17 Apr
2014
17 Apr
'14
7:36 a.m.
Scorned, derided and dismissed but are they really that bad? My take on
the Commodore 16 and Plus/4.
http://youtu.be/TdItsJVLbws
Terry (Tez)
18 Apr
18 Apr
12:01 a.m.
Anyone wants a Plus/4 - I have a boxed (ugly box) unit here, that is in
excellent shape otherwise. Has manuals as well, I believe.
Up for trades, in the St. Paul / Mpls area.
On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 6:36 AM, Terry Stewart <terry at webweavers.co.nz>wrote:
Scorned, derided and dismissed but are they really
that bad? My take on
the Commodore 16 and Plus/4.
http://youtu.be/TdItsJVLbws
Terry (Tez)
12:48 a.m.
Way back in the late 1980s when I worked part time at an Amiga dealer, I got an abandoned
Plus/4 from the junk pile in the repair shop and occasionally used it as a doorstop. It
didn't work very well for that purpose, because it's not especially heavy. :)
I don't know if I still have it, but if I ever run across it then I'll see if I
can bring it back to life. I didn't respect it much back then, but now it would be an
interesting little piece of history.
It's funny how we tended to divide into cliques back then, convinced that
"our" machine is infinitely better than the other brand's piece of worthless
junk... not realizing that they often had the exact same CPU inside. I cut my teeth on a
TRS-80 Color Computer, so naturally, I thought those were special. Now I realize that they
had an arguably better processor than many of the contemporaries, yet those other machines
had their own good features such as better graphics and/or sound hardware, more than one
expansion slot, good keyboards, etc. Now, they're all good and bad in their own
individual ways, and I like playing with and learning about all of them! Except for the
PCs. I still don't like those. :)
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
2:05 a.m.
It was pretty hard to lick the C-64 in its time.. particularly, after the
first big price drop when I believe they fell to the $399.00 point.
Difficult to find a machine with that level of graphics & sound
(IMPORTANT!!), plus almost 40K directly accessible to BASIC in that era.
The real hang-up was the price of the 1541 drive - but the C-64 itself
offered so much promise, that a lot of folks had no problem shelling out
the additional $399.00 for a disk drive - at which point, the system really
began to shine.
On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 11:48 PM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
Way back in the late 1980s when I worked part time at
an Amiga dealer, I
got an abandoned Plus/4 from the junk pile in the repair shop and
occasionally used it as a doorstop. It didn't work very well for that
purpose, because it's not especially heavy. :)
I don't know if I still have it, but if I ever run across it then I'll see
if I can bring it back to life. I didn't respect it much back then, but now
it would be an interesting little piece of history.
It's funny how we tended to divide into cliques back then, convinced that
"our" machine is infinitely better than the other brand's piece of
worthless junk... not realizing that they often had the exact same CPU
inside. I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Color Computer, so naturally, I thought
those were special. Now I realize that they had an arguably better
processor than many of the contemporaries, yet those other machines had
their own good features such as better graphics and/or sound hardware, more
than one expansion slot, good keyboards, etc. Now, they're all good and bad
in their own individual ways, and I like playing with and learning about
all of them! Except for the PCs. I still don't like those. :)
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
6:06 a.m.
It's funny how we tended to divide into cliques
back then, convinced
that "our" machine is infinitely better than the other brand's piece of
worthless junk..
Yes. I don't think it's limited to back then. Such tribalism appears to
be hard coded into humans. Atari St vrs Amiga, Mac vrs PC, Windows vrs
Linux, Samsung Galaxy x vrs Iphone.
Where there's a camp, people will pitch a tent in it, build a barricade and
hurl insults at the adjacent camp. It just seems to be in our DNA..
Terry (Tez)
On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 6:05 PM, drlegendre . <drlegendre at gmail.com> wrote:
It was pretty hard to lick the C-64 in its time..
particularly, after the
first big price drop when I believe they fell to the $399.00 point.
Difficult to find a machine with that level of graphics & sound
(IMPORTANT!!), plus almost 40K directly accessible to BASIC in that era.
The real hang-up was the price of the 1541 drive - but the C-64 itself
offered so much promise, that a lot of folks had no problem shelling out
the additional $399.00 for a disk drive - at which point, the system really
began to shine.
On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 11:48 PM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
Way back in the late 1980s when I worked part
time at an Amiga dealer, I
got an abandoned Plus/4 from the junk pile in the repair shop and
occasionally used it as a doorstop. It didn't work very well for that
purpose, because it's not especially heavy. :)
I don't know if I still have it, but if I ever run across it then I'll
see
if I can bring it back to life. I didn't
respect it much back then, but
now
it would be an interesting little piece of
history.
It's funny how we tended to divide into cliques back then, convinced that
"our" machine is infinitely better than the other brand's piece of
worthless junk... not realizing that they often had the exact same CPU
inside. I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Color Computer, so naturally, I
thought
those were special. Now I realize that they had
an arguably better
processor than many of the contemporaries, yet those other machines had
their own good features such as better graphics and/or sound hardware,
more
than one expansion slot, good keyboards, etc.
Now, they're all good and
bad
in their own individual ways, and I like playing
with and learning about
all of them! Except for the PCs. I still don't like those. :)
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
12:50 p.m.
