The C-64 was the best all-around box ever made, what a machine... you
could do anything with it... so reliable... you could throw it around,
spill coffee into it, practically tear it apart and it'd remain...
READY.
I know guys still using these things for internet communications believe
it or not, just silly stuff like mail etc. but... still it's cool,
what a phat machine, mine was painted with lightning bolts and stuff -
when I gave mine up for an Amiga I gave it a burial, it is probably still
out there and could be dug up in 50 years and used...
But friends the 1541 was for lamers, the real elite had access to the
powerful SFD-2001 drives, which could read standard discs but also store
up to 2 Mb. on a standard 5.25" floppy, perfect mass storage solution for
your BBS network in 1985! Or for those with the capital, you could get
like 200 Mb hard discs for like $5,000 US... I think anyway, been a long
time but that's how I remember it...
And it's audio capabilities were "just right", you could do all sorts of
neat stuff with it such as packet radio - or blue-boxing... wardialing &
scanning etc. which in those days was a popular past-time which was the
usual precursor to a box getting exploited... You could do DTMF
recognition even if you had an audio sampler (simple RS-232 box)... ;)
The games on the C64 were the best, I stopped liking computer games after
those days.
You can apparently overclock them... I've seen 64's overclocked, they
sell kits for it even in Europe... and there are devices to connect IDE
discs etc... for sure, hook it up to a nice fat disc and write some code
to get "swap memory" happening, overclock it to 500 Mhz... then mabye
write a POSIX kernel in BASIC or ML... you could load it up from tape when
booting... and have it run your firewall... web server etc...
You can turn a C-64 into a portable with a simple battery & black box
too... nice composite video signal works good with HMDs, perfect
resolution and text size although you could get 80 columns too...
And those old ComputerEyes digitizers... and PerfectSound audio
samplers... O for sure...
Never did see any ethernet solution for a C-64 though... probably have to
have some other linux box in front of it and connect it via RS-232... or
something... but still how the hell would you hack it... hahah... you'd
have to go grab the guy's Datasette...
CBM always had the superior technology and manufacturing and marketing, to
me a modern Pentium III is pretty much like an 8086, same horrible
architecture, just pumped up the clock cycles... I even think the Amiga
3000 was at least as powerful as an SGI Indy or equivalent... and far
easier to use, more reliable and flexible and economical etc...
One day when we have a truly advanced breakthrough OS I bet it'll resemble
the 64. You'll turn it on and it'll just be READY. So cool.
Long live C= and Amiga... Down with microsoft who destroyed them...
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