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Commodorians Part 4

This was one of the three mega exhibits for the 40th anniversary of the big three appliance computers launched in 1977.   Anthony Becker, Jeffrey Brace, Chris Fala, Todd George (captain), & Bill Winters combined their skills, collection, and love for Commodore equipment to showcase the PET-2001′s family tree.

Commodore launched the Amiga line in 1985, and with it a whole new breed of computer geek was born.  A powerhouse multimedia computer that was outclassing the graphics and sound capabilities of any competing home computers, the Amiga series was sold until the company’s demise in 1994.

Anthony Becker & Bill Winters brought their sizable Amiga collection, spanning the full series starting with the Amiga 1000.  The real sales powerhouses were the Amiga 2000 and its less expensive, less expandable counterpart, the Amiga 500.  The 1200, 3000, 4000, and CD32 rounded out the bunch, showing what was happening in the final days at Commodore.  The CD32 in particular has some amazing games and demos to show the kind of graphics it could produce.

If I asked what machine was considered the heir to the Commodore 64′s throne, what would your answer be?  The C128, with full backwards compatibility and features bursting out of the seams?  The Amiga 500, filling a similar niche as an inexpensive, graphically capable gaming machine?  There was a different heir apparent in the works that never saw full production...

The real gem of this display was the prototype machine from 1990/91: the Commodore 65.  8-bit development was passe, everyone else was focusing on new Amiga machines to fill out the various market niches.  Then some guy in who didn’t really work well with anyone else was working on the Commodore 65. 

It included an internal 1581 3½ floppy drive, a keyboard not all that dissimilar from the C128′s, 128K of RAM stock, expandable to 8MB, 4096 possible colors, a 320x200 256 color mode, and a 1280x400 16 color mode.  It used the CSG 4510 processor, running at 3.54MHz.  This machine never left the prototype stage, but a handful of Commodore 65′s have made their way to collectors over the years.  No software exists for the machine, so it doesn’t have anything to show off besides some disks of unfinished demos, and a rainbow boot screen.

Speaking of the 1581, the exhibit had an impressive drive tower.  Stacked drives included the 1571, 1541-II, 1581, aftermarket Blue Chip drive, and CMD FD-4000.  Commodore fans seem to like making drive towers, and I completely understand this fascination.

Pre-Raster Graphics

David Gesswein is considered to be one of the reigning experts in DEC’s PDP-8.  Almost every time I’ve been to a VCF East, David is there with a PDP-8 of some kind, usually an 8/e, and this time was no exception.  He took portraits with a modern camera, then converted them to ASCII and printed them out on a large, beautiful, dot-matrix printer -- I plan on framing mine! 

There was also a Tektronix 4014 showing just how much resolution the 1970s had to offer (if only in monochrome).  Brian Stuart, who had the exhibit on Forth, borrowed this terminal to test one of his programs on the authentic piece of kit and it was beautiful.  If I understand correctly, unlike other terminals of the era, Tektronix graphical terminals had on-board storage to keep images locally.  You’ll note the bank of circuit boards that sat in the cabinet under the CRT to facilitate storage and precision graphical rendering.

Lastly, David had a really cool Calcomp 563 plotter drawing really cool artwork, one line at a time.  Makes me want a plotter...

AppleDappleDudes

This was one of the three mega exhibits for the 40th anniversary of the big three appliance computers launched in 1977.  Tony Bogan (captain), Corey Cohen, Mouse Kelly, Adam Michlin, & Joseph Oprysko worked together to show the Apple II in all its glory.

An original Apple II, followed by II+, IIeuroplus, IIe, platinum IIe, IIc, IIc+, IIGS.  I don’t have alot to say about this one, but I think they covered the lineage pretty effectively.  

Commodorians Part 1

This was one of the three mega exhibits for the 40th anniversary of the big three appliance computers launched in 1977.   Anthony Becker, Jeffrey Brace, Chris Fala, Todd George (captain), & Bill Winters combined their skills, collection, and love for Commodore equipment to showcase the PET-2001′s family tree.

Before Commodore Business Machines was making computers, they were making office equipment, namely typewriters.  They got into the game of manufacturing adding machines, followed by calculators which were constantly decreasing in size while improving their capabilities.  During the calculator wars, Texas Instruments had an upper hand in the market by being a main source of calculator integrated circuits.  In an attempt to subvert TI’s control, Commodore purchased MOS Technology so they could produce their own semiconductors in house. 

It just so happened that MOS had a microprocessor, the now famous 6502, which they were using in the KIM-1 trainer./demonstrator. Commodore continued selling the KIM-1 with their own branding, and one was on display acting as a clock.

