Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982(dfarq.homeip.net) |
Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982(dfarq.homeip.net) |
POKE 53280, 0
POKE 53281, 0
POKE 1,0I can't remember how you switched to 64 mode anymore though. i remember switching to CP/M mode and being utterly lost.
It's firmly lodged in my fingers still.
Plenty of computer magazines from that era on archive.org. Try Byte or Compute!.
The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.
Three pieces of software that are mind-boggling on that hardware:
1. GEOS and the whole suite (GeoWrite, etc)
2. The Last Ninja video game
3. Echelon video game
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
Long, strange trip.
Then as now it’s memory that matters.
Anyhow if you want a brand new Commodore 64 get it here:
https://retrogames.biz/products/thec64/
It looks a lot like a C64 breadbin, with an actual working keyboard, but inside there's an ARM and of course it outputs to HDMI and has USB ports for pendrives.
It's a good middle ground between "just an emulator on your laptop" and "a real C64 with all the inconveniences".
My biggest success was piecing together how to switch out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
Did you make use of CP/M applications? I often wonder how well that worked back in the day; one of my best friends had a Commodore 128, but used it exclusively as a 64 as well for his pal across the street owned a Brotkasten (breadbin).
I'm fairly certain that computers to a 10 year old me in 2026 would be far less interesting than they were to actual 10 year old me in 1983.
The relative mystery they had around them then (assuming you weren't the kid of a turing award winner or some such, my parents were just normie folks) and seeking out the rare bits of written documentation held in a tiny dark corner at libraries, in tattered old used books, etc was like learning ancient, arcane magic knowledge and that was a lot of the allure for me.
Having instant access to most of the world's knowledge to answer any question you might have is objectively powerful, but just not nearly as fun as half-blindly intuiting your way through the dark weeds until deep understanding eventually just falls into place.
At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.
I had the luxury of a disk drive, and even eventually had an Epyx Fast Load cartridge to speed (some) things up even further! Practically zooming for the time!
A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so.
Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive...
We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.
I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did.
I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid.
It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid.
I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.
I have as well; to conquer that feeling of failure at last.
Yeah, the BASIC sucked. I'm glad it sucked just enough to make me want to learn more on my own.
My C64 came with a Super Snapshot. It had a button on the cartridge that would freeze the running program and provide options like editing the memory, modify machine code, persist current state to disk, etc.
I would type programs in BASIC and then examine the machine code that it got compiled to. I learned a lot more than I would have without the cartridge.
Even though I still have lots of original home / computer hardware including multiple versions of the C64 (working or still to be fixed..) I just ordered the Cyberpunk 2077 ornate "Commodore 77" so as to be able to play with it and potentially port over and adapt BBC basic adjacent basic like MMbasic (or make my own focused attempt at it).
It's a semi open FPGA platform and latest one here is still not MiSTer grade on many fronts but should give enough freedom at least to have my own bespoke ROM replacement come up on init.
The goal would exactly be that of eventually getting rid of the builtin basic for recreational biking of the mind with our young padawan...
I also own a MiSTer and the community's well done BBC core already largely gets us to where I want us to be but the platform chiefly lacks the SID as well as the nature of a dedicated device.
Booting into "C64 BBC basic" is a must; I hope to book some time for this project next year at the very latest.
https://commodore.net/store/commodore64/?shape=Breadbin&colo...
Getting my first PC XT clone with GW BASIC felt liberating, suddenly I could write graphical games with ease! But to this day I still love my C64, wherever it is now.
I don't know if I'll ever get around to "ripping" those disks to sort through and possibly find anything worthy of sending to the Internet Archive. And this is also assuming they still have anything readable on them.
I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have.
Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!
I still learned so much from typing short programs into it. I talked my parents into buying me an assembler so that I could make changes without re-typing a whole program.
Between games and writing first code in Basic, something magical was happening. Over the years it defined how I think, and ultimately who I am. Thank you C64 and thanks to everyone who worked on it
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*Your art reminded me that some of my earliest code produced animated flying rockets:
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*I also want to thank my mother for giving me a C64 for Christmas in 1983. My single mother worked 2 jobs most of my childhood (corporate gig by day, waitress in the evening); our family always struggled with money. I have no idea how she paid for the C64, plus the 1541 disk drive and 300-baud modem. I also didn't know the C64 would be so pivotal in my life - I was just some nerdy kid who loved to tinker with stuff, but Mom knew. So, thanks Mom; I owe you everything. Oh, and sorry for tying up the phone line all the time.
