When I was in 4th grade (1980-81; age 9), our elementary school got its very first computer – a Commodore PET with 32K of RAM, named Rudy (for the salesperson who sold it to our school). It was a PET 2001 computer, but it had a “real” keyboard, rather than the so-called “chicklet” keyboard. It ran BASIC 2.0 and used an external cassette drive to load software. But I wasn’t in that class.
The next year, I was in that class and we got several 16K CBM’s (the PET with a larger screen and BASIC 4.0), and I learned BASIC and wrote lots of “hello, what is your name” type programs.
In 6th grade, the next year, most of the classrooms had one or two CBM’s, and my parents bought me a used VIC-20 for $250 (they were selling for $300+ in the stores, new). It had COLOR!!! And it was at home! I wrote a lot of simple BASIC programs, and quickly ran into the 5K RAM limit. I typed in a game called “Tank VS. UFO” from the back of a book, and played it extensively.
When I got to junior high (1983-85), they had taken the Apple approach. So I adapted my knowledge of BASIC to the Apple, and learned Logo, and AppleWorks. The teachers at my elementary school hadn’t wanted Apples because they had to plug in only one power cord for the PET but two for the Apple, since it had a separate monitor. I think eventually they got Commodore 64’s (and power strips) before finally switching over to Apples. I used the Apples in junior high to write articles for the school paper, for which I was the editor in fall 1984.
Meanwhile, I sold my VIC-20 for $75 (cash! the most money I’d ever held in my hands to date) and my parents bought me a Commodore 64 with tape drive. Eventually I got a disk drive for it and some decent software (including the usual pirated games). I joined a user group and all that. I did a lot of sprite and character set design, drawing out on paper and entering in the decimal codes as DATA statements or just POKE’ing them right into memory. I got quite good at translating binary to decimal in my head as a result.
In High School, they were back on PET’s. There was a lab full of PET’s and CBM’s, networked together on something called Regent to a double 1.2M floppy unit (the most expensive floppy disk drive Commodore built–it cost well over $1000 at the time). There was also a lab of IBM PC-XT clones for the Business department, which was used for learning WordPerfect, etc. I naturally steered clear of that lab… There was also a PC (286, I think) with a EGA or maybe even VGA running CAD software in the drafting room.
Then, when I was a junior (1987-88), the PET’s were replaced with Commodore 128’s with color RGB monitors and double-sided 340KB disk drives. I learned Pascal on an independant study program under CP/M on those 128’s. (The 128 has a Z80 built into it, which runs at 4 MHz next to the built-in 8502 at 2 MHz, but the actual effective speed of CP/M mode is just shy of 2 MHz because of bottlenecks.) I also did a lot of hi-res graphics under the BASIC 7.0 hi-res commands (which are totally different than any other form of BASIC I’ve ever seen by anyone other than Commodore, of course).
I sold my C64 and bought a C128 somewhere along this time. I did a lot of graphics and sound stuff on it, using the built-in sound commands to play songs typed in off of sheet music; designing character sets and sprites and later redefining the keyboard layout, using utilities I wrote or typed in from RUN or Compute!’s Gazette magazines.
I used the C128 to visit the local BBS’s, and for a while I ran a C-Net BBS on it, running in in C64 compatibility mode (see Online History) using one 340K and two 170K disk drives, and started work on a better BBS in 128 mode. I dabbled in assembly, using the built-in machine language monitor (not unlike the CALL -151 on the Apple) to enter programs. Of course I had no idea about how to write proper subroutines in assembly, and my programs were uncommented (a side-effect of using a ML monitor to write them) and consequently, they were very buggy and hard to fix.
Currently I still have that C128, as well as several others. I’ve bought a variety of Commodore computers, and have at least one of each of the following: 64, 128, SX-64, Plus/4, 16, VIC-20, and even a vintage working KIM-1. I also have a large collection of peripherals, software, etc. Most of this stuff is just sitting in my garage, gathering dust, but once in a while I play a few video games or test some new components.
For more information about Commodore computers, visit my Commodore Overview page.
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