Way back in 1980, I was first introduced to the Commodore PET. I was in college, and there was a lab with a dozen machines, sharing a pair of 4040 twin disk drives. This was revolutionary: before this, my whole computing experience required booking time on the campus’ ICL 2960 mainframe (situated across town), and then returning the following day to collect the results. Naturally I lusted after a PET of my own, but as a student there was no way I could afford £700 for the computer, plus another £700 for the disk drive. (about £6500 in today’s money, more even than a fully maxed out 16″ M1Max MacBook Pro!)
So I waited. Before long the Vic 20 arrived on the scene. But I wasn’t impressed by the 22 column fuzzy colour screen. So I waited some more. Finally the Commodore 64 came out. This was much more like it, so I jumped on that bandwagon, and life was great. I bought the 1541 Disk Drive and (like everyone else) was thoroughly disappointed. But there were plenty of hacks and workarounds that could speed it up. I wrote software, even wrote a book, and occasionally played games, although I was never very good at them.
After a while, the Commodore 128 came along. It was (literally) twice the computer, and I jumped on that too. Wrote more software, played more games. And for a time life was rosy.
But the Amiga was not far behind, and so my 128 was relegated to the attic, and largely forgotten while a stream of 16 bit and 32 bit computers came and went.
Fast forward to 2021 and the Pandemic. It’s time now to pull the 128 from the attic and blow the dust off. Let’s see what we’ve got…