Old Computers, and Flack's C "64 love affair"

[Tdarcos]

I thought it was a cool tie-in, using the title of Toto's "65 Love Affair" to tie into Flack and his "Passion of the Christ" bordering on religious zealotry for the Commodore 64.

They say you never forget your first love - I haven't - and I say computer afficianados never forget their first computer. The first computer I ever owned, all mine, was an 8086-class machine (I found out later it actally had an NEC V-20, a slightly more capable chip than either the 8086 or the 8088), but that's not the one I fell for.

My personal crush is the Digital PDP-11/03 microcomputer. I first got to use one at Long Beach City College back in California in 1976. It had a whopping 64K of memory, 2 floppy disk drives, each using 8" soft floppies that hold a massive 256K of capacity, it had 3 (dumb) video terminals and a dot-matrix hard-copy terminal. It cost just shy of (then) 20 grand. No hard drive.

We programmed it using Basic. The interpreter and OS used about half the memory, so the four users were left with about 4K each.

But we did some amazing things in that 4K. It goes right along with something I have noticed, people use the resources they have up to the limit. Give people 4K and they figure out how to shoehorn into it. 64K and they shoehorn into that. And so on. Now we have gigabyte memory and terabyte hard drives (at least I do) and the software isn't all that better than it was 34 years ago. Flashier, with graphics and sound but it's almost all evolutionary, not revolutionary.

I mean, my cell phone, I'm sure, has more memory, permanent storage and processor speed than the PDP-11/03 I first used and the eight-year old HP Pavillion A305W I am using right now is in rough terms a thousand or more times powerful, I still remember the PDP-11 with fondness, and yes, with love.

About 15 years ago I bought a rack-mounted PDP-11/03 for $200 from a guy over in Fairfax County, Virginia, and brought it back to my home in Silver Spring, Maryland. I hooked its terminal connector to the serial port of my PC and connected to it through a terminal program as if I was just using a BBS. I was back in memory lane as I saw RT-11's dot prompt, similar to DOS' C> prompt.

I still had the 8" disks from my PDP-11 days, and a lot of my old software. I ran Basic, in single-user mode since I did not have additional terminals. When I think about what we did in such small spaces, I remember it so fondly.

I later got busy with other things. I stopped using it and a one day probably a couple years later I ended up talking to the guy I'd bought it from. I ended either giving or selling it back to him, I really had no need for it except nostalgia.

There is a PDP emulator program written by Bob Supnik, an engineer with Digital. Will let you run RSTS/E with Basic-Plus on an emulated PDP/11-70 which is an even more powerful OS, language and processor than the 11/03. Or you could run RT-11 and run that older version of Basic. I have the emulator and software; it runs on anything at or above an 80386. I've used it occasionally. Compared to what we have now it's primitive but some of it would still stand the test of time, it was that good.

Flack, I understand your love of the Commodore 64 even though I never used one. But I have my own flame I remember fondly, it burns in my heart even now.

[Flack]

This was less about me than I would have liked.

My family's first computer was a TRS-80 Model III (1980), and dad sold that to get an Apple II clone (the Franklin Ace 1000) a couple of years after that (1982). And while I still have a soft spot in my heart for both of those machines, the Commodore 64 was MY first computer. It sat in my room, and no one else in the house ever used it. By the time I got my C64, dad had moved into the world of PCs.

IBM Pcs and Apple computers were both great, but if you were 12 years old and into games, the C64 reigned supreme. It had the best graphics, color and sound of the three.

There's no doubt that nostalgia tints my view on lots of things, the Commodore included.

[bruce]

Everyone knows Supnik's other claim to fame, right?

Right?

Yeah, the Fortran port of Zork.

Bruce