Thanks for watching! Obviously this is all just a bit of fun. Couple of points: • You'll realise that the result of who opened the doc first was the same as who printed first, so this isn't really a race of printers & the printer part is actually moot (but fun nostalgia.) • I just used the printers I have here but remember they were slow as they were both set to high quality. • I should also point out the Mac turned out to have FileVault encryption on, as it is by default, which may have slowed it a bit. But this was a real world test and actually that's an interesting commentary on over-complicated modern features. Back in the day we just locked our floppy in a box! (Sounds painful!) Your friend in retro, Perifractic
This is absolutely peri-fantastic! :) I just got a C64 (with a nice 1541) like the one in the video here, and I'm looking for a tutorial to start using it. Of course I red the original C64 manual, and I do know how to use the computer. The main open issue is: how I can write ROMS from the web on real 5.25" disks, in order to use them on the C64. Any link to video, document, PDF, or alike to help me with this "retro-bootstrap" would be very appreciated! P.S. I am considering the option of using an SD card reader on the C64, in order to put there the files with my modern Mac, and then write from the SD to the Disk with the C64. However a link to a nice retro-tutorial for beginners would be very appreciated :)
@@youerny I use the Ultimate 64 or Action Replay cartridge. They have an option to copy a whole disk. Mount the D64 file as disk 9 using SD2IEC or U64, and put the blank disk in unit 8 then start the copy. There are other ways. I recommend asking on the big Facebook group or Lemon 64. Good luck!
When I started in computing science in the early 90s, it was all about code efficiency. The same was certainly true in the 80s when the C64 came to pass. Today, with so much power and processing abilities the idea of efficient speed, is lost ... so although thousands of times slower, the C64 had vastly superiority written code, making up for the clock speed differences. Rant over, I still love my C64s
You’re talking about a time when resources were so finite and the language was so low people had no choice but to develop in this way It’s all about relevance. The time it takes to write a saved spreadsheet to disk is of much less importance than say processing real time bank transactions, or decryption. There’s lots of places where high performance computing is important, but also lots of places where it just simply isn’t. Being able to delivery requirements quickly that perform a job to a certain standard is often all that’s required, and what the budget stretches to.
There’s always a cost - either the developer expends effort (which costs time and money) on efficiency of code; or the user expends money on faster hardware. Given the choice, the vast majority of managers at software companies will choose to push that cost upon the customer. This is why we have unresponsive, bloated systems...
Did a computer users group newsletter for several years using a Commodore 128D equipped with Jiffydos, a Creative Micro Designs RamDrive and 1581 drive. I even had Creative Micro's mouse with an on-board real-time clock that set the time/date automatically for GEOS. Did the ouptut on a Star Micronics 1000 Rainbow printer. It's still amazing that I could do desktop publishing on an 8 bit compter. Final printing was excruciatingly slow, but looked great for the time. Great memories.
There are actually two kinds of Mac Book Pros. The ones with the "£" above the "3" are made of aluminium, the ones with the "#" above the "3" are made of aluminum. Obviously, British Macs are about one pound better than US Macs.
@@Ndlanding Are you serious? That's a bunch of money. I don't drink beer, so I don't have any skin in this game. But if you are paying 5 pounds to buy a beer, then you might need to adjust your hobbies a bit. That's crazy.
maybe not but that mac printer is hella slow. Not counting about ten seconds of power-up from standby, my brother printer can do a page every two seconds.
For sure back in the day on all my Epson, and Canon printers I for sure used draft/ink saver mode to extend the life of my ribbons, and ink tanks, heck I still use a sudo draft mode on my brother Laser printer to get more life out of my already cheap generic toner cartridges. I'm of the mindset of why pay more to print something out then I have too.
I bought my commodore 64 when I was around 12 years old with my own money that i saved having my news paper route. I sold it on Ebay when I was 30 years old. It still worked. With about 200 floppy disks with it. Some bought some copies from friends, mostly copies. I always regretted selling it. Such a huge part of my childhood.
Right, it'll need a new battery in 2 or 3 years and a new SSD in 4 or 5 years... Because the SSD is SOLDERED on, once that dies the system is worthless...
Based on my Apple hardware ownership track record, will be about 3 years into an Apple product and start having issues - but the iPods it was more like 6 months to a year
Not really crappy code. But new system need to do more. A good part of the boot up of a new pc is loading drivers. A C64 doesn’t use drivers everything is coded for one type of hardware. While the PC and Mac has to check for every hardware component and load the right driver for the job. Next there is security, a lot of power goes into security on these systems. Also if used a laser printer for the printout not an ink jet the print speeds would be much better. It isn’t fare to say modern systems have crappy code where they need to do more to operate in a modern world.
@@toddfraser3353 and yet if you're trying to do one specific task and the old computer lets you finish in the same amount of time, there's clearly waste.
Jean Roch Actually I would gain very much. Try printing a modern image embedded in the letter. And you know you are basing your arguments on rather simple use case. Try video editing on the C64. On top of that you Couleur always write letters by hand so even a typewriter may be called bloat.
