Hmmmmm...
Being as a C64 is about the size of my PC keyboard, and probably not much heavier, a better plan would have been to take that, and a 7" portable TV.
I still want one, though. Obviously.
Remembering the Commodore SX-64
We're shrinking away this week from monolithic supercomputers with This Old Box for something a little bit smaller. In fact, we'll be looking at the world's first commercial full-color portable computer. Fantastic! This old box logo But first, some insight into our computer selection process: It's twofold this time - 1) The …
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Sunday 20th January 2008 01:35 GMT Alan W. Rateliff, II
I hauled mine around 10 states
In my last few high school years my SX-64 and I were inseparable. I hauled that muther around 10 states on various trips, and even used it at school. I participated in the First Annual New Mexico High School Super Computer Challenge. I used the SX to dial into Los Alamos and work on a VAX/VMS system to write programs in Fortan 77 for the new Cray Y-MP/2E. For myriad reasons my team did not complete the challenge, one of which being my active activism against the tyranny of the school administration.
The airports didn't like it so much. At every security check-point I had to plug it in to show them that it worked and was a real computer. At one I actually wound up doing a demo. People thought it was pretty cool though aged at the time (1990-ish.) With it at 23 lbs and I at a wobbly 130 lbs or so (boy, those days are gone!) with toothpick sized arms, it was quite a chore to carry around Memphis, Atlanta, and Dallas/Fort Worth airports. But I had some games, a BBS program I was writing, and a WarpSpeed cartridge, so I was pretty much set. Carried the 1670 modem and a joystick in my bag.
This unit was stolen from the high school computer lab by a former fellow teammate. It was found out in a field, sabotaged, with several pins broken off the character ROM. Still works to this day. I was able to quickly figure out the problem and replaced the CHARROM.
I've picked up a second unit not long ago and have planned to rebuild the insides including a 5" LCD screen to replace the CRT. Just need to find time for it.
I've seen some redone with 1581 drives in the empty drive bay or replacing the 1541. There's a lot of room inside and a lot which can be done with these things.
Paris Hilton icon 'cuz I bet she's a chore to lug around all those airports as well. There's a number of projects I wouldn't mind working on with her as well, I just need to find time for it.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 01:35 GMT spacepiggy
carry on
15 years ago a cow-orker gave me his when he tired of it, no box so i carried it on board my flight home
the best part was at security where they wanted me to boot it - what a crowd, in them days, yunguns, a 386 monochrome laptop was hot, the color screen won!
sadly it finally bit the dust of eBay a few years back
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Sunday 20th January 2008 01:35 GMT gopherfender
My dad had one... (almost)
I remember when i was a kid my dad had a C64 in a hardcase, basically a large briefcase full of foam padding with the keyboard, tape drive and power supply in it, with some fans as well. You needed to plug in the power cord, as well as a monitor, but i bet it was a damn slight lighter and cheaper than the SX :P
ah i remember spending hours reading the instructions to 'The Hobbit', the first RPG i ever played...... *drifts off into nostalgia*
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Sunday 20th January 2008 02:12 GMT tardigrade
Lucky Ole Sod!
I want to be the bloke in that advert.
Seriously.
Not only does he have splendid chest (and stomach) hair, but he also sports a bevy of beauties draped around his own open air pool.
He has achieved the pinnacle of Male aspiration.
Add to this that fact that he will never have to worry about a Windows Blue Screen on his awesome ultra portable Commodore and I am left wondering why evolution didn't have the common sense to come to a stop in the 70's.
High times for the High Life my man.
You are an inspiration.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 02:12 GMT Starace
Got one!
I've got one of these stored away somewhere, apparently one of the first few built to production standard.
Big heavy piece of equipment, especially with the size of the PSU at the back (the whole back end is a cast heatsink for the PSU) and the solidly built case (steel (!!) chassis, aluminium shell), but the feature set was OK at the time - I seem to remember MIDI was included? And the keyboard wasn't too bad, one advantage of all that space. Though you did have to squint at the display, so not that good ergonomically.
