e Vic-20. I used graph paper to create an 8 by
8 grid which I then pencilled in some squares to make shapes such as happy faces or space ship. By adding up the 'bits' of the squares that I'd
pencilled in, I could arrive at a numeric value to POKE into the Vic. One
of my early attempts at making a game using custom graphics on the Vic-20
was a game I called Spiders. In Spiders, you were a spider in the middle
of the screen. You could move up and down along your web. Coming in from
the left and right of the screen were bad guys. You had to manoeuvre up
and down the centre of the screen to shoot left and right and take out the
bad guys before they made their way to the middle of the screen. It was a primitive game, the sounds effects were mere 'chirps'. A chirp when you
moved up or down, and a chirp when the bad guys moved. It wasn't the most exhilarating game I'd ever played but damn it, it had come from my own two hands typing away based on a game from my imagination.

This was the magic of the Commodore era and something that I feel society
has lost. As we make technological advances we also lose some of the imagination that we used to rely upon, and some of the knowledge it took to convert that imagination into a working product. My brother and I used to spend hours on the Vic-20 creating games and utilities. Sometimes we'd
argue as to when it was time to let the other person use it. I can
remember once getting so upset that he wouldn't give it up, that I turned
the power off as he was programming. In hindsight it was a really awful
thing to do, because back then unless you saved your program on cassette,
it would be lost.

I took gaming a little too seriously at times as well. I can remember
playing a game (Omega Race?) and becoming angry and hitting the keyboard.
I ended up snapping the top right key off the computer. We took it into
the computer store where the employee exclaimed, "We've never seen a
computer with a broken key before". They ended up shipping the computer
out for repairs while we went without it for a few weeks. It was
embarrassing because I had to not only explain to my father why I'd broken
the key but he would also be the one paying for the repair. Fortunately
the business ended up losing our Vic-20 and they reimbursed us with a new
one.

For many years our bedroom closet contained shoeboxes filled with VIC-20 cassette tapes. Many a summer's afternoon worth of programming was
contained on those tapes. While I was more of a game creator, my brother
took to applications. We ended up throwing out all of those tapes when we purchased a Commodore 64. The tapes didn't just represent software but
also intrinsic learning, the ability to challenge yourself and to problem solve.

The one thing that must be said is that we were also very active youths.
Unlike many of today's generation kids that reap the benefit of 5 hours of X-Box followed by an hour of television, we were always outdoors. The
1980's was a great time to be a kid. We'd bike over to the mall, they
still had arcades back then. We might have a game of baseball in the field behind our house, or launch model rockets that we'd built from Estes do-it-yourself kits. These were the days where going to the shopping
centre was fun. The mall wasn't filled with large chain stores such as Walmart. You could spend an entire afternoon perusing the various family
owned stores. Leisure World offered model cars that you built from out of
the box, puzzles and other intellectually stimulating games. Radio Shack
still had their Battery of the Month club and I'd be sure to get my 9 volt battery each month. In those days you could easily lose yourself for an
hour just looking through Radio Shack's catalogue of gadgets. Today you'll barely find anything for the home hobbyist except an assorted bag of
resistors. The mall was a central meeting place where you could meet up
with friends. Best of all it was relatively quiet unlike today's madhouse malls. There was always some adventure to be found on your bike. One day
it might be checking out dumpsters for interesting items, the next it might
be searching for beer bottles in a forest to return for money.

During this era people still used a telephone to make voice calls. Who
doesn't remember calling their friend's house and saying, "Hello Mrs.
Wright is John home?" Nowadays kids just text one another and can't go
anywhere without their phones. But I digress, I think that people were generally more sociable in the 1980's and did more communicating face to
face. I'm not suggesting that computers were the answer to social
inequality or to being accepted by your peers. The Commodore era however
was instrumental in bringing so many young boys and girls together on a
social level. Through a friend of a friend I met two younger boys who
owned a Commodore computer. Their parents owned a pizza store and we ended
up having a pizza and horror movie party. Under what premise could kids
who don't know one another even do that today? I guess you could have an
X-Box party. Computers were new, people had never owned one before, and we were driven to learn to understand and to program them. Now days we're accustomed to letting Windows do all the work for us as we reap the end results.

