7 ms·

I'm so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20 from Sears in 1983. We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted

I'm so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20 from Sears in 1983. We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted. Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.

btgeekboy 4y ago
We weren’t well off either, but my dad was able to get a decent deal when our neighbor upgraded. It was put into my room for lack of space - and the rest is history.
- bombcar 4y ago
  For sooooo long the upgrade cycle was so short that you could live quite cheaply and comfortably by inserting yourself in the right place in the chain. In college I’d upgrade every three to six months and sell the old system off to someone for a good percentage of the new hotness.
haolez 4y ago
Same here. Got my 386 in 1994 (in Brazil nonetheless!).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
protomyth 4y ago
Yep, we traded in our Atari VCS (2600) with 23 cartridges for an Atari 400 and two game cartridges (Missile Command and Pac-Man). He spent money that was in short supply to buy a 410 (tape recorder) and the BASIC cartridge. We learned to program and that made all of the difference years on. There was a small slice of time where consumer, programmable computers were affordable to a large audience in the 80's and very early 90's. Adding to that era was the magazines that provided amazing content such as programs and news. Antic, Byte, Creative Computing, and Dr. Dobbs were the building blocks.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Lucky you! I had the BASIC cartdrige for the... Atari 2600. It'd come with a joystick in two split halves which, if I remember correctly, you had to plug in the joystick ports (so one in each port). My memory may be failing me for it was a very long time ago. I still fondly remember the first lines I drew, in colors, using BASIC. One of my very first program.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    I had BASIC for the Atari 2600 (called Atari VCS at the time). It came with two controllers that had membrane keyboards. There were not enough keys for the alphabet so you had to use key modifiers to type the full A-Z and 0-9 character set. It was immensely tedious and really a bummer to use. I’m surprised you got far enough to do graphics with it. I dont recall being able to do anything except every simple text-based things like: 10 print “hello” 20 goto 10
    - flomo 4y ago
      IIRC it didn't even have strings, but it did have drawing commands.
    - TacticalCoder 4y ago
      Yup I wrongly wrote "joystick" split in two halves but I meant a keyboard split in two halves. It's the same as you describe. I don't remember much: maybe I'm mistaken my memories of the 2600 for those of the 600 XL.
    - robocat 4y ago
      Good images of the manual and the keyboard overlays: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-basic-programming_7305.html http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-basic-programm... 64 bytes of basic tokens - so program size was limited to about 10 short lines. https://atariprojects.org/2019/12/24/try-basic-programming-on-the-atari-2600-15-30-mins/ https://atariprojects.org/2019/12/24/try-basic-programming-o... with video of a program running: https://atariprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BASIC-Video-on-Atari-2600.mov https://atariprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BASIC-V...
synu 4y ago
Exact same computer, and we were poor too. I learned BASIC on it and basically never stopped coding since then. It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer.
- alkaloid 4y ago
  > It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer. Isn't this the honest truth.
iancmceachern 4y ago
Same story here, but with a Tandy 100 RLX. We sold our Nintendo NES to help pay for it.
hereforphone 4y ago
You may want to double-check the definition of 'incredibly poor'.
- madengr 4y ago
  The kid down the road from me in rural VA had no indoor plumbing, but had a VIC 20. I eventually got a C64, but that was after my dad brought home a IBM PC for a few months to do chemical calculations in a spreadsheet. He said it was revolutionary that he could put this machine on the factory floor reactor and develop plug-in-chug calculations for reactions. He also contracted a local EE to develop a CNC marine buoy winding machine based on the PC. I remember talking to the guy as a kid and he said it was compiled BASIC. It interfaced to the gantry motors and servo system via a giant, custom control board he made.
yawn 4y ago
Similar story. Learned Logo at school on a Vic-20. Loved it so much I taught myself Basic at Kmart by grabbing the Basic User's Guide off the shelf and typing stuff into one of the C64s on the display case. It impressed my dad so much he put one on layaway. Been programming ever since.
mlom 4y ago
i have a similar story about a 486 from the 90s. i have a lot of skills now and can do things many other people cannot, include make a lot of money if i want. but look around you, and ask, how does your personal wealth in this industry, which people are now forced to participate in to access basic life needs like food and transportation and social services, represent "progress" for anyone but you? are our operating systems secure? do they respect our privacy? or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness?
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness? It sounds like you're equating "tech industry" with Big Tech¹, but the tech industry is not an evil monolith. Even Alphabet is not an evil monolith, Apple is a radically different beast than Meta, etc. If you've decided that working in tech is default evil, you could choose a political path focused on breaking up and regulating Big Tech. But there are also plenty of good people leveraging tech for good, too. ¹a.k.a. "MANAMANA": Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe
  - mlom 4y ago