@Gábor Lukácsik Personally I prefer the OS itself to be fairly lightweight. I mainly use OS X, and found that every version after 10.6 Snow Leopard added additional features that I do not need at the cost of performance. Every update made my perfectly functioning machines slower. I have also heard similar reports about Windows 10 from my Windows user friends.
This is why I use xubuntu on every machine I run, all these fancy visual effects, etc. a waste of resources. I'm happy with a decent looking monospace font, other than that I don't mind.
In older computers reading from the ROM was as fast or sometimes faster than RAM. Then consider how slow hard disks were, and how much slower floppy disks were, and it’s easy to see how you could get such a responsive OS if you were running it from ROM.
He mentions that the C64 is tested with what was available in 1986 (contrary to the description which mentions 1982). In 1982, you did not have many word processor to choose from. Actually, I know just of Easy Script. It loaded from disk in less than 30 seconds - but it was also available as a ROM module. No load time there! I am, however, afraid that nowadays only the disk version is till being sold: www.amazon.com/Commodore-Script-Advanced-Professional-Processor/dp/B004DBX3VA In 1986, however, you might have investigated other options as well. The REU came out in 1985, allowing you to upgrade your C64 with a 256kB sort-of RAM disk, which was also compatible with GEOS (the 512kB REU was meant for the C128, but also worked for the C64 in many cases). Turbo Trans came out in 1986 as well, a hardware add-on advertising a 200-fold speed increase for the 1541 drive (it read a complete disk in 16 seconds). However, I assume that it was incompatible with the GEOS copy protection. But no reason to despair, the C64 version of GEOS had a fast loader built-in.
Those programmers back then were genius... to do so much with so little... incredible. That they do comparable tasks to modern computers and software only marginally slower testifies to how well made that software was, and how lazy and bloated things have gotten with far more powerful hardware.
As we like to say in our net security classes at the local Bar Association, we didn't upgrade to gain speed, we did to gain security and ease of use. It's still impressive how fast a Commodore can be turned on and do stuff, and a picture of my setup was sent to everyone in the aforementioned Bar Association, but in 35 years we got filevault to avoid losing floppies with valuable data, solid state disks that won't get mold and the ability to chuck a Macbook Pro in the suitcase and plan holidays with our partner instead of lugging around an SX :) Stll, it's really an impressive video, as usual. And yes, I love your setup, a lot. Especially the Excelerator: I saw my first clone disk later in life, a BlueChip, and it was love at first sight
@4:38 the right question to ask should be ‘what has gone wrong between then and now and we ended up with the same software which occupies x1000 the space on our hard drives?’
@Gábor Lukácsik I was just trying to point out that, when you compile the basic "Hello World" to make an executable in any modern compiler, you will immediately exceed the available memory of any of the home computers from the C64 era. We are not talking about visual demands here. I have attended 1KB limited assembly code competitions in the past, as in the compiled code can not exceed 1024bytes. You would be amazed what people could come up with, utilizing just under 1024bytes. Now, the laziness took over and when you start with #include it is 44kB!
The MPS1200 was my Printer! That printer got me through middle school, high school, and the first two years of college. I wrote some of my best academic works on that printer. Man, I miss it. That printer was a beast. It never broke, it never gave up. And none of the pins ever wore down.
not speaking about that the mps12000 printer looks (and will always look) infinitely better than the HP... what happened in the design department? it's just a beautiful machine even today, and just looks better as it ages.
My first computer was a 1987 C-64C with a 1571 floppy drive. Had lots of fun with that computer back then, and still have it in my basement with all the original games, joy stick's and the trusty 1571 FDD!
New sub around here - found you guys through the youtube algo after watching an LGR vid. Just wanted to say how much I appreciate and love what I am seeing with your channel! The 2 Chess vids were so much fun to watch! You have all the ingredients of a terrific channel - Lady and Puppy Fractic are just terrific paw-tners in crime. I'm fairly ancient as well, having come through the 386x and 1200baud modem days, though I never was a Commodore or Apple guy. Still, there is something so wonderfully compelling to see great retro content like what you folks are doing - just as folks like Clint at LGR. Wishing you all continued success!
The macs printer has to be the slowest modern printer on the market. Mine was a cheap walmart printer and it just spits out the paper almost instantly.
This is an under-rated video, particularly for those of us who were 6-to-10 year old kids with a Commodore 64, and today use Macbook Pros! Funny my Midwest public schools in the 80s had Apple IIe and Apple IIc or Apple II Plus or something computers for my classes. My computer at home did not do what I was taught in school because I had a Commodore 64, not an Apple computer. There was also the Commodore Vic 20. The near-mint condition and quality of the Commodore 64 in this video is really cool! The sound of that Commodore printer brings back memories too! -B
Some good comments on here, I remember having to print my HS reports on that connected paper where you had to tear off the sides. As for the mac book printing, a lot has to do with the printer. But like you rightly said, 37 years and we have sped up 40 something seconds.
