Newbie is wondering
Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 1:56 pm
Hi, I just joined a week or two ago. I'm very interested in 8-bit Commodore computers. I collect them. I have a VIC20, C64, SX64, C116, c16, plus/4, and B500. I'd like to get one of the old PETS, but they're hundreds of dollars. I also have several Amigas, including a couple of Amiga NG machines. Lately I've been playing around with the B500. It is PET compatible and runs BASIC 4.0. I've written a rudimentary database program in BASIC 4.0. I've programmed professionally in BASIC and am familiar with many versions, up to Visual BASIC. I've been frustrated by the shortcomings of BASIC 4, though at the time it came out it was considered advanced. Another frustration is the Commodore floppy drives. It looks like the PET drives had three different disk formats and the drives couldn't read or write any other format than their native one. (I'd like to be proven wrong.) I have three drive units (two of them are dual drives) that can read any of the three formats. As you can see, I've invested a lot in 8-bit Commodore computers. I'm building a database of my computer things and, although it's incomplete, I've documented a confirmed value of almost $3000. It's sure to grow as I get more things into the database. I lose track of what I have without a database. Anyway I'm glad to be part of the community.