    greed is evil, and i see you all every day getting paid to fuck up our world. i see you online and i see you in person when you try to spend your money on me and services i provide. you have not succeeded in distinguishing yourself, you are all members of a technocratic class enriching itself at the expense of our environmental resources.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jgerrish 4y ago
  how does your personal wealth in this industry The Living Computer Museum in Seattle is closing down. Paul Allen's estate, who gave so much money and built several Seattle organizations, seems to be focusing money elsewhere. Like Bill Gates philanthropy, I assume they believe focusing resources towards vaccines and other general population philanthropic investments is more important. The Living Computer Museum was unique. I remember especially they had a room set up like an old 80s living room with an Atari VCS 2600, and a window looking outside. It wasn't important in the sense of "progress", but it provided a shared historical perspective. I hope whatever takes its place is cool. I'm tired of moving.
cbm-vic-20 4y ago
I have pretty much the same story.
jhgb 4y ago
We were not incredibly poor, although we probably would have been considered as such by US standards (which I'm sure were quite different at the time from Czechoslovak standards). We did have to smuggle our C64 over the Iron Curtain though, so I hope that this counts as something.
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  Stories like this fascinate me. (I've lived in the US my entire life so it's just completely foreign to my worldview.) What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one? And what were the "legal" alternatives?
  - jhgb 4y ago
    > What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one? Having a grandfather who left the country in 1968 for West Germany gifting me one when we visited him. > And what were the "legal" alternatives? Buying one at an outrageous markup in an exclusive shop. I don't remember the exact number (although I could find it out) but the price tag was something like five month of average Czechoslovak wages at the time. Apparently in the US the equivalent would have been paying $10000 for one (in 1988, mind you). Of course in Germany it cost something like 299 DM or so...
  - rasz 4y ago
    In Poland for a very long time private ownership of typewriters, fax machines, radio transmitters and computers was illegal without special permissions (>3 year prison term). You have to remember this was the time CIA was smuggling those to Poland with the help of Church. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/18/world/reagan-and-pope-reportedly-conferred-on-poland.html https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/18/world/reagan-and-pope-rep... >The report in Time adds many new details, particularly the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Roman Catholic Church in opening networks across which telephones, fax machines, printing presses, photocopiers, computers and intelligence information moved to Solidarity. Personal possession anecdote from book "High-tech za żelazną kurtyną. Elektronika, komputery i systemy sterowania w PRL" (978-83-8098-094-5) >In 1984, "Informatyka" magazine, involved in the dissemination of these machines, reported on the adventures of Mr. Przemysław, who received in April [...] a package from his brother in Toronto, containing the VIC-20 microcomputer, power supply, cassette recorder, a set of cassettes for television games and English language learning and connecting cables. The Customs Office in Gdynia refused to issue an import license, stating that it could issue [...] only if the computer was necessary for the citizen's professional or scientific work It slowly got better in second half of the 80s. COCOM relaxed import sanctions in 1984 on low end 8bit gaming machines: "New Media Behind the Iron Curtain: Cultural History of Video, Microcomputers and Satellite Television in Communist Poland" https://research.utu.fi/converis/getfile?id=51338894&portal=true https://research.utu.fi/converis/getfile?id=51338894&portal=... >The breakthrough in the domestication of computers in Poland took place in the mid-1980s, most likely between 1984 and 1986. In the global context, this might have been relatively late, but in the context of the Eastern bloc it seems that Poland was within the norm. There are two main reasons behind this chronology: one international, one local. Firstly, on an international level, the embargo on 8-bit technology was relaxed in 1984. Computers had been at the heart of the CoCom debate since the mid-1970s, but – as Mastanduno reports – it was not until July 1984 that the embargo on the most popular 8-bit microcomputers was removed, even though at the same time new restrictions were introduced regarding various telecommunications software and solutions. In 1985 you could finally legally buy 8bit Atari in Pewex - chain of shops exclusively accepting $western currency$. Personal ownership of western currency was illegal :-) but regime was running low on foreign cash to repay international loans so they came up with this brilliant plan of opening shops where you could spend your smuggled black market money semi officially. >Secondly, on a local level, as Kluska reports, in the autumn of 1984, the “[Polish] customs office ceased to make it difficult for citizens to import microcomputer equipment.” In 1986 weekend computer market opened up in Warsaw in rented School building. It ran weekly uninterrupted up to ~2012 with one location change. Interview with founder https://spidersweb.pl/plus/2021/04/gielda-komputerowa-prl-lata90-gamedev-gry-wideo-cdprojekt https://spidersweb.pl/plus/2021/04/gielda-komputerowa-prl-la... VHS recording from 1994 https://archive.org/details/gielda-komputerowa-na-grzybowskiej-16.01.1994 https://archive.org/details/gielda-komputerowa-na-grzybowski... Official 'Polish Film Chronicle' newsreel from 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxQqsqqH8ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxQqsqqH8ao
cgh 4y ago
Same, except it was a C64. Many happy days and nights spent learning BASIC and later 6502 assembly with 3 metres of snow on the ground outside and pitch black by 3:30 pm.