As someone who grew up with both the C64 and Amiga, your videos are all truly superb. I so regret getting rid of them all back in the mid 90s. I had huge collections for both systems and for the C64 I had a huge GEOS collection back in the day from buying quite a few cheap second hand bundles. In one bundle I had a binding folder of thousands of print outs of various fonts and add-ons all listed alphabetically. Something that woudve been very useful in this day and age even. But this whole video reminded me of the old C64 Aussie ad we had here which would say 'Are you keeping up with the Commodore, cos the Commodore is keeping up with you" hahahaha. Long live the 8 and 16 bits.
64 kilobytes... I’m amazed that it’s even possible to run a word editor inside a graphical operating system, with still enough memory to actually type a letter.
i mean, it not so small, the problem is, that current operating systems and programs, are not optimized, because they dont have to... they just take more and more ram. For example, my mouse driver takes 100 mb from ram, it upset me very much. It's very lame programing work. Back in day, they have to be more creative, and they were. But it costed time. Now, they spare time so they dont have to optimalize so good, but programs takes ram and HDD space like crazy. Because they are lazy to optimize. Imagine, it costs man-hours to put effort in it, that mean additional employers. So they save costs, but programs are less optimized than in those times. For example, I would program same mouse driver that takes only 5 mb memory from RAM and do same things. That is just example. But they would stop me, because it would cost some additional time - "just dont care dude, RAM is cheap now, at least, they would be forced to buy 8GB". This is way of thinking now. But back in the day, thay had 64kb, and knew, most people cannot effort superexpensive electronics anyway, so in order, so people buy they programs and hardware, they have to be supercreative, and make most optimized things in terms of space saving.
I still use GEOS. A couple of things: 1- if you don't use a RAM expansion like GeoRAM or , better, the Commodore ram carts that had DMA, it will swap a lot on disk, specially with geopaint. 2- if you value your sanity, two disk drives are the bare minimum. BUT, with more ram you can do crazy stuff like freezing in ram the geos system and rebooting it from the cbm dos in two seconds and also have ram disks that speed up work in an incredible way. You can cache parts of the os so they don't have to be reloaded from disk.
Windows O/S, especially 10 is filled with bloatware & bloat code because modern machines have lots of power, lots of memory and lots of disk space for "virtual memory" to handle it. Bloatware. Yes, and it's also true that writing "tight" code is an art that costs money in labor costs. Knock it out. Get it done. "Elegant" solutions are not relevant in today's market.
Years ago, a company sent me to learn to code dBase IV for DOS. This was circa 1993 or so. The instructor told how a company she worked for developed an accounting program, in dBase, for IBM AS400's (which was a standard office mainframe of the era.) They wrote the code to work in 500mb memory only to discover that nearly all AS400s were sold with only 200mb memory because the extra 300mb memory cost like a half million dollars! Learning to Code, Tight & Elegant is a lost art!
You could also use a geoCable and connect to a parallel port printer, I used my MPS1250 that way (it has both serial and parallel ports), also with the correct printer drivers you could get to up to 240x216dpi on that printer (3 passes per line, so reeeeally slow). Or you can be even more fancy and use an HP LaserJet compatible printer and probably win the race.
New running gag..Perifractic vs. Ladyfractic in word pronunciation. That deserves to be at the front of every video. Love the Excelerator Plus disk drive!
Dude, I can tell you my experience, trying to print from a C64 word processing program. Basically, it took as long to actually load the application as it would booting the MacBook, loading Word and writing the text. An then you want to actually *print* the document? Flip over the floppy to load the printing module and wait forever for it to load just to do that.
1:35. I thought for a moment, "I'm not sure if that's how I'd portray Amigans". Then I realised that right now I'm actually wearing a dressing gown, I've got long hair and a beard, and I own an Amiga and prefer AmigaOS to windows and mac. Now I see that it's probably a very good representation. Bravo
I had GEOS for my Apple IIe, and I think it might have beat the modern Mac in this test thanks to the Apple II's super fast floppy drives (thanks, Woz).
When it comes to Apple I think Woz did it better, and I seriously lost respect for the Apple after the Apple II GS, and the whole deal with Woz leaving the company due to Jobs, and his BS!!!
Haha. The Apple II had some good I/O and floppy drive speed - thanks to Woz's optimizations no doubt. It also had terrible graphics, which were a Woz optimization too. Its easy to forget nowdays that the Apple II was really a generation behind things like the C64, Amstrad CPC or Spectrum 48K. It belongs to the first generation of late 70s home computers like the Commodore Pet and the TRS-80.
As soon as you panned to the old printer I felt a wave of nostalgia. I had the MPS 1250 printer. It's got identical functionality to the MPS 1200 here, but replaced the serial pass-through connection with a Centronix parallel connector, so you could use it with anything that used that standard as well.
