6 ms·
The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64. It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor
by gxd 14d ago
The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.
It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.
Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)
- le-mark 14d agoI was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
- reaperducer 14d agodeep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard. Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way. But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.
- gxd 14d agoI've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book. The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.
- reaperducer 14d agoIf they don't want to print and ship a manual, offer a PDF online for curious people to download. Problem solved. Or, do what my car from 2014 did: The manual came on a USB stick. The problem isn't distribution, it's laziness and greed. Documentation takes time and money. It's seen as a cost by people who don't understand the benefits.
- gxd 13d agoI think a proper manual for a modern computer at the same detail level as the Commodore one would be much bigger than a car manual! It's not as much printing costs, but developing that documentation would cost a lot. I think that would make sense for big venders like Dell, Apple etc, but I wonder if anyone would actually read it. It's too much information...
- jz391 14d agoAnd, of course, with the Speccy you had the Microdrive - an affordable middle ground between tape recorder and a disk drive. I still remember the excitement of not having to record/rewind/play (to verify). Good old times...
- vidarh 14d agoFewer Spectrum's of all models combined appears to have been sold than the C64 alone, so it dominated very few places.
- UncleSlacky 14d agoThey had high market shares in countries with much smaller populations than the US, so in terms of number of countries (particularly in Europe and South America), it dominated in far more of them than the C64 did.
- guytv 14d agoNot only this. I had a ZX Spectrum, and at some point my dad got me a C128. I was taken aback by how poor its BASIC was in C64 mode, but on the other hand, adding sprites that moved freely across the screen without being bound to the 32x24 character grid felt like magic to me.