anyone here remember commodore computers?

I had several of the old Commodore systems...

 

That was my only computer for a long time, once windows came out and online was available in homes I got a new one to do webbing on.

 

i'm a little bit too old to remember those, I do remember the first computers I used however. I don't remember the exact models as I was quite young but they were apple computers running apple DOS. we also had another old system that had a blue display and dot matrix printer, 5 1/4" disk drives. of course by this time GUI operating systems were common, (i think those legacy systems could be bought cheap then) and eventually windows replaced Mac as the most commonly encountered system.

i think it's good to know where computers came from since they basically operate the same way these days they just have much more memory, processing speed, and storage capacity etc

 

my second computer that worked, was a commodore vic 20. to which i was able to add an after-market expansion bus, filling out its ram space and more ports. also a plotter that drew on an adding machine roll with little ball point pens, though its first printer was commodore's packaging of the axiom uni-hammer. eventually there was even a 5.25" floppy drive, which cost then about as much as a whole computer, including drives and everything, does now.

never had the pet, or the 64 or the amiga, but i loved playing with basic in rom.

my first computer that worked was an osi-c1p, with an expansion bus that was the backplane left over from my previous attempt to build a computer from ohio scientific's board level products. for that one i had built a d to a coverter to drive an analog plotter i had purchased from a surplus outfit.

the problem in the very early, pre-77 days, was finding power supply components, because, remember before that time, virually all consumer electronics was home entertainment, i.e. stereos, radios and tv's, none of which used the voltages common to digital electronics and computers.

in 1977 i was 29, and welcomed the advent of being able to just buy, rather then having to build, a working computer. even if i was still a couple more years before i was actually in a position to actually buy one.

 

i loved my C64, write code in BASIC, 5.25" floppies and a whooping 32k of avail memory. Funny thing is with a bloatware out these days computers today really aren't that much faster.

 

i sort of see what you mean. they come 'bundled', what 'gift', with a ton of crap they have to do all at the some time, which robbs so much cpu and ram, and at least 2/3rds of it is crap most of don't really need for it to be there.

before graphic user interfaces, that hide the fact that you no longer do, if you bought a computer you owned that computer, every gate and bit and register on it.

now you get 'access denied' unless you throw away your operating system and every application that runs on it, and then what do you have?

there's a bios kernal that if you were really massochistic enough and had all the time in the world to do so, you could maybe write something that would serve as an o.s., but then nothing would run on it unless you wrote that too.

but you CAN still get programable micro-controllers to play with. with built in languages and buffered i/o.

and you can also, well there ARE a lot of those things that can be shut off, or removed completely, without killing the o.s. which is something i always try to do. though i'm not guru enough to detect and eliminate all the junk that is hidden in other junk that it won't let me.