The sounds of that dot matrix printer took me back, especially with an Atari 400 in view! (Not that I had a printer in the late 70s.) I even still remember some of the Atari basic commands such as _graphics, setcolor, plot_ and _drawto_ that I spent hours typing out on that awful membrane keyboard. Those *weren't* the days, lol.
I'm a touch typist and I actually got use to the membrane keyboard. Of course, I also learned that one could abbreviate the keywords like gr. for graphics, se. for setcolor, pos. for position, etc..
I owned a Commodore 64 in 1982. I was always amazed at the graphics and sound capability in an 8bit machine with 64kb of memory. Wished I still had it. I almost had purchased an Apple IIE that I thought would be a better computer but then Price Club (Now Costco) had them on sale for $600 and not a lot more for the monitor and floppy drive. I used PaperClip as my word processor. And became quite fond of BBS's which was the next best thing to the yet available Internet as we know it today. Man....I was so cutting edge. hahaha. Load "paperclip", 8, 1
In 1984 I had to write a program to compute some engineering calculations. Round 1 was on the Engineering Departments VAX 'whiteware' system using Fortran (I was the only user). Round 2 was on my humble little C64 in basic. Each one recorded processing time and the C64 won by a factor of roughly 20x.
It will be unfair to compare the two machines from different eras both are great computers in their own right. Brilliant video all the same thanks for posting coming from a man who’s first computer was the Commodore Vic-20.
I found it interesting that GEOS was chosen for this. I knew very few people who considered GEOS much more than a novelty when it was released. Something to show your Mac friends your computer could GUI too, but nothing we ever actually used for much. It was just too slow and cumbersome and the truth is the C64 didn't really have the resources to power it effectively. The 128 version was what it should have been. Anyway, back in the day I would have fired up Fontmaster II, not GEOS. Heh, when I was in high school, I used to charge university students to use my C64 and Fontmaster II to type up and print their thesis papers.
That's what I was thinking. The C64 would have stomped here if he'd loaded a word processor straight from the basic prompt, instead of loading a whole operating system. These old computers were slower, but they had to process so much less data that in a practical test C64 should have been printing by the time the macbook was done booting. That dot matrix printer may have still lost it the race, though. They weren't exactly fast.
Wow, that triggered a memory flashback. Somehow, I still remember that I used Fleet System 2 as the word processor on my Commodore 64. And that got me thru my first 2 years in college, before I moved to my Amiga. Good times! ;-)
@@massimomagrini4452 For ultimate speed in 1982 I would recommend a repurposed 1970s line printer. By 1986 big laser printers had caught up to the old speed but now with graphics.
That Commodor 64 user interface rocked for 1982. I'd never seen it before! I was looking at TRS-80, or DOS back during the days of the computer wars. It's cool you kept it and all those other beige toys alive.
That was a fun video Chris and thanks for plugging Fusion Annual too.. I don't have much content in the annual compared to the normal Fusion issues, but I do contribute a rather nice interview I did with someone called RJ Mical - whoever he might be :)
would have been even better if GEOS was on a rom chip a Commodore really missed an oppertunity a C64 with GEOS aswell as a few basic office programs on ROM would have been the dominant Buisiness machine of the decade they could have simply replaced the rom chip that held Commodore basic with this and it would have been a beast wouldbe interesting to know if a C64 could be modded this way
That's once again some great piece of entertainment, thank you! Who else here thinks that it's about time for a new C64 chiptune vid...feat. Puppy and/or LadyFractic?
Only the US and Canada (in English, in French it's correct) say aloominum. Everywhere else in the world says it correctly. I like to annoy them by pronouncing it alaminum, ie just skipping the second i
@@SimonQuigleyI read somewhere that technically the US spelling is technically the correct way to spell and pronounce it. Can't be bothered finding the sources on that again. I've been pronouncing it Aluminium and it's here to stay in my vocabulary lol
@@ninpodarren But is it airplane or aeroplane? I've accepted zed is a lost cause with my daughter, vs zee, but I'm damned if I'm going to accept airplane! It comes from the same godawful etymological school that gives us words like "beefburger".
I’m amazed that GeOS could fit within 64k, and that there was still enough memory left over to load a word processor. However, if the cartridge is used to load the software, am I correct in thinking that this frees-up the onboard memory?
I was a GEOS 64, and later GEOS 128 user back in the day doing my school work, and it really was impressive even then what they got those machines to do with such little resources, and it was a must that you got a mouse for use with GEOS otherwise using a joystick was a pain in the bunghole, but it saved me from having to get a whole new computer for a few years. I'm honestly sad we don't have a modern version of GEOS as an alternative OS for all the low end hardware that could be made useful again. Yes I know there are Lightweight Linux distros, and Chromium OS, but they are just not the same in my book.
There was Geoworks for the PC which later evolved into NewDeal Office and finally Breadbox Ensemble, all of which ran on DOS. I believe there was a plan to port Breadbox Ensemble to Android but the CEO of Breadbox died and so the company folded.
