Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Commodore 128 as Nature Intended It

Commodore 128 as Nature Intended It

Fellow Milwaukeean (and the only current Milwaukeean between the two of us) Triticale knows I collect old computers, and when he recently changed abodes, he told me I could have his old Commodore 128 that had been in his garage forever. Well, I talked to my brother in Milwaukee about picking it up for me, and he did, and on my most recent trip to Wisconsin I retrieved said machine.

When I first tried to boot it, it failed. So I planned to make it a teach-yourself-electronics project to resuscitate it, but all it took was a new fuse in the power supply. So I didn't really learn much at all, but it works beautifully.

And darn the luck, the only television with an RF switch attached to it was in the living room. So behold:

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Oh, my. I was so excited, I hooked the Commodore 1571 disk drive up and I'll be durned if it didn't work right out of the box. So I dug through my archives of my old disks and found some of the programs I had written in the first Bush presidency. As you might know, the Commodore 128 was my first computer, so Basic 7.0 was my first language. And I wrote a number of programs.

Including Adventurers' Guild, a program designed to keep track of my D&D group's equipment and character list. It wasn't truly data-driven, but it did use the Commodore 128's graphics to their ability. I mean, high res graphics, brother:

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The main program was just a routing piece that called a subprogram allowing the user to look at the various and sundry keeps, characters, or stockpiled equipment:

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For example, if you wanted to see the roster, it would go into a subprogram for the roster and you could see all characters past and present that played in the campaign:

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For example, here's my brother's favorite character as seen when the user has chosen to view all:

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And even when I was a junior in high school, I was building help into my applications. Here's one of my first help files:

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When the user logged out, the Commodore went into hi-res graphics for a moment, painting an exit door:

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Then it ended turning the screen to default colors and with a final message from the dungeonmaster:

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Hmm, lightning is misspelled. I'll log a defect on that right away.

I wrote a couple of other things, too, including a DMV quiz program after watching the movie License to Drive over and over as only a kid in the boondocks with only Showtime could.

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The instructions included my address back in the day and welcomed correspondence. Back in those days, that's how you did it without the Internet and e-mail addresses that worked wherever you connected:

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And the Weird Al Wannabe Quiz:

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Of course, after I released them to the wild of the Commodore CG BBSes, I'd expect they were never downloaded. I know no one ever came across with a shareware donation. I did, however, make some money programming, as the high school baseball team's manager wanted a program to keep track of stats. At Stellar Soft, we were happy to gather his requirements, deliver a quality program, and support it with new features as requested for the princely sum of like $50:

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I see that in the instructions, I listed it as a division of Triple N Enterprises:

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Considering that Noggle, Noggle, and Neiderriter was our lawnmowing business, I guess I did that for taxing purposes.

Well, that's my walk down memory lane. What's my point? I don't know; I have 20 years of software development experience? Or perhaps to boast once again that I have more Commodores than Michele?

Aw, who cares, I got to post some pictures of an old computer.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:08 PM