qvc is selling my childhood

how cool is this?

the c64 was my first "real" computer. before that we had a ti 99/4a with a cassette adapter to save and load programs with. i remember there being a great debate before the purchase trying to decide which computer the family should buy, the apple IIe (my cousins all had these) the atari 800 (many of my friends, and the school had these) or the c64. my parents finally decided that the c64 was the one for us, and bought one. unfortunately the store was out of disk drives, so i spend days writing programs that i would have to transcribe to paper so that i wouldn't have to recreate them later. the c64 had these wonderful things called sprites, that caused me to use up reams of graph paper. the rents later took a 2 hour trip to another base to buy a disk drive so that we could save our programs,8

i went on to spend countless hours playing cracked games like summer games, impossible mission, fort apocalypse, and even the occassional legally bought game like beachhead, which had a bug in it that let you continue to shoot something after you had destroyed it and keep racking up the points which i used to get very high scores. i also spent days reading compute! and compute! gazette, painstakingly typing in the programs that were listed there, including speedscript(image), the word processor that i used until i was a senior in high school and word perfect 4.2 was out.

i very soon learned to love the c64 over the other options at the time. the apple II didn't have nearly the game collection, and the basic included with it was slightly off to say the least. the atari 400 only had that weird chicklet keyboard, and both the 400 and the 800 couldn't use the disk drive unless it was booted to. this mean that if you turned on your computer and started typing in a program without remembering to turn on the disk drive that you would be in for an unpleasant suprise when you tried to save your hard work to disk. atari's basic, although better than apple's was still weird. the c-64 had paid microsoft for basic and it showed. the c-64 had things that atari lacked like string arrays, and a full screen editor.

anyhow, seeing these things on qvc makes me want to buy one, until i realized that i can emulate it on my linux box, or buy a real c64 on ebay for around $30.

hippos

microsoft gets caught using pirated software. you'd think they could afford the $499(i mean $244) for a real version.