New member from US.

[toby405]

Kind of rude of me to post a couple of questions on this fantastic forum without having even introduced myself. So here is my story if you have a couple of minutes and care to read it.

Here's how it went. I was a teenager in the late '70s. A rural, bored Oklahoma boy. I stared at ads for the Commodore PET in Byte magazine, etc. for hours, days, months. I had nothing to program on but I studied BASIC in the magazines and imagined how it would work. My younger brother and I ventured into a Radio Shack one day because I new they had a TRS-80. I typed in my first ever BASIC program from memory (a simple loop that printed my name forever). It worked the first time! We thought we were oh so mischievous when we "snuck" out of the store with the loop running endlessly. "I wonder if anyone will know how to break out of the loop," I thought, and fantasized that no one would. Oh well, I impressed my little brother with my knowledge of programming, which was my whole point in going in there in the first place.

Well my family couldn't really afford a TRS-80 which didn't matter because all I wanted was the PET which we definitely couldn't afford. The only reason I wanted it was because of how cool it looked in the ads, no other reason. Eventually we got a VIC-20 which started my brother and I down a path of programming computers for 30+ years. At the time I had no idea how similar the VIC was to the PET of my dreams. We just got it because we could afford it and we could program it.

We typed in a gob of programs from magazines. Understood very little of what we typed. Some worked, some didn't. We wrote a bunch of games in BASIC. Only one or two of them all that good. Learned how to make our own graphics character spaceships and such and XOR'd the heck out of screen ram with them. Those cassettes are all long gone unfortunately, but those were the days. Then it was off to college for me.

Today we run a small internet company together. Python and MySQL are my life. I have no idea how I got the idea to reconnect with the VIC. I'm enjoying the heck out of learning machine language on the 6502. I was scared to death of it back in the day. If I had read just one ML book back then it would have been a whole different story. I'm reading the Butterfield Machine Language book right now and it's completely eye opening.

I've bought a couple of VICs and a 1702 monitor off ebay. Still working out video issues with the VICs. I think I'd like to do the s-video mod (actually pay someone to do it, I'm a disaster with a soldering iron). But really I'm spending 99% of my time right now with DASM and VICE.

Toby

[SkydivinGirl]

Hi Toby! It's great to have you here!

Heather

[rhurst]

Have a lot of fun with reconnecting!

[Witzo]

Welcome!

[Muzz73]

Awesome! Welcome to the forum and to the VIC! Fun has now taken on a new meaning for you and it will only get better!

[toby405]

Thanks for all the welcomes!