btgeekboy 4y ago

We weren’t well off either, but my dad was able to get a decent deal when our neighbor upgraded. It was put into my room for lack of space - and the rest is history.

bombcar 4y ago
For sooooo long the upgrade cycle was so short that you could live quite cheaply and comfortably by inserting yourself in the right place in the chain. In college I’d upgrade every three to six months and sell the old system off to someone for a good percentage of the new hotness.

haolez 4y ago

Same here. Got my 386 in 1994 (in Brazil nonetheless!).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

protomyth 4y ago

Yep, we traded in our Atari VCS (2600) with 23 cartridges for an Atari 400 and two game cartridges (Missile Command and Pac-Man). He spent money that was in short supply to buy a 410 (tape recorder) and the BASIC cartridge. We learned to program and that made all of the difference years on. There was a small slice of time where consumer, programmable computers were affordable to a large audience in the 80's and very early 90's. Adding to that era was the magazines that provided amazing content such as programs and news. Antic, Byte, Creative Computing, and Dr. Dobbs were the building blocks.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
Lucky you! I had the BASIC cartdrige for the... Atari 2600. It'd come with a joystick in two split halves which, if I remember correctly, you had to plug in the joystick ports (so one in each port). My memory may be failing me for it was a very long time ago. I still fondly remember the first lines I drew, in colors, using BASIC. One of my very first program.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I had BASIC for the Atari 2600 (called Atari VCS at the time). It came with two controllers that had membrane keyboards. There were not enough keys for the alphabet so you had to use key modifiers to type the full A-Z and 0-9 character set. It was immensely tedious and really a bummer to use. I’m surprised you got far enough to do graphics with it. I dont recall being able to do anything except every simple text-based things like: 10 print “hello” 20 goto 10
  - flomo 4y ago
    IIRC it didn't even have strings, but it did have drawing commands.
  - TacticalCoder 4y ago
    Yup I wrongly wrote "joystick" split in two halves but I meant a keyboard split in two halves. It's the same as you describe. I don't remember much: maybe I'm mistaken my memories of the 2600 for those of the 600 XL.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Good images of the manual and the keyboard overlays: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-basic-programming_7305.html http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-basic-programm... 64 bytes of basic tokens - so program size was limited to about 10 short lines. https://atariprojects.org/2019/12/24/try-basic-programming-on-the-atari-2600-15-30-mins/ https://atariprojects.org/2019/12/24/try-basic-programming-o... with video of a program running: https://atariprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BASIC-Video-on-Atari-2600.mov https://atariprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BASIC-V...

