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🅼🅾🅽🅾🅻🅰🅻🅸🅰 → M’kay Computer → 1986: My first computer(s)!

I was a bit late with everything, it seems. From LCD handhelds and tabletop games with sharp, bright VFDs (vacuum fluorescent displays) I went on to a b&w Pong console and the venerable Atari VCS. It was all a bit behind the times, a bit fleamarkety. The first “real computer” in my life was an Apple ][, from a line of machines that must’ve been 6-8 years old by then. Still, until then I had had no idea what a computer even was — just like most everyone else around 1983-1985.

I was charmed by those glowing amber and green screens, those rattling disk drives, those mysterious black squares full of self-running little worlds, and — subtly — the infinite reprogrammability of the machine. A computer could make stuff happen that had never existed before — and said stuff would run BY ITSELF. A computer was a frickin’ world engine.

Now, the Atari 600 XL and C 64 I would encounter later were of course better equipped for the colourful action games I’d end up playing the most (as fascinated as I was by the adventure games, my English wasn’t quite there yet). But there was a chunky solidity to the hefty Apples; even the beeper managed to sound voluminous in my mind. The ubiquitous dithering used to complement the machine’s limited colour graphics looked nothing but d i s t i n g u i s h e d in monochrome. And there was something charming and playful about the title screens² that I’ve rarely really since since.

¹or to “trigger” them in the first place; see: artifact colours.

Nox Archaist, a new Ultima-style Apple ][ RPG

²Gruds in Space, for example.

“The Last Jedi” teaser trailer remade in monochrome Apple ][ graphics! (video, 1:55)

I get a C16! Yay?

Alas, the Apple ][ wasn’t going to be the first computer I’d have for myself. That was to be the Commodore 16. You see, Commodore decided to dump their remaining 264 series¹ stock through ALDI in 1986. And who wanted an ALDI computer that had only 16 in the name instead of 64? Not me, really, but it was still a computer, and it’d surprise me and even make me a little proud at times.

What’s a C16, then? A budget machine released in 1984, two years after the C64, in the same sort of breadbin case, after canceling the technically identical rubber wonder C116 that was meant to pointlessly compete with Sinclair’s low-end offerings.

The C116. Imagine it next to a Spectrum. Briefly available in Germany only.

The C16, of course, only ever got compared to its wildly successful lookalike, the C64.

(Image credit: Mingo, mingos-commodorepage.com)

Much like the 64, the 16/116 had a power connector, two joystick ports, an expansion (cartridge) port, a serial port for printers and disk drives, video out, RF out, and a cassette port. Unlike the 64 (and their own big brother, the plus/4), they lacked a user port, perhaps owing to the diminutive size of the 116. Somewhat annoyingly, the joystick and cassette ports were incompatible with everything hitherto on the market, though adapters for Atari-style joysticks were cheap and simple and the systems were commonly sold with 1531 “datassettes” anyway.

It was more immediately accessible than all of Commodore’s earlier offerings — with BASIC 3.5 you could jump right in and draw colourful geometric shapes and make bleeping and hissing noises instead of wrapping your head around PEEK()s and POKEs.

We had…

DIRECTORY, DLOAD, DSAVE, COPY, BACKUP, COLLECT, SCRATCH, HEADER, RENAME, ERR$
GRAPHIC, COLOR, DRAW, BOX, CIRCLE, GSHAPE, SSHAPE, SCNCLR, SCALE, PAINT, RDOT(), RCLR()
HELP, TRON, TROFF, TRAP, RESUME, AUTO, RENUMBER
DO, LOOP, UNTIL, WHILE, EXIT
VOL, SOUND, JOY(), GET KEY, HEX$(), DEC(), CHAR, PRINT USING…

…and everyone’s darling, the C64, most certainly did not. We did not lose our programs every time we viewed the disk directory, without any expansions/'wedges'. We had easily programmable function keys — think macro keys. That brand new Esc key improved the BASIC screen editor and enabled simple (tiled) text windowing. A built-in assembler and machine code monitor (TEDMON) let us dabble in assembly from the get-go. We had 121 lovely pastel colours, versus the 64’s 16 shades of murk (which I'll probably never feel any nostalgia for). We got a matching disk drive, the 1551, that connected to the expansion port and was 4-5x faster than the notoriously sluggish 1541. Speaking of speed, the 7501/8501 CPUs used in the C16/116 and plus/4 ran at around 1.7 MHz rather than at around 1, but see below for the catch. Another Commodore novelty (or did any of the CBM-II series have it?) was a reset button — letting you break out of any game and optionally into the machine code monitor where you could, you may have guessed it, save the entire whopping 16K of RAM as well as look for whatever assembly instructions determined how many lives you started out with…

Function key usage (actually a plus/4 screenshot (sorry)).

TEDMON in action.

The Young Picasso showing the 264 series’ comparatively large palette.

