I had a TRS80 Model IV. I was looking to upgrade it to hires graphics (320X400), but found the C64 had color graphics and cost less than the upgrade, that was when I walked away from the Radio Shack brands. I truely loved the old commodore line, C64 and up. I also had a PET, which was much better than the TRS80 IMO.

 

You guys are old.
The first computer to come into my house ran DOS. It had a "turbo" button on the front. When you pushed it, it would latch in, and a dual 7 segment display would change from "33" to "66" - that's how you knew when you were really cooking with crisco. I played snake on it. Then we got one that had windows 3.1 on it and all the wonder of Microsoft Entertainment Pack, complete with mahjjong and chip's challenge. That one had a modem I believe. The computer after that was really a beast. It had a 28K modem and all the AOL free minutes I could use. I remember looking nervously over my shoulder (maybe 12 y/o) waiting for nude pics to load, one line of pixels at a time. It was also on this computer that I learned visual basic, and I wrote a program that could open my dad's CD drive (upstairs) from my CD drive (downstairs) across the LAN (that I set up); I played that trick on him all the time and he never caught on.

You had one of them fancy fast computers. The first IBM PC can at a whopping 4.7 MHZ. I held out for a Comaq Deskpro. It was blazing fast, something like 7 MHZ.

 

I had a TRS80 Model IV. I was looking to upgrade it to hires graphics (320X400), but found the C64 had color graphics and cost less than the upgrade, that was when I walked away from the Radio Shack brands. I truely loved the old commodore line, C64 and up. I also had a PET, which was much better than the TRS80 IMO.

I used to have a PET. It was my first computer. I loved that computer. It is still probably my favorite of any computer I ever owned. Did you have the chiclet style keyboard or the one with the full keyboard?

I soldthe PET to get money to buy my Atari 800 with 90K diskette drive. I wish I had kept the PET.

 

Actually I had both. The chiclet keyboard model had some chips that were the same number as some other chips, they were static ram, and the computer munched them like candy. The full size keyboard model used 2114 RAMS, and the cassette tape drive was external (interesting, exactly the same model as the internal model).

I gave my first one to my brother for his graduation gift, I think it changed his life.

When I got my C64 and a 1541 disk drive (180K) I never looked back. I still have a 4Gig HD for the old computer, a CMD model.

 

I had a TRS80 Model IV. I was looking to upgrade it to hires graphics (320X400), but found the C64 had color graphics and cost less than the upgrade, that was when I walked away from the Radio Shack brands. I truely loved the old commodore line, C64 and up. I also had a PET, which was much better than the TRS80 IMO.

I had a C64 with a cassette tape drive for storage. I had no monitor, so I just had to use the TV. The graphical capabilities were wonderful, but neither the graphics nor the sound chip were supported by the built in BASIC dialect of the C64. You had to know where to write the data into memory (respectively the registers of the graphic and sound chip) to see or hear something. I still remember what fun it was just to see a stupid straight line on the screen.

I had some big dreams at that time of writing computer games, but what I actually wrote were just some very small programs that did nothing useful, I was just checking that I really understood what was going on inside the 6510 CPU, the graphic chip and the sound chip. Now there is a PC sitting on my desk that does a lot of useful things for me, but I know little about what is going on inside of it and I'm much too lazy to find out. The C64 was more fun.

 

As mentioned I had the Atari 800. It's OS was far ahead of it's time. Very easy to write graphics programs and especially easy to write device drivers.

 

The funny thing is all the OSes were written by M/S. People have trouble remembering that. The C64 was a lesson for M/S, as they didn't fulfill their contract requirements for the BASIC language (they were supposed to add graphic and sound commands) and lost control of the code as a result.

That and the OS was BASIC, I've had several people argue that BASIC can not be an OS. They are wrong of course. Several cartridges came out that were pretty close to Atari, such as Simon's BASIC. I like the compiler that came out called Blitz!. And there were lots of DOS enhancement cartridges over the years, but the winner was a ROM chip called JiffyDOS (made by the same people who made my HD).

I wrote lots of strategy games back then, things like othello, checkers, various card games. I even wrote a lot of ML utilities to speed things up. Most of it is lost, and I burned my self out. Software and learning languages just doesn't have the same appeal.

 

Who's M/S?

 

MicroSoft, they didn't invent BASIC but they have written a lot of versions over the years.

Thinking about it, I would have to rate BASIC as my choice for this thread.

 

[QUOTEI had a C64 with a cassette tape drive for storage. I had no monitor, so I just had to use the TV. ][/QUOTE]

I had one of these too, I wondered who bought the other one!!