synu 4y ago

Exact same computer, and we were poor too. I learned BASIC on it and basically never stopped coding since then. It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer.

alkaloid 4y ago
> It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer. Isn't this the honest truth.

iancmceachern 4y ago

Same story here, but with a Tandy 100 RLX. We sold our Nintendo NES to help pay for it.

hereforphone 4y ago

You may want to double-check the definition of 'incredibly poor'.

madengr 4y ago
The kid down the road from me in rural VA had no indoor plumbing, but had a VIC 20. I eventually got a C64, but that was after my dad brought home a IBM PC for a few months to do chemical calculations in a spreadsheet. He said it was revolutionary that he could put this machine on the factory floor reactor and develop plug-in-chug calculations for reactions. He also contracted a local EE to develop a CNC marine buoy winding machine based on the PC. I remember talking to the guy as a kid and he said it was compiled BASIC. It interfaced to the gantry motors and servo system via a giant, custom control board he made.

yawn 4y ago

Similar story. Learned Logo at school on a Vic-20. Loved it so much I taught myself Basic at Kmart by grabbing the Basic User's Guide off the shelf and typing stuff into one of the C64s on the display case. It impressed my dad so much he put one on layaway. Been programming ever since.

mlom 4y ago

i have a similar story about a 486 from the 90s. i have a lot of skills now and can do things many other people cannot, include make a lot of money if i want. but look around you, and ask, how does your personal wealth in this industry, which people are now forced to participate in to access basic life needs like food and transportation and social services, represent "progress" for anyone but you? are our operating systems secure? do they respect our privacy? or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness?

CharlesW 4y ago
> or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness? It sounds like you're equating "tech industry" with Big Tech¹, but the tech industry is not an evil monolith. Even Alphabet is not an evil monolith, Apple is a radically different beast than Meta, etc. If you've decided that working in tech is default evil, you could choose a political path focused on breaking up and regulating Big Tech. But there are also plenty of good people leveraging tech for good, too. ¹a.k.a. "MANAMANA": Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe
- mlom 4y ago
  greed is evil, and i see you all every day getting paid to fuck up our world. i see you online and i see you in person when you try to spend your money on me and services i provide. you have not succeeded in distinguishing yourself, you are all members of a technocratic class enriching itself at the expense of our environmental resources.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jgerrish 4y ago
how does your personal wealth in this industry The Living Computer Museum in Seattle is closing down. Paul Allen's estate, who gave so much money and built several Seattle organizations, seems to be focusing money elsewhere. Like Bill Gates philanthropy, I assume they believe focusing resources towards vaccines and other general population philanthropic investments is more important. The Living Computer Museum was unique. I remember especially they had a room set up like an old 80s living room with an Atari VCS 2600, and a window looking outside. It wasn't important in the sense of "progress", but it provided a shared historical perspective. I hope whatever takes its place is cool. I'm tired of moving.

cbm-vic-20 4y ago

I have pretty much the same story.

jhgb 4y ago

We were not incredibly poor, although we probably would have been considered as such by US standards (which I'm sure were quite different at the time from Czechoslovak standards). We did have to smuggle our C64 over the Iron Curtain though, so I hope that this counts as something.

