Thread: Commodore VIC-20 Vintage Computer

there's a trip down memory lane!

Put it on Gumtree. There is an undercurrent of nerds who collect this stuff.

They are nutters, but nice.

Sold

Wow!

As kids we would get home from school, put the correct tape in, start a program load, press play on the tape and go and have afternoon tea. Later we would then go and play Shadowfax, Aztech Warrior or ... that helicopter game where you would fly through caves. That is of course if there wasn't a jitter on the cassette tape during load, necessitating starting the whole process again (but without a second helping of afternoon tea).

Amazing technology for the day, but my, we've come far.

Just having the second counter on the tape player, so you knew how far to forward the tape to got to the specific program you wanted to load.

What I find most fascinating - thinking back on it now - is how the designers of these really early systems leveraged existing technology to support their bits of kit. In this case, it's the use of commercially available cassette technology to act as a storage medium.

The C64 used the same trick, though I ended up buying the 5.25" floppy drive after a while for mine.

Pretty clever "out of the box" thinking if you ask me

Those were the days. I learned BASIC and did all of my physical chemistry lab projects on it.

Yes, the memories of scrupulously typing in page after page of basic, saving it, and then finding it didn't save properly when you tried to run it!

The kids these days will never know that kind of joy! ;-)

I had a friend who had a Vic20. I was 12 at the time (1982!) and man o man was I envious. Another friend had a Atari 2600. Man..... did I feel like a peasant!

What a memory. Mum bought us a Haminex (TVG 070C) games console, the ones with the cartridges. My brother and I would go down to the local shops and there we could RENT a games cartridge. I don't remember what it cost, but I do recall it being evil.

The "graphics" were pretty good.... we thought. Pong sort of things... a "tennis" game, some crappy motorcycle thing with lousy 8 bit graphics.


Give you and idea of the change, Unreal Engine 5 was preview released last week.... talk about SERIOUS WOW FACTOR.... seriously, take a while to actually watch this YouTube clip, full screen, in 4K resolution (maximise the option on the bottom right). It will make you question the nature of our reality.




UE5.jpg ue5 2.jpg

Despite the intervening 40 years Silicon Valley has yet to produce a robust data appliance. Show me a PC that has been around as long as your refrigerator.

Originally Posted by rob streeper

Despite the intervening 40 years Silicon Valley has yet to produce a robust data appliance. Show me a PC that has been around as long as your refrigerator.

How old is your fridge? We've got production PC's still happily running 24x7 after 10.5 years, and they're showing no signs of stopping any time soon...

Originally Posted by rob streeper

Despite the intervening 40 years Silicon Valley has yet to produce a robust data appliance. Show me a PC that has been around as long as your refrigerator.

My fridge is about 10 years old but my Amstrad PPC512 (the really beefy model with not one but TWO 720k floppydrives!) is about 30 years old and still works!

OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : The Museum

I also still have the first 8088 PC I bought, and it's still needed for my EPROM programmer!

Another one I have that pre-dates my Amstrad is from when I learnt electronics, and we used the venerable Z80 based Micro-Professors, around 1981 they were released, and as we were the last of that course to run in Australia, we were able to get a couple sets:

Micro Professor 1

Really cool, no C or assembly, just punching machine code directly in!

You guys must be blessed by the computer fairy. These are some of the dead hard drives I've accumulated over the past 10 years.Dead drives.jpg

Makes me angry to even look at them because of the years of lost work trapped in them.

Lol. I paved my backyard with mine.

I melt my hard drives down, you get roughly 275-300 grams of alu from each one, along with unbelievably strong magnets, and other cool parts!