(image credit: me, me, plus4world.powweb.com)

Take that, 64, eh? Maybe not quite. The 16 and 116 would inevitably be measured by their gaming chops, and a much expanded colour palette and easily achievable soft scrolling were really all they had going for them in that regard. The TED chip’s sound was rubbish; it had two voices, one of which could alternatively be used for noise, with one global volume, no low end to speak of, and… that's it, really. Impressive feats have been achieved with it but you wouldn't really want to, you know, listen to them out of context. Worse, still, the TED had no hardware sprites; it had to share RAM access with the CPU whenever it was updating the screen, slowing the machine down to half its full speed. But still. It found its users, mostly because it ended up getting sold off for cheap. Software was written for it, some of the games were fun for a while, and writing your own (typically very silly) software was fun too.

Let’s take a quick look at some games!

Bongo, a game by Udo Gertz

Tom, aka Tom Thumb, another game by Udo Gertz

BMX Simulator, a game by Codemasters

(image credit: mostly plus4world.powweb.com)

Not that shabby for a 16K micro without sprites. You could have quite a good time with Kikstart, Tom, Ghost Town, Tutti Frutti, Squirm, or Galaxy. Especially if you were new to all this.

Applications? Rudimentarily there, supplemented by lots of type-in programs from magazines like “Compute Mit”. Well, mostly that one, really…

Music Master application

Char-Editor application

(image credit: mostly plus4world.powweb.com)

The plus/4!

We are at last getting to the first computer in this article that did not require children to stand on a chair to reach the keyboard, the plus/4. Much like the 16 and 116 it was sold off for cheap in then-unusual places, and I upgraded to it from the C16, to which is it in most ways identical. It had 64K, with 60671 bytes free to the user (compared to 38911 on the C64! HAHAHA! YOU LOSE). It had a user port (modems and things), which the 16/116 lacked. It had a built-in “office suite”, to use the term loosely, and a case design much like the rubber-keyed 116 but bigger and actually usable.

This is what it looked like. Still does.

(image credit: Mingo, mingos-commodorepage.com)

Now, what it was supposed to be was an affordable office/productivity computer. I doubt it was hugely attractive to small businesses in 1984 with that chunky 40-column default-upper-case Commodore charset… not to mention that the included office suite really wasn’t up to snuff, and as far as I know you couldn't get anything on the level of VisiCalc or Wordstar either.

But I had no use for business software at the time. Graphics and music software on the other hand, BASIC extensions… we had some, and much more now. My favourite things at the time were the charset editor Graphics Designer and Turbo+, a fastloader cartridge with a BASIC extension that, among a few other things, made program listing scrollable with the up/down cursor keys, just like in a proper “visual” text editor. I’m sure I’d have liked to print little magazines too but nothing DTP-ish ever crossed my desk.

SVS Calc

GEOS, graphical OS shell!

TEDzakker, modern music tracker

PET Draw, “PETSCII” art editor by David Murray (The 8-Bit Guy)

(image credit: plus4world.powweb.com)

Neither was it much of a games machine, lacking hardware sprites and decent sound… though the same could be said of the successful Zedex Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. But the plus/4 was inevitably compared to the C64 instead and, worse perhaps, inevitably held back by the cheaper compatible 16K models.

So would it have been possible to have f u n with a plus/4? Yyyes. It's a perfectly reasonable albeit unimpressive 8-bitter when it comes to Speccy-type isometric games, adventure and role-playing games, and the occasional simpler action game. Mind you, most of the more luxurious 64K plus/4 games are Hungarian bootleg ports, unofficial remakes, or modern-day homebrews -- back in the day, the situation was indeed most dire.

Alpharay, modern original R-Type-style game

Alpharay (title screen)

Pets Rescue, modern original Super-Mario-Bros-style game

Pets Rescue (title screen)

Adventure Park, modern original platforming game

The Pit, modern original game, an enhanced take on Boulder Dash

Mercenary: The Second City, classic game

Elite, unofficial port

Head over Heels, unofficial port

The Bard’s Tale 3, unofficial port (title screen)

Lode Runner, unofficial port

Knight Lore, unofficial port (title screen)

(image credit: plus4world.powweb.com)

There is, in other words, still a bit of the scene around the machine. There’re demos, there’re diskmags, there’s (some) homebrew hardware like a SID-based soundcard. I’m not sure if all of the SID’s features are available on the plussy, given that the timing is different from the 64, but it sounds great either way. And if you could send one of those FLI slideshows back into the past, they’d knock everyone’s socks off. Have knocked. Will have knocked?

Dreamtime 2K17 FLI graphics slideshow (YouTube)

Metamerism demo by Bauknecht (YouTube)

Promised Land demo by GOTU, with SID card sound (YouTube)

At the time, though, the plus/4’s main purpose in my life was BASIC programmming with some very abortive forays into assembler via the built-in monitor, much like the C16’s had been. It was nice for that, though I often hit a point where I lacked the understanding, planning skills and literature to push on.

Do I miss it? Sometimes. Not as much as the Apple, to which it was superior in every way I can think of right now except expandability and, crucially, software library…

Further information:

Let's Explore The Commodore Plus/4! Feat. Mercenary by Retro Recipes (YouTube, 24:36)

The Commodore plus/4 (Wikipedia)

The Commodore 16 and 116 (Wikipedia)

Commodore History Part 4 - The Plus4, C16, and C116 by The 8-Bit Guy (YouTube)

¹i.e., the plus/4, 16, and 116 (and the unreleased 232, 264 and V364)