thrtythreeforty 4y ago
Stories like this fascinate me. (I've lived in the US my entire life so it's just completely foreign to my worldview.) What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one? And what were the "legal" alternatives?
- jhgb 4y ago
  > What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one? Having a grandfather who left the country in 1968 for West Germany gifting me one when we visited him. > And what were the "legal" alternatives? Buying one at an outrageous markup in an exclusive shop. I don't remember the exact number (although I could find it out) but the price tag was something like five month of average Czechoslovak wages at the time. Apparently in the US the equivalent would have been paying $10000 for one (in 1988, mind you). Of course in Germany it cost something like 299 DM or so...
- rasz 4y ago
  In Poland for a very long time private ownership of typewriters, fax machines, radio transmitters and computers was illegal without special permissions (>3 year prison term). You have to remember this was the time CIA was smuggling those to Poland with the help of Church. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/18/world/reagan-and-pope-reportedly-conferred-on-poland.html https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/18/world/reagan-and-pope-rep... >The report in Time adds many new details, particularly the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Roman Catholic Church in opening networks across which telephones, fax machines, printing presses, photocopiers, computers and intelligence information moved to Solidarity. Personal possession anecdote from book "High-tech za żelazną kurtyną. Elektronika, komputery i systemy sterowania w PRL" (978-83-8098-094-5) >In 1984, "Informatyka" magazine, involved in the dissemination of these machines, reported on the adventures of Mr. Przemysław, who received in April [...] a package from his brother in Toronto, containing the VIC-20 microcomputer, power supply, cassette recorder, a set of cassettes for television games and English language learning and connecting cables. The Customs Office in Gdynia refused to issue an import license, stating that it could issue [...] only if the computer was necessary for the citizen's professional or scientific work It slowly got better in second half of the 80s. COCOM relaxed import sanctions in 1984 on low end 8bit gaming machines: "New Media Behind the Iron Curtain: Cultural History of Video, Microcomputers and Satellite Television in Communist Poland" https://research.utu.fi/converis/getfile?id=51338894&portal=true https://research.utu.fi/converis/getfile?id=51338894&portal=... >The breakthrough in the domestication of computers in Poland took place in the mid-1980s, most likely between 1984 and 1986. In the global context, this might have been relatively late, but in the context of the Eastern bloc it seems that Poland was within the norm. There are two main reasons behind this chronology: one international, one local. Firstly, on an international level, the embargo on 8-bit technology was relaxed in 1984. Computers had been at the heart of the CoCom debate since the mid-1970s, but – as Mastanduno reports – it was not until July 1984 that the embargo on the most popular 8-bit microcomputers was removed, even though at the same time new restrictions were introduced regarding various telecommunications software and solutions. In 1985 you could finally legally buy 8bit Atari in Pewex - chain of shops exclusively accepting $western currency$. Personal ownership of western currency was illegal :-) but regime was running low on foreign cash to repay international loans so they came up with this brilliant plan of opening shops where you could spend your smuggled black market money semi officially. >Secondly, on a local level, as Kluska reports, in the autumn of 1984, the “[Polish] customs office ceased to make it difficult for citizens to import microcomputer equipment.” In 1986 weekend computer market opened up in Warsaw in rented School building. It ran weekly uninterrupted up to ~2012 with one location change. Interview with founder https://spidersweb.pl/plus/2021/04/gielda-komputerowa-prl-lata90-gamedev-gry-wideo-cdprojekt https://spidersweb.pl/plus/2021/04/gielda-komputerowa-prl-la... VHS recording from 1994 https://archive.org/details/gielda-komputerowa-na-grzybowskiej-16.01.1994 https://archive.org/details/gielda-komputerowa-na-grzybowski... Official 'Polish Film Chronicle' newsreel from 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxQqsqqH8ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxQqsqqH8ao

cgh 4y ago

Same, except it was a C64. Many happy days and nights spent learning BASIC and later 6502 assembly with 3 metres of snow on the ground outside and pitch black by 3:30 pm.