Talking of which, it's a very nice monitor, I believe based on some sort of portable Sony unit that was built-in in it's entirety. Very fine dot pitch tube (seemed to be a Trinitron?) so quite capable of displaying readable text even with the limited size available. And if you crack the case open you can drive audio + PAL Y/C video straight into the display cable, so it can work as a TV too if you've got a tuner. Later in its life I used mine as a TV for a couple of years...
Alongside some of the 'portable' PCs that came out in a similar style I'd say the SX compared favourably. I used some of the Compaq attempts and usually thought that the engineering was nowhere near as good, though I will admit Compaq put more thought into weight reduction and the specs were better!
In any case, when it was new(-ish) I thought it was quite impressive; compared to other home computers available at the time it seemed well equipped and the novelty factor of it being 'portable' was a bonus - certainly made my CPC seem a little tame. Plus I was *much* younger so more easily impressed.
I'll have to go digging for my example, though I think last time I checked the CPU had failed. :-(
Maybe it's time to gut it and put something more modern inside, the monitor will work just as well and it's big enough for almost anything to fit!
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Sunday 20th January 2008 05:10 GMT Dana W
I loved mine.
Mine went everywhere with me. But my best memory was an 8 hour layover in the Chicago airport, and the impromptu video game tournament that made me VERY popular that day.....
The empty slot was perfect for carrying your cord, and the mandatory Epyx Fastloader!
Its true though, airport security hated it, and it would just about dislocate your shoulder in any long distance carry.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:11 GMT Ray
Brings back memories
I got one when i was 13 or 14, i remember it being on sale down from 2000 to 1200 guilders (545 euros). Man i was happy with that thing! carried it around everywhere i went, always being the geeky one at the Commodore club meetings ;-) modifying it myself making a reset button and a switch to use single sided floppies to be used both sides, installed a speeddos chip (the Power Cartridge used up the slot and speeddos could make a dump of anything in the memory, even inserted cartridges).
About 2 years back i started it up again but it would not boot, surprise surprise: the Commodore Club still existed (well, not the same club, but still a Commodore club) and i found an engineer there that replaced one of the rom chips.
Man, i had plenty of hours fun with that thing!
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:11 GMT Mark York
One of my favorites
We used to attend computer trade shows to sell modem\software packages.
At Comodore shows this was my preferred demo model, despite the weight & tiny screen, it was a breeze to setup as only had to plug it into the mains & attach the modem & the software\RS232 communications cartridge.
Take 1 screen, 1 "datasette", one 1541 & one C64 into the Novotel Hammersmith & spend ages looking for all the cables as you set it up?
Not me just just carry the SX64 into the stand & go. :)
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:11 GMT daryl smith
Adolescent workouts
My Dad had one very similar to this by called the Otrona 'Attache.' I used to use it to do my English homework on it, and would be the only person in the class, and possibly the whole high school, to bring my essays in 'Word Processed.'
Er.. using 'Wordstar' if I recall.
It had an orange VDU and yes weighed a fricken ton and a half.
I'm not much of a geek when it comes to programming etc. and remember punching in thousands of numbers and commas which I was copying out of a book, to make a "3D" sphere appear on the screen... which never bloody happened because of some unknown reason. Probably I missed comma or something. I got really pissed off after days of typing and never tried anything like that again. Probably scarred me for life and certainly put me off trying to understand programming gibberish for life.
Now I LOVE GUI... sorry. I'm an artist, not a maths / logic whiz.
I really tried, but as Dirty Harry said: "A man's gotta know his limitations..."
My Dad certainly kept in shape lugging this thing a few miles to work and back during the week. (Uni professor.)
I loved that thing though. Saved me from writers cramp time after time.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Comparison table
I'm not sure about that comparison table. The Mac Air makes you look like some kind of metrosexual, while the SX-64 makes you look like a rich guy with a pool with bikini babes hanging about. Well ok, that's slightly untrue. Better not carry one about or you'll be arrested by the bomb squad on conspiracy of techno terrorism.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:13 GMT Ishkandar
Adam Osborne's little monster came first...