@@dbranconnier1977 Yes I know all about that, but I was hoping they could have open sourced it, and released it for the Open Source community to work on, and improve.
Indeed. GEOS supported the Apple LaserWriter and PCL printers (in the early 1980s, that would have been HP printers, but later on PCL was adopted by other printer manufacturers as well...and you rest assured that modern printers like the Océ ColorStream 10000 will happily accept PCL - assuming you ever feel the uncontrollable urge to see if your C64 can keep up with a 1425 pages/minute printer). Well, I suppose that most modern PCL-compatible printers lack RS232 or Centronics ("parallel port" or "printer port") interfaces. Hm, maybe with a Raspberry Pi as a serial-to-LAN converter? Need to control my uncontrollable urge...
Great video! I still own a C=128, 5 1/2, 3 1/2 floppy drive, 512 memory cartridge, C= monitor, Jiffy Dos, and Most of the GEOS software, compared to MS Windows 3.1 and DOS 5.0 Commodore was just as good or better. I was even able to get a printer driver for a HP Inkjet / Deskjet 500 that worked with Geos instead of just printing with a matrix printer. Jiffy Dos allowed me to boot into C=64 mode without having to type keyboard commands. The computer itself was always on 24/7 and still will run like the day it was new, Never did find much use for the C= 128 side for available programs, except for Geos 128 versions. My first MS Window computer was a 286 16MHz Gateway 2000 that I purchased so I could use the Windows version of GEOS and it programs on it. Still amazed how good the C= computers were for programs and games compared to the expensive IBM Windoze computers were during the 80s. Hail to the Commodore computer the every mans computer ahead of its time.
yeah i had it in 1986 on my commodore 64c. they also had geos for pc. the only difference was pc had aol bundled in and the c64 had quantumlink (which was bought out by aol). i used it just like you would the amiga os or windows. loaded games from within it, or copied disks etc etc. was probably my most used program. though i used a standalone word processor which was FAR more complicated to use. (had to put in codes to change fonts and sizes as well as what you saw on the screen didn't match what was printed in terms of formatting. so i'd have to print a copy, add returns to get the format right then print a finished copy. that was all due to the printer i had an okimate 20)
Oh that brought back a lot of memories, printing my college work in Near Letter Quality. I also had micro perforated fan fold A4 paper. So it looked like normal single sheets once separated. Still got useless marks but that was for my poor quality work not the paper ...
Commodore 64 was a great little machine. You could purchase plug in cartridges with a variety of games and office work. I loved the household accounts, office and check writer programs. You could download your work on disc (floppies) or send to printer for hard copy.
I was thinking if you had a laser printer for your Mac it might faster printing out. I don't have any retro computers. I just have a Dell PC modern small desktop and a Dell LED printer.
HP LaserJet printer came 1984, started seeing them in business here around 1989. There's Geos HP LaserJet parallel drivers avail. Would be interesting to how using the same printer would compare, HP LaserJet drivers could probably be found for Mac to :)
My early 80s word processing workflow would not have fared as well. C64 + EasyScript + EasySpell. That spellcheck took a LONG time. And then printing to an Olivetti JP101 Spark Jet Printer which had a one pixel print head :). I needed to take the prints to the library to copy at a high contrast to get something I could turn in... Good Times!!
I tend to agree, the title has Commodore 64 vs Macbook Pro, not Commodore 64 with era apropriate printer vs Macbook Pro with contemporary printer. That is a a laudible experiment, but I think having both computers against each other with like for like peripherals would be better!
You may have missed it but this video did show both computers against each other. Just stop the video where I mention the MacBook was first to load the document. It was also first to print the document. It won either way. So the printer was in fact irrelevant. But this wouldn't have been as fun without that dot matrix nostalgia would it...
@@RetroRecipes I suspect the C64 would have been much faster if it hadn't insisted on checking the, even for the era, insanely slow C64 floppy drive, in the name of copy protection. I used to own an Amstrad CPC, and the floppy drive speed was the one area where the CPC unarguably trounced the C64. Well, that and the built-in Locomotive Basic. The C64 had a lot of good features, but those 5 1/4" floppy drives were not one of them - they were the slowest drives, by a looong margin, of any machine of the era.
I think GEOS is a great example of.."if it only came out a few years earlier". The GEOS came out just after the Amiga 1000, and the C64 was still mostly sold in toy stores and catalog stores. People looking to do Desktop Publishing were not likely to even see GEOS being offered.
yeah the subtitles in this episode are pretty bad. seems almost like the youtube auto transcribed subtitles, perhaps even worse. were they done by a third party who perhaps wasn't paying much attention?
I did all my high school work in GEOS. That was my OS! My teachers were genuinely surprised at my printouts as the majority of students were still using typewriters or 8088 machines at that time.
It recently occured to me that computers in the 80's had limited functionality compared to today's computers and perhaps that was a good thing. That those old computers could do some tasks effectively that were beneficial but they didn't absorb your entire life. Today's computers and all the technology that goes along with them has taken over almost every aspect of our lives. When you consider data mining the people who use modern computer devices it appears that computers are now using us as much as we use them.
