ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-10-06, 09:01:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-10-05, 22:33:

What the hell happened to this discussion? Somehow a topic about different fan bases evolved into a discussion of communism and capitalism.

Speaking of communism I can only say that commies didn't manage to clone the Commodore 64. 🙂

The Soviet had their own computer systems for research and higher education but simply saw no point of introducing computers to ordinary families. The Chinese cloned millions of "Famiclones" in early 1990s but mainly advertised as "learning machines" and game consoles (Subor was the most famous and successful one), not home computers.

The reason? Profitability. If a factory was capable of cloning MOS 6502-based systems it would just clone Famicom which had a much larger pool of games.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-10-06, 15:07:

I have stopped following this thread when it degraded days ago. 😜

Sorry about that. But it's not to late to go back on track, isn't it? 🙂

Edit: How about sharing a few personal stories about how the C64 affected our lifes in a positive way?
It would shed some light into the question why the C64 has passionate fans.

As for me, I got my latest C64 by a good friend who was an elderly ham and absolute loved that C64 of his.
He gave it to me to take care for it, just a few weeks before he passed.
That's why I keep it as a memento of him, even fixed it.
A few pages earlier I wrote about the ham hobby a litte bit, also.
The C128D was part of my childhood/youth, too, which both my father and me were interested in.
Because, it built a bridge between two worlds (6502/6510 and Z80).

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-10-06, 15:07:

Went from the OP talking about why C64 fans were more passionate around real hardware, then about hardware specs between platforms (which is fine when it isn't very long and boring, I'm being guilty of barely participating with two posts) and now with politics being dragged into the discussion which IMHO feels detracting in general.

To be fair, we're at page 14 now and no tragedy had happened yet.
Other Commodore threads rarely keep going so well for so long, don't they? 🤷‍♂️

The politics thing situation isn't wrong, but in real life, there's always politics.
Man is an political being all the time (according to Aristotle).
Even if it's not about political parties, but other things.

Vegetarian life style vs meat eaters, alcoholic vs non-alcoholic, Chivalry yes/no, type of confession, the way someone talks (accent),
type of smartphone (Android vs iOS) or operating system (Win vs Lin vs Mac)..
It does not take much to "trigger" people these days, sadly. It's the profane things that will do easily.

Edit: You can't even carelessly type in English without accidentally triggering people.
I can be wrong, but I think there's sort of an argument about the use of "a" vs "an".
As in "an user" vs "a user". In English class, we had been teached to use "an" if an audible a/e/i/o/u is being followed.
On the internet, however, quite a few people don't like "an" to be used? 🤷‍♂️

Back in school, not so long ago, we're being constantly bothered with that "political-correctnes" nonse.
It wasn't just about ordinary politeness, like greeting the teacher and not talking when not beeing asked.

For example, one of my teachers once made a big fuss, because I was unpolite.
I said something like "Me and my grandma once visited a zoo and.." - "IMPOLITE!!"

What did I do wrong? I said things in wrong order. I should have said "My grandma and me once visited a zoo." according to her.
Because, I should always be humble and mention others first..
Anyway, I had no bad intentions in first place.

Other things were the upcoming gender things (in language) back then.
We had to start to differentiate between waiter/waitress or actor/actress or policeman/policewoman and so on.

Before that time, the male form was always the generic form, as well, which was also including females.
The female form was usually used to differentiate.
Many female authors even supported that, because they wanted to be equal to their male colleagues.
They wanted to be authors, not "authresses" (=Autor vs Autorin).

Unfortunately, the new gendering is now being forced on to the population (not by officials, but schools do it anyway).
So if you're not complying, you're either a sexist, an eternal backward person or I don't know what.
Ironically, a large percentage of population (male/female/..) seems to be annoyed by the topic, also.

So yeah, it's a bad time to learn German right now.
We're going the opposite way to English language. Rather than unifying for equality (say, omitting actress), we're separating.
You now have to say both "waiter/waitress" each times. Or "waiter (m/w/d)" .
(m/w/d) meaning man/woman/diverse.

Anyway, I don't mean to go off-topic again, start a fire or go any further or make things any worse. So please don't mind or respond, please read and ignore, if possible.
I'm just trying to explain myself here, no more no less.

For someone born in 20th century/Europe, it's hard to adapt right now considering all the circumstances..
Or to not to loose mind. Everything you had been teached is now either upside-down or obsolete.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-10-06, 19:16:

For someone born in 20th century/Europe, it's hard to adapt right now considering all the circumstances..
Or to not to loose mind. Everything you had been teached is now either upside-down or obsolete.

Well, I kind of suspected before I even entered a thread about the C64, that it was going to talk about something that is now obsolete...

dormcat wrote on 2023-10-06, 18:34:

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-10-06, 09:01:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-10-05, 22:33:

What the hell happened to this discussion? Somehow a topic about different fan bases evolved into a discussion of communism and capitalism.