In 1985, Commodore ceased producing the Vic-20. The bike rides to friend's houses with cassette tapes and the in class trading of tapes was over.

Today the Vic-20 still maintains a small following of loyal users who write programs that push it to levels never before seen including DYCP scrolling, split rasters and plasma effects.

THE COMMODORE 64

The distribution of software on the PET was slow, it improved with the
Vic-20 but the Commodore 64 would set a new precedent in terms of allowing Commodore owners to meet others and to share software.

The Commodore 64 was introduced in August of 1982. The initial price was approximately $600. A complete system with disk drive and monitor was approximately $1000. Needless to say there were very few Commodore 64
owners in my neighbourhood. The machine offered 16 colours, two joystick ports, 64k of memory and 40 characters per line.

The family across the street from us purchased a Commodore 64 around 1982.
I recall sitting in their main entrance playing a very simple game where
you were a character on the screen and had to try to get to the top of the screen which was full of falling stars. It was an ASCII game and by all
rights the game was complete garbage but just as the Vic-20 took time to
learn, so too did the Commodore 64. It would take time for the PET and
Vic-20 programmers to learn how to program quality games for the Commodore
64. It would take time to learn to create sprites and music.

We were so fascinated with their Commodore 64 that we continued playing it
well after the neighbourhood kids who owned it had gone to bed. Their
mother eventually came out and told us it was time to go home, tomorrow
would be another day to use the C64.

As the price gradually decreased, more households began to own Commodore 64 computers. Around 1983 a young kid moved to our city from Windsor,
Ontario. One of the first things this young kid did was to get himself a second phone line and to set up a Bulletin Board System (BBS). BBS's were
a popular thing in Windsor and our city offered perhaps three BBS's in
total. One was run by an electronics company, one out of a guy's house and
one by a large tourist attraction.

This young kid had ambition. It was unheard of for someone his age to have
a second phone line let alone running a BBS from his C64. A few more
fortunate kids had modems for their C64's and used them to call into the
three non-Commodore boards that our city had. The content was mainly
Buy/Sell ads.

Well you can imagine the shock when Weekend Warrior's (as he named himself)
new BBS went up and it offered forums such as the "War Room" where anything went. No rules just mayhem. The board, which operated on C-Net software,
went crazy as young people from across the city now had a forum where they could unleash their verbal demons. People would go to the war room and
call other people out as "little fuckers" not because they disliked one
another but simply because they could. There'd never been a local online community where people could just let loose like this.

By this time our parents decided they would purchase us a Commodore 64.
One day a local computer store had a crazy sale. People were lined up
outside waiting for the doors to open. We were one of the first people in line. When the doors opened I walked in casually, only to look behind me
and see people bolting inside as they tried to grab items on sale. My walk turned into a run and I headed to where the Commodore 64's were. The
computer needed a new chip because a joystick didn't work but was otherwise functional.

We didn't own a modem so in order to make posts on this bulletin board, I'd have to walk over to Weekend Warrior's house and login from his BBS
directly. I don't remember his board's name, I do know that it was always busy. People in my city had never used a C64 BBS before and never had a
forum to meet other Commodore youths. The commercial game downloads
section didn't hurt either.

I went snowmobiling with a couple of kids I barely knew, who I met on
Weekend Warrior's BBS. I remember at one point having a conversation with
one of them about did they like me? Was I cool? Apparently one of the
other kids had the same concern about how I viewed him. Oh to be accepted
by your peers when you were fourteen years old.

Another time we had been chatting with a couple of other guys who lived
about 45 minutes away, and we took the Greyhound bus out to visit them. Of course we brought along some games. One of the two kids happened to be a
very good graphic artist and would make some graphics for me.

A few months into running the BBS, Weekend Warrior along with myself met up with a new user from the BBS named "Fly on the Wall". We were walking up
the street and there were two girls walking our way. One was Fly's sister
and the other his cousin. They were looking for us, as we were looking for
the house. This was the great thing about the Commodore computers - people were able to meet new friends with nothing more in common than the computer that they owned. Teenagers didn't just go out and randomly meet new people
- until our Commodore computers came along. We spent the summer drinking
with Fly on the Wall. Sadly he had a lot going on in his life and last I
heard he eventually took his own life a few years later.

