Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Commodore 64 revisited
From news.com: "YAMHILL, Ore.--There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on the QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Oregon, which is the home and circuit design lab of Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer.
Ellsworth has squeezed the entire circuitry of a two-decade-old Commodore 64 home computer onto a single chip, which she has tucked neatly into a joystick that connects by a cable to a TV set. Called the Commodore 64--the same as the computer system--her device can run 30 video games, mostly sports, racing and puzzles games from the early 1980s, all without the hassle of changing game cartridges."
Should you get excited over it? Well, it's $30 and QVC has sold 70,000 of the little buggers since it began the campaign. Better (worse?) still, according to the story, there are five hidden games in the joystick and it can be modified (Professional Hacker. Do Not Attempt At Home) to use a keyboard, monitor, and disk drive.
Kinda rings nostalgic to me. I was one of the original presenters (voice over, in absentia) when Commodore first introduced the 64... It seems like yesterday. Sigh...
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