I recently found the framed receipt for this purchase. My mom still had it and framed it when she found it years ago, as it became clear that purchase led to my prosperity (until recently) as a software engineer. I found it in a box out in my garage, where it now sits next to my C64 (the original case, but not original motherboard).
The whole purchase - C64 + 1541 and a few other things, adjusted for inflation, would be around $1200, which is a lot for a single mother with 2 kids. It makes me appreciate her wisdom in seeing the importance of that purchase.
>Oh, and sorry for tying up the phone line all the time.
Also sorry for the $300 phone bill ($900 today), the month after I got my first 300 baud modem. Phone calls were way more expensive back then, calling across local counties cost more than numbers closer to me. And out of state charges were ridiculous. And file transfers were sloooow. I got into trading warez right away, so it got expensive. And then I became a phone phreak, but that's a separate story.
So I was able to pre-order the C64 before it was released, which earned me a "free" tape drive to actually store programs--the disk drive had to wait a bit. But my serial number was something in the 700s.
I programed it, even if I never became a programmer. But having early and strong intuitions about computers paid off for years to come, and set me up enjoy being an "early adoptor" of things to come, rough edges and all.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written.
The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive.
I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.)
This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
This reminds me of the Apple II family. It is well-known that even in 1984, Steve Jobs considered it irrelevant - despite the fact that it alone was providing the revenue that kept Apple solvent. The Lisa and the Mac had both landed with a thud in terms of adoption and sales, mainly due to being very, very expensive (and I'm sure in part because they only supported monochrome displays, until Mac II in 1987, which only got less affordable -- $10,000 in today's money). The Apple II series on the other hand, kept being sold -- schools and consumers couldn't get enough of them - demand that lasted until the last Platinum IIe (1993) and IIgs (1994) rolled off the assembly lines.
The Amiga seems to have been a similar story - Commodore trying to get people to adopt an unquestionably better PC well before the point in the cycle where it was as affordable as the previous PC they were selling.
It seems like there's a lesson here. Trying to drag the public to your "better" new product only works when (A) it solves a real problem for them, and (B) they can clearly see that it's worth the price you're asking.
In the late 80s and early 90s, a lot of people didn't see anything relevant to them that the Mac or Amiga (or the IBM PC) could do that a C64, Apple II, or Atari 8-bit computer couldn't do. Or at least, not nearly enough to spend 10 grand (in today's money). Eventually, relevant capabilities (I'd argue that multimedia CD-ROM software and then, the 'modern-day Internet' were those catalysts) and price both got things back into that sweet spot that "flagship" PCs had been divorced from since 1987.
To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.
Happy birthday, C64!
Entering incantations like: "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part). Or playing with assembly with LDA, STA (or same for X and Y) was fun.
Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address).
Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot.
But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
DOOM on C64 with variable height floor/ceilings
And my favorite, Quake on C64
It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.
Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)
I had a ZX Spectrum, and at some point my dad got me a C128.
I was taken aback by how poor its BASIC was in C64 mode, but on the other hand, adding sprites that moved freely across the screen without being bound to the 32x24 character grid felt like magic to me.
I still have an original C64 on my shelf beside me. Think I'm going to hook it up and play some games in honor of its 44th birthday.
I still occasionally consider buying one but then I remember it'll just sit on a shelf collecting dust, better someone who actually uses it gets one.
The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.
You say it “magic”, it wasn’t “better” or “different” or “worse”, it was a kind of magic that happens when tech is new and folks experiment.
I’m sure many will look back in 40 years and say the same about AI - we’re living through the magical age of AI.
Just as we did when we got our C64’s back in the day ;)
EDIT:
Perhaps I should clarify what I meant. There are folks having their C64 moment with AI today. These folks are getting into computers via AI just as the grey beards amongst us did with the C64.
I don’t think we should be begrudging them for their starting point. After all, those that started with punch cards don’t generally go around laughing at the C64 kids!
