What’s interesting about old computers is how slow they appear nowadays. In my 40+ year programming career, you’d complain a machine was slow to develop upon so you’d get an upgrade and it would seem really zippy. But within months it would seem to be no faster than what it replaced. Lather, rinse, repeat. For 40 years!!!
Of course what happened was your software tasks got bigger and bigger because you could do more and more so the speedup was used up with more software. And the loop continued each cycle.
It’s quite scary when you see how slow a 20 year old PC is to boot say Windows XP on a spinning rust disk compared to a modem PC booting from an SSD. At the time that old boot up time seemed quick.
Then you put it all into context and see what could be done 50 years ago with 32KW of mag core, a paper tape reader and a pair 9trk tapes. I think all programmers should be made to build a 64k x8 DRAM card using wirewrap and 4k x 1 chips. Once they’ve wrapped a few hundred wires they’ll be less keen to write simple programs that need GB to run
VX-4 processor aside for a sec, my VX-4 BBS runs at 4800 baud…even an extravagant 9600 baud if it is feeling a bit spicy!
Runs great and I am going to try to convert it to machine so it runs the QSO software faster and frees up more space. Same with the BBS software.
I’ve a few hardware ideas for the VX-4 for taking it out /P too as well as more thoughts about useful software. If I can fix the Z-1GR display I will port it to the 16 bit beast!
My 486SX Thinkpad is surprisingly nippy running Windows 3.11 and Microsoft Office from a Compact Flash Card. Many an old laptop has been given a new lease of life with a replacement for spinning rust.
Agree 100% on the C64. I still have my original C64, and it still works. During the covid pandemic I brought it out and set it up and had a lot of fun with it. My kids enjoyed playing all my old games. We built a wifi modem for it using an ESP32 and my kids got to experience the Internet of the 1980’s (dialing in to BBS at 1200 baud, but ported over telnet).
All that stuff has been boxed up again and probably won’t see the light of day for a while.
I still have a pair of C64, plus a matching color monitor and tape drive. Originally, I had a C16 from Radio Shack, but returned it when I found there was no modem port. Lots and lots of games available for both models.
I love how the Commodore 64 is still punching strong approaching half a century old now.
The acceleration of technology in that space of time is mind-boggling, but even more so now as consumers grapple with built-in obsolescence, right to repair, shorter hardware and software life cycles and so on.
Yet still the C64 lives on and continues to find new audiences. The same could probably be said about the Spectrum and Amiga but I think the C64 is possibly more revered?
Have a look at this winning demo The Lab by Elysium which won the top prize at X’2026 in the Netherlands back in June this year.
Incredible work. The full list of winners is here, all doing stuff the C64 was never designed to do. Great to see!
