I never thought of that as something funny at the time. Tape storage was notoriously slow so I switched to floppies as soon as I could.
Still kept the tape deck though, as tape was more popular in the UK.
My parents decided to get me a computer for my birthday in the early 80s. I remember being with my dad at Toys R Us and telling him I was fine with the tape drive. He disagreed and spent the extra money for the disk drive.
We had a Vic 20 that also had cassettes and BELIVE YOU ME SISTER it was a sad day if you mixed the Frogger up with your Madonna tape in your Walkman. Worst high pitched squelching HREEEEEEE! in the history of the universe
They...had printing on the cassette itself. And we're both the same color. So at a glance, if you were a chaotic child, you could grab the wrong one. Also they looked like music cassettes so they could easily end up with your pile of music if your mom was trying to clean.
My first was a Texas Instrument 994a. You could only program in Basic and had to save your work to a cassette recorder. Of course it had a couple of pretty awesome games you could purchase. Once we discovered Parsec, it never got used for programming again.
The first computer I actually wrote software for using Basic. I wrote a point of sale program that dealt with inventory, customers, sales totals and costume rentals for a costume shop. Of course I didn't call it point of sale. 🤣
I had one growing up followed by an Amiga. Picked up this C64 last year and it was a very happy reunion. And it's very cool now with all the new C64 hardware and games being produced.
I had 2 90-min cassette tapes full of games, copied from a friend. It took me forever to compile a list with each staring point of a game on the counter of the datasette. Good times!
https://beardygeeks.com/ - set that up a few months ago. The cup is really good quality, bought one from myself! :) Me and my friend even built custom hardware for the C64 so we could connect 8 joysticks...
My first project for the Commodore 64 was a light pen. And then a voice synthesizer using some chip from Radioshack, and then finally a crude rudimentary camera system utilizing an EPROM.
I learned to program on the competitor system the Atari 800XL. Tape drives were obsolete by 1987 but I had a ginormous 5 1/4" floppy disc drive and 300bps modem. It took 2 hours to download a 64x128px image which took up half the disc space 😂
xD Disk drives were something I had no experience with back then. Cassettes stuck around a lot longer in the UK as the main format for the C64 as it went through some boom years in 87-90. I was still buying games on cassette right until getting an Amiga in '92.
Yeah, it's one of the big divides with C64: North America was the land of floppies whereas Europe was one of cassettes. Floppy games and drives were too expensive for my family to pick one and them up. Wasn't until we hopped over to Amiga that I got to use them.
Aww yeah, I remember coming across this early on when I started using YouTube more and retro channels started popping up. Kinda nostalgic now in its own right!
Ahhh, great times! When I upgraded to a disc drive, a bunch of us chipped in and bought the Shootem Up Construction Kit. We spent hours making our own games on that C64 🙂
Aww, nice! Never had the chance back then to upgrade to disk, but have some experience with it now with this C64. I had the tape version of SEUCK tho and spent a lot of time making games and playing the included ones.
I have made some 100 games over the years with the help of the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit (plus a bit of extra coding with the help of a few friends).
You can find many of the games here: https://psytronik.itch.io/
Aha, sometimes, though not as often as I remembered. After six months or so of owning this C64, I've had three games fail to load and loading times aren't as slow as I remembered them to be either. About two-three minutes discounting multiloads.
SYS64739 - much fun locking up all the display machines we could find in the computer shops in town - bloody kids! Loved the C64 and of course, Elite ❤️
xD What mischief! Amiga Elite was the first version I played but I picked up a copy of the C64 version a couple of years ago with the Dark Wheel novella. It's been lovely digging into that version too.
Yeah! Was snapped earlier today while tinkering around with Phantasie III. All of ours are in good working order with this Toshiba as my favourite daily driver set.
Our first home computer was a Commodore 128. Years before that I had a programming class on a mainframe and had to learn to keypunch my own cards. My kids found a program I has written, on cards with a rubber band around them, and said "Wow! Computer antiques!" Yeah, I'm old.
My first computer classes were on a DEC System 10 at the J.C. which also used punch cards, circa 1975. I might have a stack of them stashed in a box somewhere.
Comments
Still kept the tape deck though, as tape was more popular in the UK.
FOUND
LOADING
READY
He was sure right.
Brings me back.
Zork.
bar, bar.
I was surprised how slowly disk games load on C64 without a fastload cart. Not all that much faster than cassette in some cases.
:D
Screw the tape
SEARCHING
FOUND BART
LOADING
(Chiptune version of The Simpsons theme plays)
You can find many of the games here:
https://psytronik.itch.io/
IIRC the extra ",1" was only necessary when loading binary programs. (i.e. the equivalent of ".exe")