From the Mail Bag

So two years ago I made a brief mention of the Commodore 64 I used to own, and somebody just sent me an email about it:

I read about your problems loading Commodore 64 disk software, which you said required a complex command and took about 20 minutes even though it was on disk, not cassette.

This was all due to Commodore's crappy recycled BASIC, not written for the C64, but for the Commodore PET series. AFAIK to load from disk took a command like LOAD "filename",8 . This meant load from device 8, which was the disk drive. I never owned a disk drive for it, but it was almost as slow as cassette, anyway. To load from disk on Atari 8 bit systems I think you typed LOAD "D:filename" and it was a lot quicker, but most games were on cartridge anyway. To load from cassette on Atari you just pressed down 2 keys when turning the computer on, then pressed PLAY and hit Return.

You may enjoy my new blog  commodore64crap.wordpress.com , about trying to program the Commodore 64 and why it was crap.

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Paul Londoner

So... there you go. And if you want to learn more about the Commodore 64, check out that blog.

Thanks for reading, Paul!