I do wish i was born in simpler times back in the 80s... its ironic, because if i was born back in the day, I'd want to see how advanced things would be 50 years later, which is now... but now that NOW is NOW.... i don't want it... technology is slowly ruining society... i don't want to imagine 50 years from now...
Lots of different takes on this comparison but I think it’s a good example of how software writers do bloat the apps for “just in case” scenarios and eye candy on the screen. They don’t concern themselves with conserving enough resources to actually speed up the app from a real world perspective. My machine at work, supported by a three person IT department is much slower and glitchy than my home machine supported by me, who has fallen way behind in up-to-date knowledge but respects allotting plenty of resources to the apps I use but enabling only the bells and whistles I need. Fun video! I miss my Atari 400xl....but not edlin
Thanks for watching! Obviously this is all just a bit of fun. Couple of points:
• You'll realise that the result of who opened the doc first was the same as who printed first, so this isn't really a race of printers & the printer part is actually moot (but fun nostalgia.)
• I just used the printers I have here but remember they were slow as they were both set to high quality.
• I should also point out the Mac turned out to have FileVault encryption on, as it is by default, which may have slowed it a bit. But this was a real world test and actually that's an interesting commentary on over-complicated modern features. Back in the day we just locked our floppy in a box! (Sounds painful!)
Your friend in retro, Perifractic
LOL@"locked our floppy in a box"!
So that's what happened after logging on. It looked very odd to me.
We Americans get it all wrong.
This is absolutely peri-fantastic! :)
I just got a C64 (with a nice 1541) like the one in the video here, and I'm looking for a tutorial to start using it. Of course I red the original C64 manual, and I do know how to use the computer. The main open issue is: how I can write ROMS from the web on real 5.25" disks, in order to use them on the C64. Any link to video, document, PDF, or alike to help me with this "retro-bootstrap" would be very appreciated!
P.S. I am considering the option of using an SD card reader on the C64, in order to put there the files with my modern Mac, and then write from the SD to the Disk with the C64. However a link to a nice retro-tutorial for beginners would be very appreciated :)
@@youerny I use the Ultimate 64 or Action Replay cartridge. They have an option to copy a whole disk. Mount the D64 file as disk 9 using SD2IEC or U64, and put the blank disk in unit 8 then start the copy. There are other ways. I recommend asking on the big Facebook group or Lemon 64. Good luck!
When I started in computing science in the early 90s, it was all about code efficiency. The same was certainly true in the 80s when the C64 came to pass. Today, with so much power and processing abilities the idea of efficient speed, is lost ... so although thousands of times slower, the C64 had vastly superiority written code, making up for the clock speed differences.
Rant over, I still love my C64s
Fortunately, not in most real-time embedded systems... I do some hacking on Grbl... efficiency is job #2, right after correctness at #1.
You’re talking about a time when resources were so finite and the language was so low people had no choice but to develop in this way
It’s all about relevance. The time it takes to write a saved spreadsheet to disk is of much less importance than say processing real time bank transactions, or decryption.
There’s lots of places where high performance computing is important, but also lots of places where it just simply isn’t. Being able to delivery requirements quickly that perform a job to a certain standard is often all that’s required, and what the budget stretches to.
Lean code was dead by 1986.
This is like 99% of Electron apps
There’s always a cost - either the developer expends effort (which costs time and money) on efficiency of code; or the user expends money on faster hardware. Given the choice, the vast majority of managers at software companies will choose to push that cost upon the customer. This is why we have unresponsive, bloated systems...
OH MY GOD!!! The sound of that Dot Matrix Printer printing in BOTH DIRECTIONS brings back a lot of memories to me!!!
You too huh? :-D
Yeah, like that old IBM proprinter I used for over a decade
I LOVED MacWrite. I never had a chance to use a C64 but I had a friend who had one as well as a Vic20.
Did a computer users group newsletter for several years using a Commodore 128D equipped with Jiffydos, a Creative Micro Designs RamDrive and 1581 drive. I even had Creative Micro's mouse with an on-board real-time clock that set the time/date automatically for GEOS. Did the ouptut on a Star Micronics 1000 Rainbow printer. It's still amazing that I could do desktop publishing on an 8 bit compter. Final printing was excruciatingly slow, but looked great for the time. Great memories.
Considering how old the C64 hardware is, I'm still impressed with the old girl.
There are actually two kinds of Mac Book Pros. The ones with the "£" above the "3" are made of aluminium, the ones with the "#" above the "3" are made of aluminum. Obviously, British Macs are about one pound better than US Macs.
A pint's a pound, the world around!
@@Ndlanding Are you serious? That's a bunch of money. I don't drink beer, so I don't have any skin in this game. But if you are paying 5 pounds to buy a beer, then you might need to adjust your hobbies a bit. That's crazy.