...and then there were the Compaq "portables". Although I've used those machines, none interested me as proper business machines until the Toshiba 5100/5200 came out.
I could squeeze in SCO Unix (with drastic pruning), a full Oracle database and a (rather) large application into that THING's 100 MB disk. It was so precious that my boss actually carted the damn thing on his *lap* all the way from Heathrow to Narita, used it in Tokyo and carted it all the way back the same manner even though it was *definitely NOT* a lap-top by any stretch of imagination. That probably contributed to his Deep Vein Thrombosis, if nothing else.
Ah !! The sacrifices we make in the name of computing !!
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:13 GMT Nick Pettefar
Amstrad CPC thingy
My first "real" portable (ha ha ah ha) was an Amstrad PPC with 1,000 expensive non-rechargeable batteries that went flat in about two minutes and a patented Unreadable-In-Any-Light LCD screen. Was that progress? A Z88 was better I posit.
Ah, Old Computers. The newest old history in history.
Are personal computers the the fastest generators of obsolescence? They seem to go out of fashion faster than fashion itself.
Nick. (Old car, old bike, old house, old clothes, new Mac.)
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:13 GMT Emilio Lizardo
Que the theme song:
My little brother's best friend's father had one. I remember (at age 13) boldly barging into their home several times on warm summer nights to ask permission to go upstairs and use it. It had that asci Star Trek game with the K's for Klingons... My very first time spent with a computer (apart from that time dad took me in to land the luner lander on his company's mainframe.)
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:13 GMT Eric Olson
My first computer!
It's amazing. My dad came home with one of these around 1986, when I was all of four. I'm sure he picked it up on clearance somewhere. But that computer was the best gaming platform I had for years to come. My dad's uncle had a C-64 that he used to get a ton of cracked games, so we had a huge library to play. Also, after a year or two, my dad got a monitor that was probably 13", which was hooked up to the beast and allowed my dad and I to play Wasteland for hours each night.
My dad later picked up GeOS for it, as well as geoCalc, and spent hours making up the stats spreadsheets for my baseball teams. Ah, those were the days.
He recently sold it to a guy in Finland, I think, or Denmark. All the games, the cartridges, the monitor, and other periphrials (I think there was a drawing pad called Koala?) for a few hundred dollars. It still worked just fine 20 years later.
Ah, memories.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:13 GMT Liam Proven
You can run XP on one, too...
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/sx64/
Mind you, I'm not 100% sure whether this counts as an inspired hack or savage butchery of a classic machine. Still, kudos to the chap: all the original ports and controls work, as does the original screen, keyboard and SID chip!
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Sunday 20th January 2008 19:13 GMT BoldMan
Anyone remember the Osborne Portable?
During my degree (Astrophysics with a bit of Geophysics), we were using an Orborne "portable" to record measurements in the field. It was a bit of a beast, and the floppies had a habit of being sensitive to voltage fluctuations which made them run at different speeds, which when you are out in the back of beyond, is a bit of a bugger!
http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html
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Sunday 20th January 2008 20:08 GMT Alan W. Rateliff, II
Bad disks from CRT in UK?
IIRC, there was supposed to be a DX-64, which would be the dual drive model. AFAIK, never saw the light of day. As for the CRT blanking disks, I never had the problem. Might have been a problem in the UK versus the US due to FCC requirements and stuff. Who knows.
I remember running GEOS v2 on mine. That little monitor is surprisingly sharp. Of course you could hook up a larger monitor in the back if necessary. I don't think that the SX could be used as a serious business machine any more than the real 64 could. There was good software, though. I remember reading about small businesses run entirely on Commodore 64, hotels and the like. In fact, during one family road trip way back when we stayed at a hotel that was run on a C64.
One of the great things about the SX was using the "dual monitor" capability. My friends and I could play games versus each other on separate screens, or use the bigger screen for observers. "Space Taxi" anyone? "Gunship" more your style? Or how about a game of "Strip Poker" for the party?
PH again, for the strip poker.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 23:59 GMT John Benson
the real value of the Commodore SX-60 for me...