Something about the scrappy underdog making awesome games despite the attribute clash, and having the terrible keyboard really set the vibe. Plus the Z80 processor was way more interesting than the 6502, and really set the speccy-folks up for the move to intel in later years.
Back in the day I don't think many would have switched from the Spectrum to the Commodore.
So in that respect it holds a special place in that my entire life/career changed the day I plugged it in.
On the other hand, I'd absolutely have traded it for a C64 if offered that trade even back then.
Ah, who am I kidding? Of course c64 was better…
He asked me to help, so I dove into the owner's manual and jumped to the games you could type in - and subsequently lose when powered off - the cassette recorder came later.
I've been doing the same thing for 46 years now. Creating, marveling, and sometimes wanting to defenestrate the machines. :)
I used it up into the 90's. There was enough to do and learn with this machine to satisfy a young mind forever, but there was still that nagging inferiority complex that came from not having the latest and greatest.
Despite the fact that genuine hardware improvements have slowed down and software is stuck in the mud, it's easier than ever to get infected by the FOMO that drives the endless churn. But now, a little older and hopefully wiser, I perceive how pointless all that is. When it comes to how I use technology on my own time, I try to mindfully use only what sparks my own joy of learning and creating, and disregard everything else.
My school had a VIC-20, later an Apple II, and an enterprising teacher brought in a Commodore PET.
Later on, my friends had ZX Spectrums, Amstrad CPCs (not sure of the model), and lots and lots of C64s. A few Tandy 1000s and Cocos. I was always envious of the great games that they had.
I only did a very little Basic on it, my mom used GEos (writer)? to write up her masters degree thesis. In fact, I think it and a bunch of floppies are still up in our Attic ... i really doubt it still works if I were to plug it in someplace :D I don't think we had the first generation c64. I enjoyed alot of the video games, I would go to our local Target store and buy games on floppies, especially when they were on sale for like $4.99....
Edit: sorry I said Target, I think I ment Gemco (which is now the building the Target is in) :D
(Let me tell you, we were NOT going for the "heavenly points"...)
Years later, my first actual home PC was a "hand-me-down" VIC-20 with a giant box of unlabeled tapes which someone had painstakingly hand-typed from the back of magazines... (BYTE !)... my favorite game of all of those was AMOK.
Went missing during a move, then nothing until a 386... (my computing needs until then had to be met in school labs - Tandy's PETs and ICONs)
My friend had the breadbox one and i had the slimmer profile model. We spent countless weekends coming back from computer store with boxes of blank floppy disks and using a box cutter to put a notch to make them double sided.
Turns out, it was a Sega SC-3000H, back before Sega decided it was a console company. Also, interestingly, it was really only popular in NZ/Aus (I grew up in NZ).
I have very clear memories of spending hours copying BASIC code of games, line-by-line from the monthly Sega magazine into the BASIC editor, playing it for 15 minutes, then everything dissapearing when I restarted it.
I was always envious of my friend who had a C64, but that Sega was a great little machine.
A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had already announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU, and Compaq was already selling clones.
I adored that thing (coming from a ZX Speccy it felt like a proper computer), I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe77esw9-nU (PC1 booting into a game) - that instantly takes me back more than 30 years.
EDIT: I forgot, one came up on Adrien's Digital Basement a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou-_sHTxwc4
My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster.
Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels.
My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions.
No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth.
Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.
Did you ever get into the "demo scene"?
Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity.
People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.
ZX Spectrum in 1982 cost $200 ($692 today) for 16 KB model and had a 48K model for 40% more.
It was the difference between affordable and unaffordable for many people.
So strange to stumble upon this blast from the 80s in a small town in the middle of Portugal. But I think this reinforces the fact that the Spectrum was to Europe what the C64 was to North America.
Anyway, wonderful memories in there!
Arab countries & Europe's Eastern block each have their own computing histories that's very different from the usual US-centric tale.
You fool! That was to encourage latent hackers to emerge into the world.
There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.
A friend of mine, whose father was an art teacher, had an Amiga 1000 at home. Mind blown (I'm super lucky for later on another friend had an early SGI Indy at home for his stepfather was president of SGI Benelux). So I got to see and salivate on those mythic machines early on.
Of course I was stuck on the C64 until the Amiga 500, way more affordable, came out.
