What is on Your Mind?

Retro Games has announced that the C64 is back, this time full-sized with a working keyboard for the dedicated retro home-computer fan, available December 2019.

See also:

CNN:

Iconic 80s computer The Commodore 64 to return with fully-functional keyboard

YouTube:

The C64 | Trailer

I used to manage a land surveying business with a Commodore 64 computer, back in the the "good ole days" and the reason that business did so well was because we "young surveyors" were the first to use computers for day-to-day land surveying tasks. My company was called "Micro Survey of Louisiana" and it was without a doubt one of the most fun and enjoyable businesses I have operated over my lifetime.

I think the problem with this is: a computer is worthless without programs. Back then, when the C64 was a gaming staple (and lets be honest - this was what sold millions of them) there were programs in abundance and a lot of them were pirated. Today the programs (read: games) are not there any more and if they are they are mostly pirated versions.

Another thing is: it was usual to connect the C64 to the TV and use the TV as monitor. Back then, when 12" B&W monitors were common, this was awesome. I wonder if this is still possible with modern TV sets, because they usually don't rely on PAL/NTSC any more. Furthermore i suppose having a TV set as a monitor is not that awesome any more opposite the modern 4K-resolutions.

My suspicion is that there will be a short hype and then nothing - which is regrettable, because the 6502 family had some really interesting features which died with it, but that is true for a lot of features in a lot of old processors.

bakunin

Yeah, I wrote all my own programs for the C64, in "Commodore Basic" or something like that, as I recall.

All the programs I wrote were related to land surveying, which were all based on geometry and trigonometry, calculating azimuths, distances, grids, grades, fill for construction sites, industrial sites, pipelines and highways (or customer billing / invoicing) and making morning print-outs on a dot-matrix computer.

I can still hear the sound of the dot matrix printer grinding out numbers for the days work as we drank our morning coffee and prepared to load equipment into the truck.

Those were the days ..... long hair down to the middle of our backs, notebooks and pen in hand, making big money as "modern day land surveyors" in a world where computers has not yet "made a splash".

For us, and our customers, the C64, the TRS80, the Amiga and more made us a pile of money, "back in the day".

It was the Dean of Students at Tulane University in New Orleans, many years later, who convinced me to "move on" from my career in land surveying (he said it was best not to work in the day to day weather, but become a EE / computer engineer), enroll in the engineering department and study EE.

At Tulane, we sat in the hall in lines and waited in long queues to use the first Apple IIs, then Mac 128Ks, then Macs 512Ks, the Mac Plus and then the Macintosh SE, for our lab reports and ran Fortran and COBAL programs on VAX.

What a great life and how lucky we were to experience the "dawn of the computer age" in every day life.