128. It came with wonderful manuals which included a Commodore BASIC manual. I also was subscribed to Commodore magazine which had pages of PEEKS/POKES I'd blindly type in. Didn't learn a single thing from that, but the toy games they ran were cool. :)
Seeing PEEK and POKE two pages into the article made me laugh. I always treated those like black magic, mysterious lines that I got out of a magazine that did cool stuff.
I loved the Simons Basic cartridge, that gave me a lot of the PEEK/POKE power wrapped up in new Basic keywords. Sprites were so cool!
I remember trying to write something ambitious on a Commodore 64. When faced with BASIC I tried to come up with some way of organizing my design. I really tried. But there was so little there I couldn't get traction and gave up.
Thank god for our tools and abstractions today.
This C64 simulator is proof that there is a legitimate need for the Caps Lock key.
We might have lost the ability to solve problems and create solutions with approachable yet powerful programming environments. But think about all the abstractions, frameworks, platforms, paradigms, and design patterns we now get to learn!
Here's a lost way of programming: I heard of someone who typed control characters on the C64 screen that matched 6510 assembly and then ran them from out of the video buffer.
In C64 Basic, "$" declares that a variable is a string, like this:
``` A$ = "Hello World ```
So you say this as "A-string equals Hello World"
I still pronounce "$" as string however many years later
I agree with the sentiment, at least partially. Using a high-level library in JS to display a complex graph is nice when you build a production system, but for learning the direct, almost tangible control is so important. It enables our intellect to build high-level concepts on low-level ones, and allows us to slowly understand how hidden functionality complicates high-level design before actually having to deal with it.
The only thing I knew and needed as a kid was...
LOAD “$”,8,1
list
run
Commondore was good old times :)
PEEK and POKE, my old friends.
This is exactly how I learned to program. My brothers only liked playing the games, but I preferred making my own (generally based on source code listings in the back of BYTE magazine).
IIRC, Pirates on the C64 is written mostly in BASIC, with a few machine language routines squeezed in for performance.
My first programming or rather "programming" cause I mosty used it to save text on cassettes. Good times.
You may know SYS 64738, but who knew SYS 42222?
Works for me