LOAD "*",8,1
I was cleaning out the garage a while back and finally tossed out my 1541 drive. I almost kept it, but have long since lost track of the C64 I had when I was a kid.
I remember making “double sided disks” with my Mom’s hole puncher and making sure that if I wanted to save it, I promptly taped it up and put “white out” on whatever label was there and scrawled in my own title such as “steve’s program”
My very first computer that I can really remember, was a Vic20 with a cassette drive ( not sure if you could even really call them drives ). I was in 4th grade, or around that time, and remember that during recess we were allowed to play on it if it was our turn.
Then, my family bought a C64 – we never had any gaming consoles as my Dad figured they would just rot our brains. Ahh , but he didn’t count on all the games which could be had on the Commodore.
Mission Impossible ( many many hours wasted there ) Lode Runner ( I think it had 101 levels or some such nonsense ) and Oregon trail to name just a few.
But, one of my odd childhood memories involves sitting and typing in line after line of DATA statements from the backs of the Commodore and Ahoy! magazines.
I had no idea what I was doing for the most part, blindly typing in row after row of statements like:
540 data255,255,255
550 data234,170,171
560 data128,0,1
570 data135,199,193
I remember pages and pages of these data statement and other BASIC commands. And when I was done.. well it ran 45% of the time.
I clearly remember when my older brother showed me how to write a joystick controller routine using PEEK and then how to graph out our own sprites so we could make basic faces and stuff.
And the C64 also had cartridge games – I think we had some spaceship game which had Beethovan or Bach as a theme song to it… I can still hear it in my head as I blasted my way through space ( anyone remember the name of that game? No IMDB for C64 out there .. )
As I entered middle school I dropped computers altogether, in favor of girls and sports. Then, in the summer of 1991, I had just moved to Seattle, a movie called Terminator 2 came out and I was hooked on special effects. I bought a special effects book and in the back was a free demo version of Caligari Truespace – after that I scrimped and saved so I could buy a used version of 3DSr4 for DOS ( the seller also had a number of IPAS as a bonus ) and promptly figured out that computers could do some cool things and wanted to do “something” with computers in the future.
Anyway – thought I would share some random thoughts with folks today J
If anyone remembers the name of the crazy classical music space game – let me know.
And Dad, thanks for buying that C64.
Spatdsg