...was not in the games or color, it was in the cool and inexpensive peripherals that were available.
In the mid-80's, the SX60 taught me about text-to-speech with a plug-in cartridge that turned trivially-encoded text strings into recognizable speech. It also taught me the possibilities (and limitations) of speech recognition when I added the Covox Voice Master. There was also a FORTH cartridge I used in an electronic music class to write a multitrack synthesizer: each voice of a two-part Bach invention was encoded as a separate FORTH source in which note names and durations were new FORTH commands; my program read both sources and merged them in real-time to play back the complete piece using cooperative multitasking.
Oh, and the light pen! Within a short time of unpacking it, I had a little Basic program (maybe twenty lines) that read the light pen coordinates and varied the sound frequency based on horizontal position and the volume based on vertical position of the pen on the screen. The button on the light pen changed the sound's voicing on-the-fly.
I even learned Pascal on it because there was a disk-based product that more-or-less transliterated Pascal into Basic along with some extra tricks to provide local variables etc.
I also had a Kaypro DOS machine with more RAM and a faster CPU but it never fired the imagination like the Commodore did. By the late 80's I was working with Macs, and the Mac Plus with HyperCard, sound and speech synthesis was the last machine that stretched my mind: after that, most personal computers seemed focussed on emailing, web-surfing and gaming.
So here's to the Commodore SX-64, the 64, the VIC-20, the Ataris, the TRS-80's and other machines that made it easy for us to experiment with awesomely cool stuff in just a few lines of Basic or whatever. The only thing that approaches the level of excitement and involvement of those days is Alan Kay's SQUEAK project (www.squeak.org) but even that is completely mediated through software that requires object orientation to grok; although it generates excitement and understanding, it is at a completely different level than cartridges, wires, PEEKs and POKEs.
In summary, I think that the misty-eyed ramblings about Commodores etc. are not merely the product of nostalgia but due to the fact that those machines and their add-ons encouraged stimulating experimentation before personal computing settled into the bloatware-, browser- and graphic horsepower-based categories it now largely occupies. In my experience at least, they represent a maximum in excitement and involvement that no amount of RAM, hard disk and language wars has equalled to date.
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Sunday 20th January 2008 23:59 GMT Adrian Esdaile
10.5kg? That's not too bad...
Lets just chuck my HP NW9440 on the scales (starting at 3.4kg according to HP website - that's without the bloody battery!) with the monster plugpack it requires, a small logitech mouse because trackpads and keyboard nipples are quite frankly, arse, a mouse pad for said mouse ($1, IKEA), and the fairly heft laptop bag required to hold this aircraft-carrier of a laptop... Hmm, about 8.5kg!
Considering the SX64 was the most powerful thing around in about 198x, I would have hoped current laptops should weigh about 200g!
At least the HP can still play Elite! So can my trusty C64 - still working too!
I'd love to get my hands on a Sexy-64 though!
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Monday 21st January 2008 01:01 GMT David
Good memories...
I worked for Commodore in the UK when the C64 was being developed - I brought the first one back into the UK in a shoebox - it was a mess of PC boards and spaghetti wiring that the engineering team finished a couple of days before I flew home.
The C64 was a great machine because of its 6502 processor – I wrote a stack of commercial software for it in assembler (including the assembler itself). I also wrote a version of Forth, which compiled down to machine code and then, when V isiCalc came on the scene I wrote a spreadsheet called Swift which did pretty well.
Great times and it only now with these retro pieces that I can see how amazing it was to be involved in the start of the personal computing revolution.
I never had a portable C64 – though I did do some development on the C128 which was a pretty nice machine before moving onto machine code with the first IBM PC’s.
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Monday 21st January 2008 03:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm sorry to say ...
... that when I read 23 pounds I did a genuine LOL (I really did catch myself laughing with an audible sound - LWAUS?!?).
But, as said by the author; it's easily done these days.
