Set up a user port interface on my Commodore 128 so it could connect to a breadboard. In fact, this one time, I set up an LED bargraph and had the computer sequentially output the rows of a figure from its character set, and waving a mirror in front of it caused the character to display in the reflection. That was a really nice effect. 
My first experience with Commodore 64 is playing summer games on the it, (and I did get pretty good at pole vaulting). But I think my first computer usage was on an IBM at computer camp. My first at home computer was a Commodore Amega. When my parents brought it home I asked them why they didnt get an IBM they said the guys at the computer shop thought these were better. Go figure.
I programmed a database on a Commodore Pet!
The guy at the store was probably right. Amigas had a GUI interface, a million-color palette, and four-voice stereo sound at a time when most PCs were still DOS-based, had 256 colors or fewer, and a single voice beeping speaker.
Amigas did in 1985 what Windows didn’t do until 1995. That’s almost a direct quote (lost the cite though) and Gateway bought them out because the Amiga was a threat to IBM PCs.
[/rant]
Amigas did have a rather cumbersome video memory structure though… Commodore held on to its inneficient 8-pixels-per-byte-8-bytes-per-8x8-square and instead of keeping all the color bits together, they defined separate planes (5 of them, IIRC) to hold the significant bits. So writing a single pixel involved splitting it up into 5 bits and writing to 5 separate bytes.
Still racking my brain though trying to remember what D&D is…
I guess so, I was happy with it until it got a virus and we couldn’t use the disks anywhere else except at home. It was like buying a beta vcr when a few years later everyone else went vhs. But I still use the Amiga monitor as a TV, and the colours are really sharp.
Let’s hear it for Commodores! We had a Vic-20, a C64 and a couple of C128s. I still have the C64 and a 128, plus disk drives, in storage. One of these days I really should see if any of them still work.
Hey, Vintage Computing Forum on CompuServe (go.compuserve.com/vintagecomputing) has a section for Commodore enthusiasts.
How you doin’ that? With this?
For you Scott Adams adventure fans: http://www.msadams.com/index.htm
As for me, I got my desk cleared off last night with the intention to hook up the ol’ Apple IIc but my wife call to say she found her W2 form so I’ll have to do the taxes instead.
I started with the 64. When the smoke escaped from the disk drive, I upgraded to a 64/128. Still have it, and it still works, though it lives in a dark closet. Wish it had a good new home to go to.
Why is
POKE 3876,8
indelibly engraved on my brain?
Does it ring any Bells with the old Vic20 crowd?
Wikipedia says it is the best selling computer model of all time! 
POKE 36879,8 perhaps?
That’s a video ram address, isn’t it? It’s probably a color setting or something.
Started with a PET.
Does anyone remember a game called “Dungeon” on the PET and 64? Dragons were spades, wyverns were an X, that sort of thing? When you got within one space of anything it activated? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Ahh! The C64 - now there was a box with character, not like your shallow x-boxes and PS-2s of today.
I didn’t actually own one, but for a while enjoyed my friends. I still can’t get over how good the music was compared to the other computers and consoles of its day, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins blew me away!
The best part though was that he could afford to buy a new game every week!
[nitpick]VIC 6560 chip register.[/nitpick] Yeah, that particular POKE turns the entire screen and border black, which is good for special effects and games.
Being able to resize the VIC-20’s screen was cool, and one of the few features the C64 didn’t have, but of course trying to edit programs in that mode looked weird since the OS still thought the screen was 22 columns.
Ah yes, my first computer was a C64.
As a matter of fact, I still have it, thanks in part to my parents’ inability to throw things away. I brought it back with after the last time I visited home. Unfortunately most of the documentation from my games is lost, and since copy protection in those days usually meant entering a word from the manual, half of my games are now unplayable. Still, it’s nice to load up some old school games once in a while. Defender of the Crown, anyone?
Ah yah - that’s it.
Obviously not as indelibly as I thought.
Now why would I be doing that on a regular basis?
Right, when a program crashed halfway through, the video would be left in whatever mode it was in.
Hence when programming space games, the error message would often end up printed in black on black 
So it would have been 36879,1 to return me to white text on black? Something like that.
I was reminicing with a friend a while back about the lengths we went to to convince our parents how useful a computer would be for schoolwork. I showed brochures of spreadsheet programs (Vic20!) and described how good it would be to type my essays.
Then I saved up for 6 months and bought the thing.
And played games.
and wrote games.
and swapped games.
and learnt programming instead of anything useful.
So we never actually did anything school-related at all 
.
Me and my mate, both now professional computer techs, really pulled a fast one on our parents when we said that getting a computer would help us with our studies …
Hm. The jokes on whom?
.dan.
The value at address 36879 determined the screen and border colors. I remember 8 was all black, 25 was all white (which actually looked light gray) and 27 was the default - white screen with a cyan border. Looking at the hex values it seems like the low 3 bits were the border and the high nybble was the background, which had 8 extra colors that the text and border didn’t (mostly odd shades of red). I cannot for the life of me remember what that 8’s bit was for, but there was some reason why it was always set.
Text color, if you recall, was stored character-by-character in color RAM and the default was blue, so if you were getting black on black text then you must have been setting the foreground color by printing a Ctrl-1 character.
Oh yeah, and it seems to me the biggest spreadsheet program of its time was for the VIC-20.
One time I went prodding inside a VIC-20 and found one of those little potentiometers that turn with a screwdriver. Adjusting it caused the gray screen background to turn white. I have no idea what this does to the life expectancy of the VIC chip though.