Speaking of communism I can only say that commies didn't manage to clone the Commodore 64. 🙂

The Soviet had their own computer systems for research and higher education but simply saw no point of introducing computers to ordinary families. The Chinese cloned millions of "Famiclones" in early 1990s but mainly advertised as "learning machines" and game consoles (Subor was the most famous and successful one), not home computers.

The reason? Profitability. If a factory was capable of cloning MOS 6502-based systems it would just clone Famicom which had a much larger pool of games.

I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about.

Soviet Union cloned everything it could buy or steal:

Agat — Apple II clone
ES EVM - IBM mainframe clone
ES PEVM - IBM PC compatible
Poisk — IBM PC-XT clone
Iskra-1030 — Intel 8086 XT clone
SM EVM — most models were PDP-11 clones, while some others were HP 2100, VAX or Intel compatible
DVK family — PDP-11 clones
Elektronika BK-0010 — LSI-11 clone home computer
UKNC — educational, PDP11-like
Elektronika 85 — Clone of DEC Professional (computer) 350 (F11)
Elektronika 85.1 — Clone of DEC Professional (computer) 380 (J11)
Elektronika SS BIS — Cray clone
Besta — Unix box, Motorola 68020-based, Sun-3 clone
ZX Spectrum clones:
ATM Turbo
Dubna 48K - running at half the speed of the original
Hobbit
Pentagon
Radon 'Z'
Scorpion
and many many more ...
5E76 - IBM/360 clone, military version
Micro-80 — experimental PC, based on 8080-compatible processor
Radio-86RK — simplified and modified version of Micro-80
etc... (taken from Wikipedia)

And they definitely were aware of home users, but they were lagging behind Western countries by 5-10 years, so their Home PC revolution started somewhere in the middle of 80's but in the end of 80's Soviet Union was already collapsing.

The Ruskies.had an 8086.clone., perhaps an 8088 also. I have 3 ofntheir 8086s. Have yet to test them. Nothing I own currently runs at the moment.

kant explain wrote on 2023-10-06, 19:49:

The Ruskies.had an 8086.clone., perhaps an 8088 also. I have 3 ofntheir 8086s. Have yet to test them. Nothing I own currently runs at the moment.

They cloned both and in addition also 8080, 8085 and Z-80 CPUs ... and many many more other different chips like 8051, 8031, 8035, 8039, 8748 etc. They were buying and stealing everything they could because they were simply unable to design something good by themselves.

American Home PC revolution started from January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine:

And Soviet Home PC revolution started from September 1982 issue of Radio magazine, where Communist party started publishing series of DIY articles:

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-10-06, 19:57:

They were buying and stealing everything they could because they were simply unable to design something good by themselves.

Thanks for the correction.

I've read a story about a Western scientist/engineer visiting USSR in 1980s carried a Japanese scientific calculator (by Casio or Sharp) with him that gave his Soviet colleagues a cultural shock as most of them were still using slide rules as their primary calculator.

dormcat wrote on 2023-10-06, 20:26:

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-10-06, 19:57:

They were buying and stealing everything they could because they were simply unable to design something good by themselves.

Thanks for the correction.

I've read a story about a Western scientist/engineer visiting USSR in 1980s carried a Japanese scientific calculator (by Casio or Sharp) with him that gave his Soviet colleagues a cultural shock as most of them were still using slide rules as their primary calculator.

Slide rules, there are places where people still use abacuses 😄:

Photo from 2012 from some distant area in Russia.

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-10-06, 20:21:

American Home PC revolution started from January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine:

That cover/magazine got it wrong.
The Altair 8800 was a microcomputer, not a minicomputer.

a) A minicomputer doesn't use a microprocessor such as i8080.

b) A minicomputer is the size of a whole desk, or has the ALU in a separate container.
It's smaller than a mainframe, though, which occupies a whole wall or floor, even.

Anyway, the magazine maybe was inexperienced at the time and didn't get things right at first, that would be understandable.

USSR vs calculators. They had digital pocket calculators (scientific), of course. Those attending an university, at very least.
They also had Game&Watch style LCD games from 1980s onwards (link).
ZX Spectrum clones were increasingly popular, too.
In the 90s, the Dendy (Famicom clone) became very popular, too. Ending up as a synonym for a game console.

Edit: i think the use of a slide rule was a preference, maybe. 🤷‍♂️
Like some people prefer analogue clocks over digital clocks.
My father still talks fondly about using slide rules, too.
Despite being a computer person. But that's before my time, really.

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-10-06, 20:31:

Slide rules, there are places where people still use abacuses 😄:

fznj9m52kn8v.jpg

Photo from 2012 from some distant area in Russia.

Well I don't know about Russians, but many of us East Asians treat abacuses with a very different attitude: parents believe practicing abacus helps children's math abilities. This trend reached its peak back in late 1980s: TV shows invited child prodigies, with or without physical abacus, to "beat" adults using electronic calculators with long arithmetic calculations. The trend gradually faded out in 1990s but I can still find abacus classes for pre- or grade schoolers nowadays in Taipei.

