Last Updated on July 27, 2018 by Dave Farquhar
OK, so first I find out that Quantum Link has been reverse engineered and resurrected, and then I find out there’s a darn good C compiler for 8-bit computers, including Commodore, Apple and Atari. It’ll even compile GEOS (the Commodore GUI) programs!
Quantum Link, for those of you who don’t know about it, was the precursor to AOL. Imagine an AOL Lite running in text mode using 16 colors and character graphics, and you’ve pretty much got it. Trust me, in 1986 we thought it was the coolest thing around.
I first used it in 1986 but didn’t actually subscribe until 1989. By 1989, of course, its popularity was on the decline because Commodore 8-bits were in their waning days, but it had had plenty of time to build up a great software library. I remember using the free hour or whatever it was they gave you per month to download as much PD software as I could, then I uploaded it all for credits to local BBSs. I built a huge software library that way. And I remember exchanging e-mail with the people who wrote every month in the Commodore magazines, which I thought was pretty cool.
And as far as programming 8-bit computers in C, I never got all that far with it way back when (assembly was so much more efficient) but I imagine today, with the compiler running on a PC with seemingly limitless CPU power and memory, it could probably optimize the code pretty well and generate something comparable to what at least an average assembly programmer would do by hand.
I remember those marathon sessions on the C-128, staying up well past midnight on Friday nights and knowing the system inside and out from both a hardware and software perspective–knowing where the chip was on the board and where it resided on the memory map. It’s just not possible to know the whole system that intimately anymore. I could program them, repair them, and I even designed at least one plug-in board for them (it either added another sound chip or a high-speed RS-232 port), although I never built the board. I wasn’t that confident in my soldering ability.
Maybe someday I’ll dink around with that stuff again. Part of me would really like that.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Dave… not to dredge up memories of deeds from the past that were not quite legal, but YOU gave me my first C compiler for the C= 64: PowerC. I never had a problem getting things to compile inside PowerC, although I had huge issues with the amount of available RAM.
Heck, I can still remember using the Herbert Schildt book to teach myself the language. Purple cover, stripes down the front, ergle. Okay, I can’t remember it real well, but there’s a vision floating in front of my eyeballs. It’s just that I’m nearly blind.. =)
Pshaw, you and Chuck Hejkal are the primary reasons I have the occupation I do today. Iron Doctor and Robopsykotic helped, but you were the stable influencing factor.
Let’s see… LDA #00; STA $C000; STA $C001 — black border and black background? I think?
hehe.
Actually I think the addresses were $D000 and $D001. $C000 was the 4K free space that was handiest for stashing code. I think the VIC-II was at $D000. I do remember it was 53280/53281 decimal.
It frightens me how many things I have a harder time remembering. I think the last time I wrote a real program for a Commodore must have been 1992 at the very latest. Although I did get a wild hair sometime in 1996 or so and decide to try to rewrite MOB Mover (remember that?) in assembly. But by then my C-128 could only run for about 30 minutes without crashing, so that killed that idea.