Lester, Bob wrote:
 
>     Commodore 64 anyone?  :-) 

I owned one then - with speed of 1.0?? MHz. Played games, learned myself 
Assembler, prolog, basic (slow and yucky!), logo (?spelling? that turtle thing 
language - actually a vector based drawing program). 

There were a lots of new things+terms like sprites, garbage collection, game 
cartridges, etc.

And I remember the weird data handling by magnetic tapes - you could overcome 
that weirdo design and more than double up your tape reading/writing times by 
using a much published + free TURBO software.

For more info - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64

 
>     Do you know what OS it ran?   

Own kernel owned by Commodore and Commodore BASIC. You need to use Poke/Peek to 
disable Basic and then go have fun with Assembler.

I am still sorry that when I sold my C64,  I also sold that 300+ pages book 
which gives a detailed line by line overview of that kernel and basic 
interpreter.


>     Was the HW an x86?  Motorola?  Apple? 

8 bit MOS Technology 6510 with 64KB memory - Loosely based on Motorola AFAIK. 

I'm not sure what the motherboard was and what chips were on that beside a VIC 
graphics and SID soundchip.

Sound chip was a SID chip invented by an engineer who is also a musician. It 
was a sound synthesizer with 4 'waves' enveloped in 
Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release. It was then at that time the only home computer 
capable playing organ music with all its vibrato + drum effects. ;-)

Game, Sinbad the Sailor, was one of the first games which has a speech 
synthetics used for in-game dialogs by those characters.

You can download a C64 emulator to use on your windoze PC. That worked like a 
charm which I used to replay Manic Miner! (a version of JetSet Willy type game)
 

>     I had a buddy (years ago, of course), that did strange and wonderful (at 
> the time) things with several of them connected together.  No cases, wires 
> everywhere,  but pretty cool anyhow for the time. 

Connected? How? I only know analog modems and bbs you used for that.
 
>     TGIF, else I'd be in trouble.  :-) 

You will never get in trouble and not get any flames! ;-D

Groete / Greetings
Elardus Engelbrecht

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