In the beginning, there were the 8 bits.

Actually, at first, there was a Timex Sinclair. That was a bit of a disaster, not necessarily any fault of ours. The computer itself was hugely popular, especially when the price fell to under 50 dollars. The fault lay in it's meager 2K of main memory. Timex, who made the device under license, simply didn't anticipate the demand for the 16K ram expansion pack. The thing that made the computer do anything useful other than print out nasty messages about my sister in a semi-random pattern.

Hey, it was all you could do with 2K of ram.

Then, deciding we needed to hit every dead end of 8-bit computing, I was given a Vic-20 for christmas. The purchase decision was no doubt influenced by it's discontinuation and the recent price drop to 70 dollars.

The Vic-20 had 5K of memory. We were smoking now. And, unlike the Timex, you could actually do things with the Vic without the ram expansion. But that's because most of the program cartridges had extra ram on them.

I digress. There's a point to all of this. Don't stop quite yet, brave reader.

So the vic served out a few years, mostly as a game machine. I'd occasionally try my hand at basic, but there just wasn't anything beyond the simple manual. Then, one joyous day, it died. Just crackle, snap, pop, dead.

So for my 13th christmas, or maybe it was my 12th, I convinced my father to buy me a Commodore 64 for both a christmas gift, and my next birthday. This was the shit.

Three days later we were in Sears, at that time a mecca of all things low end computer, buying a 1541 disc drive. My father was cursing up a storm, but the writing was on the wall... the Commodore 64 was useless without one, and all of the software that came with it, educational software for me and some around the house applications for dad, were useless without the disk drive.

Back in those days, the gold rush days of the first home computers, software was available in many ways, but the only few that meant shit were cartridge and disk. And there was a 3rd, magazine.

Yeah, magazine.

You'd buy a magazine, probably something like Ahoy! or Compute's Gazette for 2.95. Inside would be software sent in by hobbyist programmers, and you'd type it in. You had games, utilities, applications. It was beautiful.

You rarely found much in basic. Sure, a few applications here and there, but the basic that existed on the Commodore was later banned by the Geneva convention as having damaged too many children. So most of what you typed was ML, and you typed it into a special ML Loader program. You'd spend hours typing lines like....

00 0A 3F E3 B1 F3 D2 F3 83

The last 2 numbers were checksums, designed to make sure you didn't crap up the first 6 numbers. I think. It's been a while, so forgive the occasional errors. Anyhow, it was mind numbing work to go out and type in all of that and end up with a very nice clone of space invaders.

But that clone of space invaders was dear to me. As I kind of mentioned above, games were forbidden to me for some odd reason. My parents would only buy me "educational software". Anything else I would have to purchase or write on my own. So the magazines, at 2.95 a pop and offering 4 or 5 programs (at least) a month, were incredible bargains.

What's more you could take all the code, disassemble it, and see how it all worked. I guess that's where I got my start with all of this computer programming stuff. That and a copy of the Commodore 64 Programmer's Guide. I finally had a computer they published books for.

And for a simple 8bit, 1mhz computer with 64K of memory, that beige box could sing and dance. You had sound that really wasn't equalled until the sound blaster came out for the PC, which was rather late in the game. You had graphics which trounced CGA and EGA, which was the only real competition. You had a great gaming machine.

But you also had, and this blows my freakin mind, a full WYSIWYG word processor. Pull down menus. Icon driven interfaces. Dialog boxes. GEOS... it was like Mac OS 1.0. But it worked, and it was cheap.

So how come, 18 years later, I'm stuck with clippy? We read manuals back then. Are people too stupid to do that these days? Where has people's curiosity gone to? Do they really need an animated dog to help them find their files?

Thing was, back then you had to have some sort of idea what you were doing to get the damn box to work. Taking a disk monitor and looking at raw game data on discs was fairly common, and educational. Honestly, the best programmers, in my opinion, are the ones who started with the 8 bit beige boxes. Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, I discriminate not. We're all brothers.

Ah well, at least Doom3 looks good. I wouldn't give up the GeForce for that old 64 output. Unless you're talking Rocket Ranger...

Those were the days.