IMHO practicing abacus helps arithmetic but not mathematics; Nobel laureate Richard Feynman had shown that it might even hurt your math abilities when elements of more advanced math become more abstract.

Now how did we get here from C64? 😅

But let's go back to the topic.

Even though I'm not going to buy the Commodore 64, I've purchased the Commodore 1531 Datasette and the X1531 cable in order to connect it to one of my PCs.

dormcat wrote on 2023-10-06, 20:51:

Now how did we get here from C64? 😅

Morse code? 🙂 I told before, the C64 was used as a morse/radio teletype keyboard in the 1980s..
And in USSR, being a radio operator (doing morse, both civil and military) was a honorable/heroic profession.
They were being admired for their skills.

Edit:

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-10-06, 20:53:

But let's go back to the topic.

Even though I'm not going to buy the Commodore 64, I've purchased the Commodore 1531 Datasette and the X1531 cable in order to connect it to one of my PCs.

🙂👍

dormcat wrote on 2023-10-06, 20:51:

IMHO practicing abacus helps arithmetic but not mathematics

If you ask me, today it's good only as a back massager. 😄

Speaking of clones... I don't think anyone ever actually cloned the C64 or their chips?
The earliest 'clone' I know is the one Jeri Ellsworth made in 2004, but it is basically an FPGA-based 'software' emulation of the chips. The chips aren't actually cloned gate-for-gate.
And these days you can buy 'replacement' chips for SID or VIC-II, but again they are FPGA-based emulations, not gate-for-gate copies of the originals.

Is a gate for gate reproduction possible with an fpga? Fpgas or at least the old pal/gal type have some form of gate.

I think everyone would like to have actual burned into silicon reproductions of their beloved chips. But having something less then ideal is better the nothing.

kant explain wrote on 2023-10-06, 22:22:

But having something less then ideal is better the nothing.

Is it ? I'd rather have a good walk than a bad drive by car, for example.
Ie, I'd rather not have something than something poor.
Seriously, I don't understand people anymore. 😔

Edit: Back in the 90s, I've seen "vintage radio" imitations of tube radios.
They were made of cheap plastic and tried to imitate a stereotypical radio of my grandma's days.
However, it was nothing like the real thing. Made in China, cheap PCB glued to the plastic chassis etc.
The receiver was poor, the audio quality, too.

Edit: Or let's take emulator boxes that look like a NES, SNES or C64.
They're miniatures housing an SBC running an emulator.
They're 1/3th the size of the real thing, have no working slot or keyboard.
Before I get something like that, except for the giggles on a party, I'd rather use a full functional emulator.

You really must be responding to someone elses post. In life there's such thing as a reasonable facsimile. That doesn't make it poor. It makes it acceptable to some sizeable portion of people. You are fully within your rights to reject am fpga reproduction. Just leave me alone and let me like what I like.

By the way that seems to be the first time you posted anything that was less then 500 words.

kant explain wrote on 2023-10-07, 01:40:

By the way that seems to be the first time you posted anything that was less then 500 words.

Thanks, I try to keep it low all the time, but trying to justify myself isn't easy within a few words. 🙁

Also, again, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with the C64, which causes lots of thoughts about pros/cons.
That's why things turned out to be especially long, maybe.

Still, the discussions were quite fascinating in the past days. So many different views on the matter. 🙂👍

But to go back to the original topic, I can think of another reason why the C64 has so many passionate fans.

The people are a bit overburden by today's world and are looking back to fond times,
times in which they were happy.
Days from before PC, smartphone and social media were omnipresent.
And here, they remember the carefree days of good ol' C64, mailboxes, beloved films and other things.

That's why series like Stranger Things must be successful, also, I suppose.
People like to go forward, but with the culture/society they brought them happiness.
It's not just simple nostalgia, they're seeking/wishing for a reboot, maybe.

PS: No worries, I'll take a break for a while now.
I agree you're right that I overdid a bit. Sorry about that. 😅

The past has always fascinated me in one way or another. I don't want to go back though. Things often sucked really hard. When I was about 9 years old I had a stint where I took in every silent movie I could. I started reading about the Norse myths around that time. I've always been kind of a medieval guy, loved that crap since I was 4 (they bought me a medieval playset for my birthday. It turned me into quite the weird kid. And an even weirder adult). I started reading comic books at about 10. When I found out they had a 40+ year history, I did everything I could to read and learn about that. Now I didn't live through those years, but still found the historical nature quite irresistable.
So it shouldn't seem so strange that people who never experienced the classics when they were current still take immense interest in them. Technology is everything these days. People really don't want to be without it. The problem is they overburden themselves with it. I still take in much of what I need from AM radio. I never watch tv, don't even own cable/satellite
There just isn't enough there to interest me. And with so few hours in the day as it is who has the time.