Having read a few of the comments saying how sharp the screen is I can appreciate that; a few years ago I picked up a few old Atari 800XLs at boot sales (for nostaligia - it was my second computer after a VIC 20 (the Atari was a good idea 'cause my uncle's brother could get all the Atari software pirate in those days)) I wondered if the components had deteriorated over the years as the display on the telly was so fuzzy. A few moments later I realised how shite a computer looks on a telly.
Oh for the old days of diversity. Macs (from which this is typed) are PCs these days and even Sun will sell you a PC if you want!
Why the icon? It's because I've not been to impressed with the latest OS X. At least I didn't pay for it (long story involving an apple store a friend making a thousand pound purchase the day after the latest release and various iMacs and iPod touches displaying mac oriented torrent sites and pornography).
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:03 GMT b166er
Copyright Infringement
So you guys'n'gals were all copying games from your mates back then too?
Guess what, the game industry never collapsed, eh? In fact went on to become a massive new industry.
I didn't realise you needed cracked games on the C64. The only game I remember that had copy protection, was Elite with that prismatic lense. That actually worked!
"Thorin cleaves your head with an axe"
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:03 GMT Trygve Henriksen
The important bit about the SX-64...
wasn't the weight(the Osborne One was just as heavy), but the screen.
This was the FIRST portable with a COLOUR screen.
Quick list of firsts:
1982: First portable: Osborne One
1982: First laptop: Epson HX-20
1983: First Portable with a colour screen: Commodore SX-64
1984: First 'PDA' : Psion Organiser One.
I think the Norand Sprint 100 was the first 'industrial handheld', but aren't certain when it was launched...
Yes, I have them all.
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:03 GMT Jim Lewis
@ John Benson:Experimentation
I agree with your sentiments John. Computers have spoilt us into requiring a GUI and for most people this is a barrier to understanding what's actually going on behind this.
One area that I think does offer an avenue of this kind of exploration though is PICs, which require an understanding of the principles of using writing and compiling simple code and using actual pin outs on chips to control ciruits.
As most people probably feel uncomfortable messing around with their actual PC it allows them to experiment knowing that at worst they'll fry a £2 chip.
These are pretty well supported for use in schools etc. too.
EG See:
http://www.mstracey.btinternet.co.uk/pictutorial/picmain.htm
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:03 GMT Paul
luggable is cool
wow. I remember seeing these when I was a kid and wanting one so bad. Didn't have any need for it, but the luggable form factor automatically scores major kit fetish points. Important military/scientist types would need something like this in the field... hmmm.. I wonder if someone sells something like this with todays power. Say a luggable rack type thing.. 8 cores, 4Tb raid, many Gb ram.... oh yeah.... hmm too much coffee this morning must lie down...
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:03 GMT Edwin
Superior systems
Two spring to mind:
The Compaq luggable (mono screen, but x86 (or was it x80?)) - the first PC in our house - very good for e.g. MS Flight Simulator 1.0 ;)
For a little less flexibility but loads more portability, there was the Tandy 102. I still have one of these, and they are impressive machines. The tactile feedback off the keyboard is fantastic, the OS was coded by billg himself and it runs about 20h off four penlites. No modern portable comes even close ;)
Could we do the 102 next please?
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:03 GMT Peter Kay
Actually, it was pretty good
As mentioned the screen was very sharp, and it worked well both for games and (basic) business functions. I used it on holiday with my relatives, who owned a games studio at the time..
I'm really impressed by the ITX conversion and interfacing the mentioned link provides. What I really want to see though, is the crazy Atari ST laptop, that used D cells and had a battery life of about 15 minutes..
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:50 GMT Graham Bartlett
@Paul
Get into live PA sound, Paul. I promise you there'll be as much "luggable" gear as you can eat!
2x12" PA speakers - 15lbs. 2x12" guitar amp - 20lbs. Behringer DDX3216 mixer in flight case - 25lbs or so. Flight-cased power amp - 30lbs (someday soon I'll need an extra amp in there too, which'll probably require wheels on it).
