Happy feel good video of the day. When times were a little more normal. We had the commodore 64. I'm guessing this one came before it.
by 2 years, 1980 for vic, but that company had a PET long before.
The commodore 64 was $666 dollars the first week (over $595 list official), a buddy got his for $620 and was happy. $666 was the same price as earlier apple 1 computer.
Apple historians claim that Apple never said it was $666, but rather it was $666.66 : see :
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=apple+computer+666+dollars&ia=web
But Commodore 64s and Apples were sold for $666 before expensive addons.
fun unrelated trivia: that commodore 64 6502 computer decades later would be able to run a very evolved chess program that could beat most humans. researchers for years kept trying to write tinier chess programs.
In 1982 they had a SHITTY chess program that used 672 bytes : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess
many decades later using most of the 64K ram address space of a 6502, chess got rather sophisticated and those old 1981 machines with newer code would amaze you.
For unlimited ram on workstation-style computers , obese and wasteful heavyweight chess is a big bragging rights competition, and now AI is smarter than any human chess player :
Best Chess Engines of 2021 : :
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/
Best Blitz speed chess of 2021 : http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404/
IN 2021 researchers use real actual self-programming AI to have machines write their own chess AI : Alpha zero, and Leela 0 chess engine. Most chess competitons are based on limiting beginning play databases to 12 deep moves or less, otherwise with unlimited storage, a so-called AI could pre-store almost 25 moves in the future. years from now, competitions will be like back in earlier years... based on ram constraints.
March 2021 : Can You Beat 1024 Bytes of JavaScript at Chess?!:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vpnw/can-you-beat-1024-bytes-of-javascript-at-chess
Hah!
C64 was a pretty fun computer. I remember some of the programs. We had that piano keys thing you put on the keyboard for a piano program. We had the joystick for the space invaders game. There was a cool print program that made cool banners. I think it was print master or print shop? I can't remember. We would print out banners with the dot matrix printer for birthdays. I remember this one game where you were stuck in a cave and you had to get out. There was like a wizard in the beginning who put you there. It was called Cave of the Word Wizard. Had to look that up. Forgot it was a spelling game.
I didn't find out until much later that the C64 sound chip is sought after by low bit synth enthusiasts.
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