A matrix dot printer gives me that full ASMR experience everytime..
Draft mode isn't cheating...didn't we all just use it for speed and extending the ribbon life as standard?? :D
True!
I agree :)
maybe not but that mac printer is hella slow. Not counting about ten seconds of power-up from standby, my brother printer can do a page every two seconds.
the HP printer has a draft mode that is much faster too...
For sure back in the day on all my Epson, and Canon printers I for sure used draft/ink saver mode to extend the life of my ribbons, and ink tanks, heck I still use a sudo draft mode on my brother Laser printer to get more life out of my already cheap generic toner cartridges. I'm of the mindset of why pay more to print something out then I have too.
I bought my commodore 64 when I was around 12 years old with my own money that i saved having my news paper route. I sold it on Ebay when I was 30 years old. It still worked. With about 200 floppy disks with it. Some bought some copies from friends, mostly copies. I always regretted selling it. Such a huge part of my childhood.
ebAy
No comments? Am I that early?
The MacBook Pro will no longer work when it's 37 years old!
The MacBook might not work in the amount of time they were still making the C64, lol.
The Macbook wont be operational in 3 or 4 years 🤣
Right, it'll need a new battery in 2 or 3 years and a new SSD in 4 or 5 years... Because the SSD is SOLDERED on, once that dies the system is worthless...
Haha that caught me off guard :D
Based on my Apple hardware ownership track record, will be about 3 years into an Apple product and start having issues - but the iPods it was more like 6 months to a year
This just confirms that crappy code always grows to fill all available memory and eat all available CPU cycles.
Not really crappy code. But new system need to do more. A good part of the boot up of a new pc is loading drivers. A C64 doesn’t use drivers everything is coded for one type of hardware. While the PC and Mac has to check for every hardware component and load the right driver for the job. Next there is security, a lot of power goes into security on these systems. Also if used a laser printer for the printout not an ink jet the print speeds would be much better. It isn’t fare to say modern systems have crappy code where they need to do more to operate in a modern world.
@@toddfraser3353 and yet if you're trying to do one specific task and the old computer lets you finish in the same amount of time, there's clearly waste.
Jean Roch But this is not the case here. The mac Makes work was more convinient Heer and has a lot more features.
@@vorrnth8734 I'm sorry, but if your goal was to write a letter with a computer, you're not gaining anything from using a recent Mac, clearly.
Jean Roch Actually I would gain very much. Try printing a modern image embedded in the letter. And you know you are basing your arguments on rather simple use case. Try video editing on the C64. On top of that you Couleur always write letters by hand so even a typewriter may be called bloat.
The fact that the 35 year old computer was only slightly slower shows how horribly bloated modern software has become
@Gábor Lukácsik Personally I prefer the OS itself to be fairly lightweight. I mainly use OS X, and found that every version after 10.6 Snow Leopard added additional features that I do not need at the cost of performance. Every update made my perfectly functioning machines slower. I have also heard similar reports about Windows 10 from my Windows user friends.
Lumumba, remember both printers are set to best quality.
@Lumumba B. It's 100 Mb/s. That's really weird.
Well, *some* “modern software”, at any rate ...
th-cam.com/video/Nbv9L-WIu0s/w-d-xo.html
This is why I use xubuntu on every machine I run, all these fancy visual effects, etc. a waste of resources. I'm happy with a decent looking monospace font, other than that I don't mind.
In older computers reading from the ROM was as fast or sometimes faster than RAM. Then consider how slow hard disks were, and how much slower floppy disks were, and it’s easy to see how you could get such a responsive OS if you were running it from ROM.
He mentions that the C64 is tested with what was available in 1986 (contrary to the description which mentions 1982). In 1982, you did not have many word processor to choose from. Actually, I know just of Easy Script. It loaded from disk in less than 30 seconds - but it was also available as a ROM module. No load time there! I am, however, afraid that nowadays only the disk version is till being sold: www.amazon.com/Commodore-Script-Advanced-Professional-Processor/dp/B004DBX3VA
In 1986, however, you might have investigated other options as well. The REU came out in 1985, allowing you to upgrade your C64 with a 256kB sort-of RAM disk, which was also compatible with GEOS (the 512kB REU was meant for the C128, but also worked for the C64 in many cases). Turbo Trans came out in 1986 as well, a hardware add-on advertising a 200-fold speed increase for the 1541 drive (it read a complete disk in 16 seconds). However, I assume that it was incompatible with the GEOS copy protection. But no reason to despair, the C64 version of GEOS had a fast loader built-in.
Oh How I miss my old C64 days... The golden age of Home Computing for sure.
I can remember shopping for C-64 accessories at a store called "The Golden Hedge".
Those programmers back then were genius... to do so much with so little... incredible.
That they do comparable tasks to modern computers and software only marginally slower testifies to how well made that software was, and how lazy and bloated things have gotten with far more powerful hardware.
As we like to say in our net security classes at the local Bar Association, we didn't upgrade to gain speed, we did to gain security and ease of use.