And yes, if your live sound rig allows you to do multitrack recording (as mine does) then you can indeed get your PC along for the ride. Currently I just lug my desktop around, but it's not a good long-term solution. Rackmount PCs look cool but they're way too pricey, and my gear won't work with a laptop (uses a PCI card) so I'll probably just bolt a regular desktop to the floor of a flight-case.
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Monday 21st January 2008 11:50 GMT Joe Blow
Legendary computing...
Laugh however you want about the size and weight. Fact is, that the SX64 was pioneering portable computing. However thin the Macbook Air is, it's nothing but an incredibly boring follow-up on already existing products... Not being "the thinnest notebook in the world" by far at 0.4-1.9cm (Sharp Musamara: 1.66cm, 2001; Mitsubishi Pedion/HP Sojourn: 1.8cm, 1998(!!); Sony Vaio VGN-X505VP: 0.9-1.9cm, 2004) i might add..
What is it with Jobs' fetish for thin notebooks anyway? Every time they made the Powerbook 1mm thinner he praised it like they had just landed on Mars!
Anyhow, back to more impressive computers: Did you know you can even add WiFi and an MMC/SD-reader to the SX64? Just use the MMC Replay expansion cartridge and an Ethernet WiFi-Adapter:
http://ami.ga/news/news127_e.htm
btw: I demand a column "expansion slots" in the chart. The SX64 should read "2" (User- and Expansionport), the Macbook Air "0"...
Another column "able to play the latest games at day of manufacture and years beyond" would seem appropriate, too, since the SX64 whoops the MBA's ass in this category, too, thanks to lame chipset GPUs...
So, in the end, SX64 wins. Who'da thought? 8)))
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Monday 21st January 2008 16:50 GMT John Benson
@Jim Lewis: yes, the PIC rocks
I got into PIC programming after an interesting job where I used a Z-World Z-80 based embedded controller. The big thrill with the PIC was counting instruction times and writing a program that would clock in the bits of an RS-232 serial transmission, recognize the character, and then turn on an LED in response.
There's a lot to be said for playing around with stuff you can afford to break. PIC chips fall into that category, and so do Pentium III systems now. But what can I do with a Pentium III other than run other people's code or write things that interact at the command prompt or GUI level? I enjoy shell scripting and other forms of programming but I get enough of that at work. I know that there are some interesting things you can hook up to a PC like soft-oscilloscope and X-10 interfaces, but where is the cheap light pen, a plug-and-play voice synthesizer and something as simple and fun to program as the sound chip?
I know that I could scrabble around the Web for lots of different languages to play with, free databases and web servers, but I've already done that in the line of duty.
I remember playing around with low-integration TTL logic chips in college (maybe a half-dozen ANDs or ORs or inverters per chip) and verifying that they implemented Boolean logic; I even learned interesting details like fan-in, fan-out and debouncing a switch input. No surface-mount technology, roughly human-scale, accessible to a novice solderer. Nowadays you start with a microprocessor like the PIC if you want to get down and dirty with the hardware, and there is a world of difference. I had fun, I made mistakes, the smoke signals would occasionally escape from the DIPs, but I learned some important basics. I wonder if they even make low-integration TTL any more...
I also remember reading somewhere that some kids can't even figure out how to light a flashlight bulb in series with a battery. I wonder how many readers here went through the "take the flashlight apart and light the bulb with a battery and piece of wire" stage? I know I did, though at the time I was unaware of how important that lesson was, or that it was even a lesson. How many of you ever loaded batteries into a flashlight in opposition just to prove that the voltages cancelled out and the bulb didn't light? Probably quite a few.
Remember when they used to label things with "No user-serviceable components inside"? I do, but I haven't seen it much lately. I guess kids don't pry things open to see how they work like they used to. Even if they did pry them open, they'd probably get tired of seeing small, low-chip-count, high-integration PC boards, opaque to understanding. I remember spending minutes at a time looking at the glowing filaments of vacuum tubes in the stereo or the radio and knowing that the electrons inside were vibrating in step with the music they produced in the loudspeaker. That's a big enough idea for a kid to get his mind around, but nowadays the picture is incomplete without some notion of tiny semiconductors, let alone microprocessors, digitized sound and sampling.