However, the 6502 really shined in their first home computer, the PET-2001, available initially in an 8K version and a short lived 4K version.  The PET was unique compared to its contemporary appliance home computers (the Apple II and TRS-80 Model I) in that it included a monitor and tape drive all in the same chassis.  You’ll also note that the case of the 2001 is made from metal, not plastic like the competition.  In true Commodore fashion, this was a money saving move -- they re-purposed their file cabinet manufacturing arm to make cases for the PET line resulting in very sturdy cases.  The keyboards were re-purposed from cash registers, resulting in an incredibly clunky and uncomfortable design that didn’t last long. 

I made it a personal mission to sit down at the PET-2001-8, just as I had at my first VCF East a decade ago, and program something.  I tweaked the existing random character generator program on screen to use different PETSCII graphics than the demonstrator they had set up.  This is an early blue bezel model, which makes up for the terrible chiclet keyboard.

Going Forth Into the Past

You want to find a higher level language that’s really easy to port to various architectures spanning about 50 years? Brian Stuart has you covered with the classic language Forth.  Brian even implemented it himself for his LSI-11 (basically a PDP-11/03 on a chip) back when he was in college, and decided to dust it off for the first time in decades just for VCF East.  He also had a 6809 based SBC, a SPARC Station, and the Pocket Chip arm based machine.  You name it, Forth will be there.  He even was emulating a Tektronix graphics terminal on his laptop, drawing spirograph-like images using Forth -- he later got to test it on the real thing.

Commodorians Part 2

This was one of the three mega exhibits for the 40th anniversary of the big three appliance computers launched in 1977.   Anthony Becker, Jeffrey Brace, Chris Fala, Todd George (captain), & Bill Winters combined their skills, collection, and love for Commodore equipment to showcase the PET-2001′s family tree.

Commodore’s PET/CBM series wasn’t exactly geared towards computer users on a budget, nor did any of them have color graphics modes, or a wide variety of games.  Then in 1980, the VIC-1001 was released in Japan in an attempt to corner their home computer market before anyone else.  However, it didn’t take too well to the Japanese market, and Commodore never succeeded there.

However, the American version known as the VIC-20 was wildly successful.  In 1981, a VIC-20 could be purchased for under $300 which was incredibly inexpensive for a color home computer.  The downside was that the VIC-20 only had a 22 column display, and 5K of RAM, of which only 3583 bytes were available to the user. 

The VIC-20 was the first computer to break a million units sold.  In true Commodore fashion, they saved money wherever possible by changing the design to decrease production costs, resulting in three main variations.

Early models that lacked RF shielding around the VIC-I graphics chip and a massive heat sink

Models with RF shielding and a massive heat sink

Late, cost-reduced models with denser RAM chips, improved power regulation, no massive heat sinks, and smaller motherboards

The VIC-20 introduced the serial IEEE-488 bus designed to replace the older parallel version, so as to save money on disk and printer interfaces.  The first disk drive to use this interface was the short-lived VIC-1540 drive.  Due to the way serial was implemented, the 1540 only works with the VIC-20.  It was replaced with the VIC-1541, which was later branded the 1541 and continued to be used with the majority of the Commodore 8-bit line.  Because of its short production run and lack of general compatibility, the VIC-1540 has become somewhat of a collectors item.  This one was on loan to the team, and its functional status was unknown. 

Most software distributed for the VIC-20 came on cassette tape, as well as on ROM cartridges that plugged into the back of the machine.

TRanSistors Part 2

This was one of the three mega exhibits for the 40th anniversary of the big three appliance computers launched in 1977.   Peter Cetinski, Kelly Leavitt, Dean Notarnicola (captain), his son Drew Notarnicola, & Jeffrey Jonas teamed up to display Tandy Radio Shack computers, primarily focusing on the TRS-80.

Seen here is the rarely talked about TRS-80 Model II, which was designed as more of a business machine than a personal machine.  This means that Tandy gave this machine a 4MHz Z-80A, 32K or 64K of RAM, the largest external storage mediums available, and a 12″ monitor -- nothing to sneeze at in 1979.

It included an internal 8″ floppy drive, but it was common to see it with a hulking bank of three external 8″ drives.  It isn’t common to see a model II running, but this is VCF East, and it’s no fun to display a broken computer.  I played Star Trek on it, however it was loaded from a modern CF card storage device instead of the original 8″ drives (which are apparently incredibly frustrating to fix).  I also played Worms, which was a pretty good snake game, even with the awkward controls. 

While they weren’t architecturally similar to the desktop Trash-80 machines, the TRS-80 Model 100, 102, 200, and even 600 series portable machines were a big hit.  A precursor to the modern laptop in terms of portability, these devices had full keyboards that would put many modern machines to shame.  The down side to this design was the limited character display, lacking a backlight or any serious graphics modes.  I still want one...