On 4/18/2014 5:06 AM, Terry Stewart wrote:
> Where there's a camp, people will pitch a tent
in it, build a barricade and
> hurl insults at the adjacent camp. It just seems to be in our DNA..
>
> Terry (Tez)
I've never seen such behavior. As some in the "we all get
along camp",
I say you're wrong!
Jim
P.S. jk, but i could not resist the meta argument. Oh, and Commodores
are the best machine EVAR! You big iron folks are just deluding
yourselves, and the other home machines are just doorstops.
1:29 p.m.
On 2014-04-18 1:22 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Don't go all binary on me!
Cheers,
Bryan
P.S. Just my 10 cents.
I've never
seen such behavior. As some in the "we all get along camp",
I say you're wrong!
There are exactly two kinds of people in the world: those
who insist on
dividing everybody up into two groups, and we who do not.
3:57 p.m.
On 04/17/2014 11:01 PM, drlegendre . wrote:
Anyone wants a Plus/4 - I have a boxed (ugly box) unit
here, that is in
excellent shape otherwise. Has manuals as well, I believe.
I think it was around 1988 that someone gave me a busted one, but I never
did get it working - and in fact inexperience at the time only made things
worse. I remember the manuals* made it sound like quite a goofy little
system, so finding another one is on the "low priority" to-do list.
* and thinking about it, I may still have the manuals in storage (the
machine itself went off to NMoC in case they wanted it for static display;
cosmetically it was in reasonable shape)
Mine had the black tape unit (and I'm not sure what happened to that,
either), but I expect with a disk drive they wouldn't be bad little machines.
cheers
Jules
19 Apr
19 Apr
2:49 a.m.
Jules,
If that manual is in good condition and unwanted I'd be interested in it.
I don't have a hard copy manual at the moment. There is one on E-bay at
the moment but it looks a fairly tatty specimen.
Terry (Tez)
On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 7:57 AM, Jules Richardson <
jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
On 04/17/2014 11:01 PM, drlegendre . wrote:
Anyone wants a Plus/4 - I have a boxed (ugly box)
unit here, that is in
excellent shape otherwise. Has manuals as well, I believe.
I think it was around 1988 that someone gave me a busted one, but I never
did get it working - and in fact inexperience at the time only made things
worse. I remember the manuals* made it sound like quite a goofy little
system, so finding another one is on the "low priority" to-do list.
* and thinking about it, I may still have the manuals in storage (the
machine itself went off to NMoC in case they wanted it for static display;
cosmetically it was in reasonable shape)
Mine had the black tape unit (and I'm not sure what happened to that,
either), but I expect with a disk drive they wouldn't be bad little
machines.
cheers
Jules
9:33 a.m.
On 04/19/2014 01:49 AM, Terry Stewart wrote:
Jules,
If that manual is in good condition and unwanted I'd be interested in it.
I don't have a hard copy manual at the moment. There is one on E-bay at
the moment but it looks a fairly tatty specimen.
Were there separate ones for the system and then BASIC? I keep thinking
there was more than one manual (aside from the data cassette one), but
maybe that's just cranial bit-rot :-)
I'll keep an eye out for them anyway, and give you a shout if they turn up
to see if you still need them (if I still have them, they're in storage
back in England, but I might be going back over there to organize/ship
stuff later this year)
cheers
Jules
9:30 p.m.
There are at least two I know of. One is a general user manual, the other
deals with the built-in application software.
I'll keep an eye out for them anyway, and give you
a shout if they turn up
to
see if you still need them
Thanks!
Terry (Tez)
On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 1:33 AM, Jules Richardson <
jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
On 04/19/2014 01:49 AM, Terry Stewart wrote:
Jules,
If that manual is in good condition and unwanted I'd be interested in it.
I don't have a hard copy manual at the moment. There is one on E-bay at
the moment but it looks a fairly tatty specimen.
Were there separate ones for the system and then BASIC? I keep thinking
there was more than one manual (aside from the data cassette one), but
maybe that's just cranial bit-rot :-)
I'll keep an eye out for them anyway, and give you a shout if they turn up
to see if you still need them (if I still have them, they're in storage
back in England, but I might be going back over there to organize/ship
stuff later this year)
cheers
Jules
22 Apr
22 Apr
10:27 a.m.
Well, taken on their own it's not a bad design really. The only problem is
that it was late to the game, and in a couple of crucial ways it was
inferior to the C-64, and completely lacked C-64 compatibility, in a time
where the C-64 was already well-entrenched. It was better in that it had an
increased color palette and a nicer form factor IMO.
On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 6:36 AM, Terry Stewart <terry at webweavers.co.nz>wrote:
Scorned, derided and dismissed but are they really
that bad? My take on
the Commodore 16 and Plus/4.
http://youtu.be/TdItsJVLbws
Terry (Tez)
3725
days inactive
3730
days old
12 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
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brain＠jbrain.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
drlegendre＠gmail.com -
jules.richardson99＠gmail.com -
nf6x＠nf6x.net -
oltmansg＠gmail.com -
pet4032＠gmail.com -
terry＠webweavers.co.nz