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Comment by Endy | Hacker News Reader

I keep forgetting that the Atari 2600, the NES, the Apple II and the C64 had the same processor. But... didn't the C64 have a modem? So it should be able to connect to the Internet, even if very slowly?

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The C64 did not have a built in modem, but a number of them were available as an add-on. There was a trick where you could "overclock" a certain 300 baud modem to 450 baud, cutting download times significantly.

I never had a IP stack for it, but I did use my Commodore machines to dial into a shell account and use the internet available at the time (telent and ftp), and to MUD. I believe the terminal program I used had full ANSI support.

Although in 2017 data usage; 50% faster than forever is still forever.

Oh, I remember it taking multiple days to pirate^Wdownload software that took multiple disks. And call-waiting wasn't your friend, getting kicked off of the one phone line the entire house had at their disposal. You're right, 50% faster than forever is still forever, and/but 50% faster than multiple days is still multiple days.

That being said, I had quite the software library.

Sure, there are modems and serial ports, ranging from 300 to 115200 bps, but since 2002 there are 10 Mb Ethernet cards too. I wrote a TCP/IP stack for it: http://oliverschmidt.github.io/ip65/

This'll probably kill the site for a bit from the load, but http://oldservers.ddns.net/index.html

Probably everyone reading this (including you) already know that, but my OC forces me to specify, that C64 had MOS 6510, which was an improved version of 6502.

Yes the 6510 had an on-chip cassette interface. State-of-the-art. Ran at 1Mhz tho', the Beeb ran at 2Mhz making it the beast in the 8-bit stable.

The 6510 ran at 2 MHz on the C= 128 if the VIC was turned off.

https://wphosting.tv/how-to-use-the-commodore-c128-in-2mhz-f...

While we're nitpicking, the NES used the RP2A03 running at 1.79 MHz in NTSC regions and RP2A07 running at 1.66 MHz in PAL regions.

https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/CPU

The 2600 actually had a simpler version of the 6502 called 6507. It had fewer address lines and could only handle 8KB.

And the British Acorn BBC Model B, which led to Acorn Risk Machines and ARM Cores - one of the UK's finest ever exports.

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