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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

"When I first got my 133MHz BeBox (not new, sadly), it had "only" 32MB of memory and it had four more SIMM slots to fill."

My first proper PC was a 80286 ("Opus" in Hants, UK) I think it costed about £1200. 1MB RAM, 20MB HD. 1989ish.

I went on to study Civil Engineering at Plymouth Poly (Devon). Now I run an IT firm with a slack handful of employees.

My C64 now has a USB interface.

My uncle used to do programing with punched cards. Us old gits have a habit of hanging around and making the place look untidy. Soz.

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> My C64 now has a USB interface.

The controller for which is probably faster and has more memory than the C64 itself :) So maybe it's more like your USB controller now has a C64? :)

Fair enough 8) A few years back I recall Alan Cox (int al) demonstrating Linux booting on a hard disc. Not from a hard disc but actually on one - ie there is enough RAM etc to boot and run a shell in most peripherals.

That aside, have you seen what Jeff Minter and co could do with a C64? You have around 40Kb RAM to play with. You've got the SID for sound and sprites are a thing. Thank the good $DEITY that your storage isn't as noisy as a Spectrum and you have a decent amount of memory to work with. Now make a game to run on this thing!

I can see a Quickshot II across the dining room (WFH.) Hmmmm, when lunch time turns up I think some Mutant Camels will need a good kicking.

Ha, yes I always have fond memories of the days when people wrote a serviceable chess program in 1KB which you typed in from a magazine [1] and I compare that to nowadays when I can have a Firefox Tab using 1GB+.

Also some of the optimisations (The Hobbit on the BBC micro actually using screen memory to load the game) and "friendly rivalry" between developers and copiers (I remember trying to Hack Frak! on the BBC micro and it detecting this and playing the Jolly Roger).

[1] http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/

No I didn't see that from Jeff Minter, I was never a C64 guy. I had an Atari 800XL in those days (and in fact I kept it all this time - though it needs new RAM chips). I did have Mutant Camels though!!

I did see the harddrive Linux thing yes, I think it was shown at SHA2017 too.

And I was just joking about the controller having a C64 indeed :) Of course functionally the C64 is more versatile despite having less resources.

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