Weekend Warrior took down his board a few years later, having lost all
interest in the Commodore 64.

By now it was about 1984 and everyone owned a Commodore 64. Some days I'd
walk to school and see an empty C64 box in the garbage and the end of a neighbour's house.. A few of these households had pretty teenaged girls at home and you could imagine how badly I wanted to get to trade games with
their father. It never happened though, unless you had that middleman
friend to make the introductions you really couldn't just walk up to the
door and ask them to trade games.

Speaking of adults, we traded games with our teachers at school. It wasn't uncommon for us to bring some disks to school for the teacher to take home.
No, we didn't get extra grades for it.

In time I was introduced to an older fellow named Gary who was about 31
years old, I was about 16 years old. It was something unheard of,
something I'd never done, to go over to a man's house for the sole purpose
of trading games. Part of me thought it was unusual for a grown man to
have an interest in games - but now I know better. So there we were, the mutual friend and I and this older man trading games. Over the next year
or so I'd often go over and trade games with him. He was an avid collector
who owned thousands of disks and had an impressive hardware setup. His C64 displayed his real name when he booted it, he had some crazy fast load
system and a cartridge switching setup that allowed him to boot up with different cartridges inserted.

The thing about disk fast loaders is that sometimes they work a little too fast. I can recall a friend and I creating a "21 second backup" connector
from some schematics. This involved connecting a ribbon cable to a socket which you then placed inside your 1541 disk drive. The other end of the
cable connected to your Commodore 64 port. Well the damned thing never did work properly. It functioned, it was fast and it copied a disk in 21
seconds but you were guaranteed to have errors on the final copy. Fast
does not always equal quality.

Sometimes Gary would even come to pick me up in his truck and I'm sure to
my parents the idea of a grown up picking up their child to go over and
copy games might have seemed risky. I can assure you that nothing ever happened - except he once offered me a beer which I was thrilled about.

On another occasion I remember going over to a friend of a friend's house
who introduced me to an older fellow who had to be in his 50's. This
fellow allowed me to sit in front of his computer and copy anything I
wanted. Could you do the same thing today I wonder, without being seen as
a paedophile?

Through the BBS's I met a couple of guys at our university who were
Commodore owners. One of them had made a homemade speech synthesizer. He dropped one off at my door a few days later and I used it to digitize my
voice for use in a few programs. I can't remember who these guys were or
what became of the hardware.

Around 1985 we started having 'user meets'. Sometimes these consisted of copying software while other times they were a gathering of people to do
some underage basement drinking. I'm quite sure that all across North
America similar user meets took place. Most certainly many Commodore 64
user clubs of the non-underage drinking age were formed. Some of these
user groups still exist today although Commodore support is diminishing or non-existent. Compute! Magazine went on to release Compute's Gazette
which was focused more on the Commodore computer. In the magazine you
could often find addresses of other computer clubs from across North
America. Not only were small groups of friends coming together but now
large group meetings were taking place.

While this might not sound unusual, it was relatively new to have an actual 'group' for computer users back in the late 70's to early 80's.

There were days where people from my school who I'd never known well, and
one who used to make fun of me, show up at my door with a box of blank
disks wanting games. Some paid me, others didn't. All across our city,
and across the country, kids were making new acquaintances and friendships.
We were trading games with people our own age, with grown-ups and with
seniors. Age wasn't an issue to them or to use. Our own Commodore social network.

In 1985 Q-Link was introduced for the Commodore 64. Q-Link was an online community with chat rooms, online games, and file transfers. You could
play card games and Wheel of Fortune against other players. It was a very popular gathering place for Commodore users. Q-Link administrators had
names that began with Q (example: QJohn). Many hours were spent by entire families playing games against other people connected by Q-Link. During
the 1980's this was something quite new unless you happened to borrow your father's credit card and use CompuServe which was text based only. Unlike Facebook and other social media of today, Q-Link didn't have the ability to create groups meant to harass others, there was no weak flimsy Community Standards, and you couldn't post nudity. It was very much a family
oriented place.

Bulletin Board Systems appeared in most major North American cities, as
there was at least one kid in each city who owned a C64 and a modem. These

--- MBSE BBS v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux-i386)
* Origin: Dragon's Lair ---:- bbs.vk3heg.net -:--- (39:901/280)