My dad was the head of the math department at the high school where he taught, and at that time computer science was folded in under the math section. They had Commodore PETs at the time; that was the first computer I ever used; he brought one home over the summer a couple of times. Tape deck and everything. Later he was able to bring home a C64 for thesummer. When we finally got a home computer, it was a C128. Not quite as iconic, but could run all the same software. I think we had that all through my high school years, and I finally got a 286 or 386 when I went off to university.
Can’t believe I didn’t post in this thread 17 years ago. In any case, I got one when they were still expensive, before they migrated to ToysRUs. I cut my teeth and more primitive machines with a lot less memory.
Commodore knew all about their quality problems. I was friends with a guy who used to be a VP there, and he said that the sparkle bug (early bug in the graphics chip) was known before they started shipping but that Jack Tramiel decided that replacing bad product was better than delaying roll out. Given how they whupped TI, he was right. My C64 didn’t have the bug but I knew people who saw it.
I actually cut my teeth on a TRaSh-80 with 16K, but within a year, I’d upgraded it to 64K and Extended Basic. At the same time, I also got a C=64. I had a cassette recorder plugged into each*, but I only had one TV, so I rigged up the little slider box to switch between the two. If I wanted to watch TV, I had to take the slider thingee off and hook up the antenna.
For my next birthday, my mom got me a disk drive for the Commodore. All those old Ultima games… they seemed almost mystical in and of themselves. PC ports don’t have quite the same feel.
ALL I did was code RPGs. Most of them were Colossal Cavern/Adventure types, but I added some primitive graphics and sound effects. Wish I still had them. Wrote them in basic, but I did eventually get an assembler for the C=64, but I was never very good at it. Years later, when I took assembly in college, it all started to click.
* Do I remember right that there was a ground cable or something on the Commodore’s cassette drive that you had to tape up with electrical tape or it might fry the whole thing?
Wow, this takes me back. Hours spent typing in lines of programming from the “Big Book of Games” my dad bought. The Datasette, the 1541(i think) disk drive. Playing a game called Bard’s Tale and having to stop every couple of hours because the disk drive would start getting too hot(plus having to swap disks every couple of turns). The rom cartridges that plugged into the back, Space Invaders, Centipede, Choplifter…waiting patiently for Dad to finish doing all his “financial junk” on this spreadsheet program he had so I could play a game called Contra(probably not the game you’re thinking of, probably). Oh and reloading “parameters” for games that got corrupted somehow.
Good memories
What the hell is an Adams? Was I making shit up 17 years ago?
It was called Atom, not Adams 
I dont know if this was just local but for the ti/4a vic-20 and c64 (or anything you could program with basic) did your computer stores sell little game booklets of 5-10 pages where youd type in the game for about 5 bucks or so ?
They were ripoffs of popular games usually like one was called frog hop (frogger) or star fighter (an early version of star trek )
actually yes there was an Adam computer… it was a pretty much a colecovision with a computer add on …
1984 Adam commercial:
We had a Commodore PET at school - had a lot of fun programming on that (and playing a game called “Gold Miner.” At home, I had a Timex Sinclair (I took that one to college with me, with a black and white TV to use as a monitor).
Later in college, a roommate had a C128 - that was the one for playing LARN, Impossible Mission and Raid on Bungling Bay (I may be mixing some of that up with the roommate who had an Amiga)
I had a VIC-20, bought it at Montgomery Ward in the U.S. in late 1983. I got a 16 KB expansion cartridge and tape drive a few weeks later, lived with that for a couple of years. Eventually I added a 1541 disk drive and a modem. Met my now-husband on a local BBS in 1987. I learned I liked computers and eventually majored in computer science. By 1990 when I bought my first IBM-compatible beige box and stopped using the VIC, it had a VIC-1020 expansion box with 40 KB of RAM, two printers and a 1200-bit-per-second modem. I threw away the equipment in the late 1990s, but still have some of my old software and word processing files on a VIC emulator.
So you did use it for word processing, spreadsheets, and similar? What software? I always went to the IBM for that.
My first was a UK101 (A clone
of the Ohio Superboard II) which i soldered and assembled myself.
(and then had to have it done properly.)
8K memory & 8K BASIC rom !!
Then upgraded to a BBC Micro Model B. Which
was already assembled, thankfully.
Happy days.
My first computer at home was the Commodore Plus/4, a piece of garbage that was designed to be a $60ish computer but Commodore went through a change in management and the new guard decided it should be a $150ish computer despite its specs. It was also fairly boring for a kid, lacking much in the way of games aside from a few I had on Datasette. Ugh.
Fortunately, after a couple months it broke and when my parents went to have it replaced, it was already discontinued and the Commodore 128 had come out to replace it. I think they either swapped it for that or gave a hefty discount on it but, either way, my real formative home computer experience was on that. Naturally, 95% of the time, it was in C= 64 mode. I did have a friend whose dad had a portable Osbourne computer though so sometimes we’d trade CP/M games which required me to use the 128’s capabilities.
I entered in some programs from magazines but usually I’d just wait for local computer fairs where you could usually buy floppies with all the programs for a buck or two each. Played a lot of games, learned to go online to various BBS’s and get even more games and talk to people in far flung places (well, far flung Chicago suburbs) and played a little with dirtier phone tricks but not enough to get in trouble. Turned in many a school paper printed on dot matrix as well. I have a vivid memory of spending more time writing a program to solve my math homework (square roots) than it would have taken to just do it – mainly because I kept fiddling to get my square root sign made of the special characters to display right.
Oh man, I’d forgotten about that.
That takes me back.
In 1986, a GUI for the C64 called GEOS came out, giving it a primitive Windows-like operating system. I used the GeoWrite and GeoPaint programs for word processing and drawing. There were also GeoCalc and GeoPublish programs, but I don’t recall ever using those.
I wrote up D&D adventures and made maps, and typed papers for college using GEOS and it’s sub-apps.
The VIC-20’s screen was 22 characters across, so I never saw a usable spreadsheet program.
The word processor I used was SpeedScript by Charles Brannon, published as a type-in in COMPUTE ! and COMPUTE’s Gazette . I had managed to relocate it in memory so that I could use a custom character generator (on-screen font) replacing some of the useless PETSCII graphical characters with accented characters (é à û etc.) – because you can’t write French with just English characters. And I had cobbled together a 2-step process to capture print output and send appropriate codes to the printer to print those accented characters correctly, with several plug-in fonts too. Ah, good times.
About 6 months ago, I tried SpeedScript in my emulator. It was my first time using it since about 1990. I can’t believe I used to enjoy using that program.