My thoughts on: The Commodore 64. The Mother of modern Computers. Forget Charles Babbage and his calculating machine. Forget ENIAC and Cray and all other mere shadows and prefigurations of this glorious inaugurator of the wired age. I say: byte for byte, the Commodore 64 and its software outperform anything we have now. Sure MS Word for Windows is better than Speedscript, but it's also way (200x) bigger. You can't possibly argue that it's 200x better. It certainly isn't any faster. And the games - Raid on Bungling Bay, Ghost Busters, Ultima III - they have only just recently been matched by games for the Mac and IBM (Civilization, for example.)

I remember my first machine code program: drawing a diagonal line across the screen, and how awestruck I was at the speed, or rather the instantaneousity. The line was drawn too quickly for my eye, or probably even the monitor at 20 frames per second, to follow. Which is why I am so irked by being able to follow MS Word draw the button panel at the top of each new document that I open. If the C64 could do it instantly with a 6502 at whatever its clockspeed was, why can't the 486 at 33MHz? My suspicion is that with each advance in computing power, programming gets to be less and less efficient, so that the advances are being mostly wasted.

Let's raise a glass to Necessity as the mother of Efficiency. My friend Rudi wrote a speech-recognition program in machine code, that actually worked reasonably well, and you know it must have been less than 64K. I spent more hours than I care to admit to writing algorithms that generated prime numbers, and timing them in an attempt to find the one that was most efficient.

But sadly, those days are gone.


©1996 Michael Kyba, Sitegeist Media
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