Time to play CHESS against the vintage 8k commodore pet!
Took a bit to figure out how to get it going, but I did get it going...at some point I will try to play an entire game...and see how I do against this very small chess program...who knows...I might get the upper hand!
The struggle with these old tapes is necessary...the joy will be found...always interesting stories...of great moments in the life of using cassette tapes to save and load programs onto a vintage commodore pet computer...
Time to have a look at more cassette tapes!
Some weeks ago, despite my best efforts not to get more Commodore things, I did find an interesting collection of very vintage things including but limited to, some cassette tapes for the vintage original 8K Commodore PET with the tiny keyboard and the datasette built-in to the computer...
I do not know when these tapes were last used, and indeed, if they held onto their data or not...but starting up this PET and typing in LOAD and pressing play on the tape drive takes me back to my high school days at Northern Secondary School in Toronto where I first saw and fell in love with these then cutting edge computers
I would sit in the back room of the computer room where the card reader was, that we would load our cards into day after day...they went into the hopper, and then they would be read and transmitted to the Toronto Board of Education computer downtown and then the printouts would be sent by board mail, yes, a truck with all the other board mail, and then our teacher, Gord Mahaffy would go through and separate all the programs so that each student could see what they did right, what they did wrong and go back to the card punching machines to try to make it right and have everything come back with no errors...day after day, we would do this...but in the back room, there was a PET!
And from time to time I was able to go in there after school and learn more and more about the computer...and of course, it had a datasette, so cassette tapes became the order of the day!
They were slow, but at the time it was all we knew...except for the cards in the hopper...which took an entire day to get results back for...so the tape drive did not seem so slow compared to that!
It was there that I first learned to program...I do not call it coding...it was programming and I still enjoy tinkering on the PET's, and indeed, I am sure there are programs on these long lost tapes that I have never heard of or seen before!
Come enjoy the ride and the trip down memory lane...to discover and re-discover those magical early days of computing!