Speaking of sound, here's a big one: you used to be able to take a sheet of paper, roll it into a cone, push a pin through the pointy end and then use it to play the music on a record (78 RPM if you were lucky to have one, and a turntable that played that speed). Sometimes you could hear the music faintly just listening to the buzz of the pickup on the rotating record when the electronic amplification was turned down.
Perhaps we are on the threshold of everyday technology turning into what Arthur C. Clarke defined as magic, i.e. any technology sufficiently advanced as to defy understanding.
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Monday 21st January 2008 17:12 GMT Austin Troxell
And Now a Word from A Dinosaur...
In 1969 I got my first "computer," a German-made kit called the "Logikus." You wired your own logic circuits and used slider-switches to input your "data." The "output" was presented via a display comprised of small flashlight bulbs. See it here: http://www.logikus.info or Google the wiki.
When I bought my Commodore 64 some *15* years later, I thought I'd landed in "computer heaven." I had the base unit, a floppy drive, a cassette-tape storage drive and a printer. Man, I was hot! I soon was writing batch-processing programs on the thing for my job as an industrial chemist. I even had it generate production-cost analysis and Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS). Just before I quit that farkiing company, I sold them the whole system for more than I paid for it... and "neglected" to hand over the program floppies. When they balked later, I said "Gimme my unused vacation pay and the programs are yours. Otherwise, YOU figure it out!" I'm still waiting for that payout....
Gawd, anyone here remember "RUNDY" errors? ;)
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Wednesday 23rd January 2008 15:50 GMT Ed
no Linux for the SX-64.
Since 1.2.8, Linux hasn't been able to boot a standard (ie non-embedded) kernel without at least a full 2M of memory (1.2.7 could boot with 2M-384K, and it only took a minor hack to get 1.2.8 to boot with 2M-384K. 1.2.9, on the other hand - right out.)
Also, Linux fundamentally depends on having protected memory, which the commodore 2^[67] systems did not have. (I have not heard of any embedded version of Linux getting around this requirement. However, I'm not active in the embedded Linux world, so it's possible one has been developed without my knowledge.)
That having been said, there *was* a unix OS that was developed specifically for the C-64: LUnix. I've not tried this on a SX-64, but I know of no reason why it wouldn't work there.
Regarding the SX-64 monitor: this monitor was far from rubbish, as it actually handled the full 320x200x16 screen resolution of the C-64, despite only having 5 inches to do it. I realize modern monitors pull off significantly more impressive pixel density, but for the time, that was amazing.
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Wednesday 23rd January 2008 20:19 GMT Daniel B.
This laptop
This SX-64 seems to be as lightweight as the modern 8-kilo "laptop", sans the bone-inspiring 17" widescreen LCD (why would I want a screen as big as my desktop?), DVD, and super-stereo sound system. If anything, at this rate it seems like this baby will we *lightweight* compared to current laps.
It seems like there are no more lap-tops anymore... Oh well, at least the SX64 might run good old Test Drive ;)
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Friday 25th January 2008 19:07 GMT Svein Skogen
Maybe a better comparision would be
Maybe a better comparision would be the Bondwell BW-2. And swap the "SD-Card" reader with the more generic "removable media drive", since this would include anything from the size of a micro-sd and up to the 8" floppies.
This would make for a funny comparision, since the BW-2 included things such as a ramdisk, and an office-like suite (Wordstar, Calcstar, etc). Pretty advanced for its day.
//Svein
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Saturday 26th January 2008 11:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Drool...slobber
I want one! I've always been a fan of old computers, even back in the stoneage when they (and myself) were new. I remember seeing a commercial for this thing when I was around 10 years old and immediately wanted it. It didn't help that there was an electronics store at Meadowbrook Mall at the time that carried them, a mondo-flashy place with lots of neon and catchy tunes emanating from within. They had an entire display set up with four computers doing various things on a tiered platform, and the top one was running this weird 2-D sunset graphic demo...in color! Tres cool!
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