Still have my C128 and it was still working last time I cleaned it/tried it (when I was locked inside during Covid) and a few floppy disks were still reading fine (so I took a NOS --new old stock-- pack of 5"1/4 floppies and made a copy of Fast Hack'em and a copy of the Commando game): pure time capsule.
Fetched two C64s too: I know the PSU is tricky on the C64 and I don't know if those work or not. I've got floppy disk readers too.
But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
A snake like line drawer that crashed when it hit the screen edge, stuff like that. I was 12 or 13 and didn't have any mentors but I did know some BASIC from a school program. Really loved that machine.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
I was into war dialing with my C64. Every night I would input the parameters, start the war dialer, go to sleep, then wake up the next morning hoping I got something. Well, one night, about an hour-or-so after I started the war dialer, there was a loud knock on the front door. I looked out the window and saw a cop car. I knew what was going on immediately. I somehow fucked up inputing the dialing prefix to the war dialer, setting it to’ 911’. Then I let the dialer do its thing; it called 911 around 1000 times. The cops were NOT happy. They were basically yelling at my mom. I tried to explain what was going on, but people didn’t know about computers or modems back then. The cops thought I was calling 911 and hanging up, over and over, like a prank.
One thing I remember is my Mom really wasn’t all that mad at me. She wasn’t happy, for sure, but I got the sense that she recognized that there was a lot worse trouble I could be getting myself into. I’m 100% certain that she would’ve been more upset if I ran up a $300 phone bill.
I had the FBI show up my house this one time... one of my warez/phreak acquaintances had started a world-wide conference call of phreaks originating from a PBX located somehow inside a very very top secret military facility. I just told them I didn't know anything about it, I didn't call anyone, I just picked up a phone and it was this chaotic party-line call, I just hung up after a while. I don't actually know who added me to that call, but I have my suspicions. My mom was really not happy about that.
It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard.
Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way.
But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.
The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.
Or, do what my car from 2014 did: The manual came on a USB stick.
The problem isn't distribution, it's laziness and greed. Documentation takes time and money. It's seen as a cost by people who don't understand the benefits.
Feel that way every time I see a YT video on a "retro" computer I would have been able to play while having a beer legally (18 in the UK so 1998), it's then a shock to realise that was nearly 30 years ago.
> Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same.
So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
> And the games. So many games...
Still a gamer, there are three constants in my life, programming, reading and video games (roughly in that order).
That's the thing right? I love the missus (only met her at 38 y/o but it's been 15 years of love) and our daughter she's now 11 y/o. And it's perfect.
I just wish life would play in slow-mo. The same life, but in slow-mo.
Yep. 10 here. A lot of the same feelings.
You have to consider the backdrop/time as well - back then there was no BigTech(TM), there wasn't social media/the pervasive backdrop of everything you do with tech been monetised or commoditised.
Fundamentally you felt like when you bought a computer/OS/Software you were the customer not the product.
Your Commodore 64/BBC Micro didn't do everything it could to gather all your data for targeted advertising, there was no algorithm trying to keep you angry so you'd buy more copies of Crash magazine.
While there will be kids out there having a blast with AI, I suspect the whole experience is flavoured differently because of the world we built for those kids.
Of course, I’m not using fable or the latest top of the line AI but neither was that the case with the C64. After all, it wasn’t exactly a mainframe!
But certainly, today’s renter’s economy discourages tinkering with devices since these are either not owned or intended to be resold when newer devices come out, so shouldn’t be altered.
The folks back then had more control over the (limited) capabilities of the hardware, and in order not to just blindly type code from a magazine (which we all did) you had to develop a good understanding.
The folks with AI today have much better capabilities with (for most, anyway) much lesser understanding of what's going on.
Both are magic, but one is tinkering with spells, the other is figuring out how to ask a (slightly drunk) wizard to cast spells for you.
Well, every generation thinks they invented sex, right? Who knows what wild things they may learn to invent? Maybe even Skynet!
My C-64 was hooked up to a nine-inch Panasonic.
Though it was color, so I guess you still win.
Did you and Angelina Jolie really get it on?
It's as irritating as those comments like "they said the same about calculators"... well, maybe AI is not like calculators? Or sex, for that matter.