Comments on: Twitter from your Commodore 64

No, really, you can send a tweet from a 20-year-old computer.

[Aaron Kempf]

twitter is a fad... iPhone is a fad.. neither one of them will be 'cute' 25 years from now-- like the commodore is today.

I learned to program on the commodore, and I'm still using the same language..

[rrod182]

Porn on the 64 sucked.

[gavdana]

BASIC?

[seven7dust]

don't you have anything better to do than troll about Apple on every single topic ?

[Vegaman_Dan]

@Seven7dust:

Wow. How do you *not* get the point that Aaron is making here? The C64 is a cultural icon of geekery. In 25 years, the iPhone won't have that nostalgia attached to it. It wasn't a slam against Apple at all, something you seem to be overlooking.

Really, sometimes it's okay to mention an Apple product *without* being negative about it. Sheesh.

[Gimpymw]

25 years from now--you still will not have had sex with a woman.

[SNOOP_ROCA]

Gimpymw, you took the words right out of my mouth

[Orion Blastar]

Good for Johan Van den Brande to support the Commodore 64 even after Commodore filed bankruptcy and the C64 technology is so old that hardly anyone uses it anymore except for the die-hard fans who are willing to pay money to modify it to get on the Internet.

If you write it, people will use it even if it is an old computer platform. This is a good thing.

[ti99_forever]

Sorry, but we need something like Contiki on the TI-99 first...
At least our disk drives aren't as slow as a C64's!

[benjwah]

Really? TI-99 users & C64 users are going to get in a war over specs & speed?

[ti99_forever]

Hee hee - no, the annual flame-war is between the Commies and the Speccies! And they don't always stick to "annual"!
Just see either comp.sys.cbm or comp.sys.sinclair!

[sparrowhyperion]

I will never understand what people see in Twitter. It's impractical, and a pretty big waste of time. If you have to say something to someone use an IM client or Email. It's amazing how people behave like herd beasts. If one of them does something, a million will do it even if it is just plain silly... I really hope twitter dies quickly and frees up all of the network bandwidth it wastes on a daily basis. Remember Earth Shoes? Everyone thought those were a good idea too. Until a few hundred thousand people started suffering from fallen arches... A good marketer can get anyone to do anything and Twitter is a prime example...

[faseidl]

You should read (for starters) a great post in "social media today":

Twidiots: The Fact and Fiction of Social Media Demographics
http://bit.ly/121Uv9

Here's the concluding paragraph:

The facts are out there. There is no longer any excuse to be a Twidiot. The time has passed when being unsure of where Social Media fits for your audience was merely a casual problem to be solved as priorities permit. In late 2009, failing to understand how our increasingly social world challenges and benefits brands has become an act of shortsightedness or deliberate ignorance that threatens consumer perception, brand value, market share, and the bottom line.

[sanenazok]

@faseidl: A blog post on a marketing website. If ever there was indisputable evidence of something! In other words, if your job involves marketing then duh it's necessary to use social networks and crp like twitter. Per this article, Twitter is for 18-34 kids who don't work full time (make about $40K/year). Yep, pretty useless fad that will be replaced by whatever comes next.

[inachu1]

I still have my c-64 and my TI-994/A pc!
Ahhh the good ole days.

[rkarsdorp]

sad

[stale_pancake]

I owned 5 Commodore 64s and one Commodore 128 before buying just about every Amiga they put out except for the 4000. Those were darn good days. Especially when the Amiga first hit. I bought one in a mall for $1,499 plus I think a spare A1010 and the monitor brought the whole thing it just about $2,500. Bought EA's Deluxe Paint, Marble Madness, and the Fairy Tale Adventure. I thought that thing was the coolest box ever made. The fun lasted a very long time too. Pretty sure I used those for a solid 4 to 5 years.

[paulimusmaximus]

Ah, Amiga 500, my first computer. Switched to an ibm with windows 3.1, it was all downhill from there...

[therobot]

Will this work on an Altair 8800? I need to know please k thanx buh bye!!

[inachu1]

I should add that the programming language is not that far apart and should take less than 12 hours to make a TI version of this.

