Commodore Computer Devotees Tinker With the Past

[Jared Moya]

Robert Bernardo spent a week this spring traveling the Pacific Northwest, trying to save part of yesterday's future.

The high school English teacher swung through Portland and Astoria, Ore., and then on to Ethel, Wash., to drop off a collection of antiquated computers — a PET8032, three VIC-20s, an SX-64 portable and a Commodore 128D.

Then on his way home to the Central Valley town of Visalia, Bernardo packed his white Crown Victoria with three more SX-64s, boxes of software and a couple of printers.

With any luck, this agglomeration of decades-old circuit boards and dusty disk drives will allow Bernardo to reboot a handful of computers made by the long-defunct Commodore Business Machines.


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[pimpinaman]

I miss my Commodore 64c and all the BBSing that went with it.

[Wiccan]

Way back then, having one was pretty cool.... I remember begging my mom for a dot matrix printer that I could hook to mine. I can't believe she actually forked out $300 for it at Sears!

I can't believe I still remember that.... :icon_flow

[shawners]

I had a commodore 64.. I then even pirated games, me and my friend had a disc copier program, keep taking the blank floppy out and putting in the original game.. several times back and fourth. I loved it. My mom was gonna get me a commodore or a IBM machine.. For some strange reason commodores were cream of the crop.. THrow a game cartride in the back of the keyboard and played pacman and others. Screen monitor was yellow and i hated that.
SYNTEX error drove me crazy.

[pimpinaman]

I know I used a magnavox monitor with mine (a TV some of the time), loved that computer!

LOAD "*",8,1

oh yeah :)

The game intros were the best....they made some of the games just look silly sometimes.

[SanDiegoKid]

I stayed up for a week straight playin' Ultima V on my C=64.

Even met one of my best friends on the local BBS scene... man I loved crashin' mofos' boards. I was the most hated kid in BBS land around here.

[Signa]

LOAD "*",8,1

my dad showed me that command only once when i was 3. never forgot it afterwards. i was playing anything i wanted after that. it was my first dabeling in piracy too. my dad had a group a friends that sent a flurry of 5 1/4" disks all over to everyones friends-of-friends. we prolly had like 100 disks with hundreds of games. i dont think we even got to play them all.

lol that reminds me. i was like 9 and i found mixed in the box of disks a game called "stroker" played it and didnt know what the hell was going on. totally boring. found an emulator of it a few years back. i bet you can guess what it was about. its on www.c64.com if you cant guess

[SanDiegoKid]

"Stroker"? Hmm.. I'm guessin' it was a Burt Reynolds game?

[derekb]

ZX Spectrum was the daddy over here at that time
All you need to copy games was to connect 2 tape recorders together(or get a double tape deck)
You would get about 20 games on 1 C90 cassette :)
Happy days!