[c64web]

Is there a network adapter available for the TI ?

[ti99_forever]

Please do, then! We don't even have a working port of GCC yet!
To get on the net, we either use a shell account, connect through a PC, or some kind of terminal server like a UDS-10. I've posted emails and usenet posts through such a device at the low level...

[thinkin123]

Is it just me or do Apple Trolls seem more obsessed with Apple then actual Apple users?

I can not remember an article I have read in recent times where someone did not express their dislike for Apple, even when Apple and its products were not the subject of the article.

[joevai52]

Yes, they're extremely annoying, just like all the Microsoft trolls. I wish they would both go away.

[deftdrummer]

More than go away...just die and let new technologies ravage their souls.

[c64web]

Tried the twitter client for the C64 yesterday works a treat. after creating the disk image i was online in 20mins and the experience was surprisingly fast. This will be a nice addition to the ever increasing networking applications for the Commodore. We now have a web-server & browser, email-client, ftp-client, irc-client and now a twitter-client. Commodore enthusiasts more information here www.c64web.com/contiki.html "This site is served from a C64" enjoy and look forward to a news-reader one day :)

[sanenazok]

Nice to see how far we've come from 8-bit computers and yet how much Twitter holds people back. Geez if this kid did some research maybe he could've cured cancer. Oh sorry he can't do that since you can't write a research paper in 140 character bursts. Well back to hacking 8-bit computers for no purpose other than to show that it's possible.

[ChancreSore]

So it's safe to assume then that you have no hobbies and spend every waking hour of your life researching cancer cures?

Make no mistake, I find Twitter quite silly. But then I felt the same way about Facebook before I "got" it. I doubt Twitter will lure me in the way Facebook has, but that doesn't mean I feel the need to cast aspersions on those it has.

[Xenite227]

Nice, you spent hours making something 3 nerds will use.... congrats.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Still got my luggable SX64 business 'portable' machine. Works well too. What to do with it though...

[johnqh]

There are two things wrong with this article.

1. Tweeter. Seriously, what's the purpose of that?
2. Using Commodore 64 to tweet. Two wrongs do not make a right.

If you want to do it the old fashion way, maybe talking to people in person, or writing a letter, or even making a phone call would serve the purpose better.

[sythara]

lol thats funny

[Crosby4Life]

Psht. Commodore doesn't have Blu-Ray. PS3 > C64.

(I kid, I kid. I'm a computer nerd and have fond memories of the C64. I have no doubt that the developer who created this did so with a rather large grin on his face, and with the mentality that it was pure novelty; and rather useless in the grand scheme of things. Also, I really need to find a modern wireless keyboard that makes the same typing sounds as the old C64 ones. That's just music to my ears.)

[sadchild]

1. i have a C64, inherited it from a now-dead-in-law.
2. i hooked it up for 2 days.
3. i got tired of it very quickly.
4. 99% of twitter users are self-important shmucks who do nothing interesting but still suffer from severe diarrhea of the mouth. their friends got tired of listening to every last BORING detail of their life, so they had to go find some other cyber-losers who might be looking forward to seeing such entertaining tweets as "i ate grape nuts for breakfast again, but i liked it better yesterday"

twitter is one million del griffith's. watch 'planes trains and automobiles' if you don't know who that is.

[peterwhite]

I shudder to think about how many hours I must have invested into PIRATES on the C64 ( actually I had a Vic20 and a 128, but Commodore made the 128 backwards compatable ... very progressive :)

The days of COMPUTE magazine and keying in pages of machine language code from some new game on my Commodore - those were some great times.

[orlbuckeye]

The problem with keying in those machine language programs was finding your errors and determing if it was worth finding the errors or sending away for the Compute magazine disk.

[deftdrummer]

So when they get WOW running on the C64 then your life is over it sounds like...

[SNOOP_ROCA]

YES! NOW I CAN FINALLY GO ON TWITTER WITH MY 25 YEAR OLD PAPER WEIGHT OF A COMPUTER!

[Harrison912]

I mainly use Twitter to socially market my safety and security web site but my Commodore 64 is long gone! Thanksfully my Dell is perfect for tweeting.