It's still impressive how fast a Commodore can be turned on and do stuff, and a picture of my setup was sent to everyone in the aforementioned Bar Association, but in 35 years we got filevault to avoid losing floppies with valuable data, solid state disks that won't get mold and the ability to chuck a Macbook Pro in the suitcase and plan holidays with our partner instead of lugging around an SX :)
Stll, it's really an impressive video, as usual. And yes, I love your setup, a lot. Especially the Excelerator: I saw my first clone disk later in life, a BlueChip, and it was love at first sight
@4:38 the right question to ask should be ‘what has gone wrong between then and now and we ended up with the same software which occupies x1000 the space on our hard drives?’
It's a good point
@Gábor Lukácsik I was just trying to point out that, when you compile the basic "Hello World" to make an executable in any modern compiler, you will immediately exceed the available memory of any of the home computers from the C64 era. We are not talking about visual demands here. I have attended 1KB limited assembly code competitions in the past, as in the compiled code can not exceed 1024bytes. You would be amazed what people could come up with, utilizing just under 1024bytes. Now, the laziness took over and when you start with #include it is 44kB!
The MPS1200 was my Printer! That printer got me through middle school, high school, and the first two years of college. I wrote some of my best academic works on that printer. Man, I miss it. That printer was a beast. It never broke, it never gave up. And none of the pins ever wore down.
not speaking about that the mps12000 printer looks (and will always look) infinitely better than the HP...
what happened in the design department? it's just a beautiful machine even today, and just looks better as it ages.
Design has just completely stagnated these days, there's nothing interesting like IBM minimalism anymore
@@noahhughes2501 example?
My first computer was a 1987 C-64C with a 1571 floppy drive. Had lots of fun with that computer back then, and still have it in my basement with all the original games, joy stick's and the trusty 1571 FDD!
New sub around here - found you guys through the youtube algo after watching an LGR vid. Just wanted to say how much I appreciate and love what I am seeing with your channel! The 2 Chess vids were so much fun to watch! You have all the ingredients of a terrific channel - Lady and Puppy Fractic are just terrific paw-tners in crime. I'm fairly ancient as well, having come through the 386x and 1200baud modem days, though I never was a Commodore or Apple guy. Still, there is something so wonderfully compelling to see great retro content like what you folks are doing - just as folks like Clint at LGR. Wishing you all continued success!
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
The Lady sure is the most beautiful lady on TH-cam!,,,,
more importantly; witty, rarely agrees, stubborn, and a mind of her own...
Her eyes are stunning.
I briefly looked at her and she looks astonishing. Very attractive she is.
Her expressive eyes and beauty would make for a perfect Disney Evil Queen impersonation (I’m at Disney World now and just saw her last night).
The thirst is real here. Lol
The macs printer has to be the slowest modern printer on the market. Mine was a cheap walmart printer and it just spits out the paper almost instantly.
You probably don't print at the highest quality, and it slows down things a lot.
This is an under-rated video, particularly for those of us who were 6-to-10 year old kids with a Commodore 64, and today use Macbook Pros! Funny my Midwest public schools in the 80s had Apple IIe and Apple IIc or Apple II Plus or something computers for my classes. My computer at home did not do what I was taught in school because I had a Commodore 64, not an Apple computer. There was also the Commodore Vic 20. The near-mint condition and quality of the Commodore 64 in this video is really cool! The sound of that Commodore printer brings back memories too! -B
Thanks!
Some good comments on here, I remember having to print my HS reports on that connected paper where you had to tear off the sides. As for the mac book printing, a lot has to do with the printer. But like you rightly said, 37 years and we have sped up 40 something seconds.
As someone who grew up with both the C64 and Amiga, your videos are all truly superb. I so regret getting rid of them all back in the mid 90s. I had huge collections for both systems and for the C64 I had a huge GEOS collection back in the day from buying quite a few cheap second hand bundles. In one bundle I had a binding folder of thousands of print outs of various fonts and add-ons all listed alphabetically. Something that woudve been very useful in this day and age even. But this whole video reminded me of the old C64 Aussie ad we had here which would say 'Are you keeping up with the Commodore, cos the Commodore is keeping up with you" hahahaha. Long live the 8 and 16 bits.
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
The performance Berkeley softworks squeezed from that 0.98 MHz machine with 64 kB is unbelievable.
64 kilobytes... I’m amazed that it’s even possible to run a word editor inside a graphical operating system, with still enough memory to actually type a letter.
i mean, it not so small, the problem is, that current operating systems and programs, are not optimized, because they dont have to... they just take more and more ram. For example, my mouse driver takes 100 mb from ram, it upset me very much. It's very lame programing work. Back in day, they have to be more creative, and they were. But it costed time. Now, they spare time so they dont have to optimalize so good, but programs takes ram and HDD space like crazy. Because they are lazy to optimize. Imagine, it costs man-hours to put effort in it, that mean additional employers. So they save costs, but programs are less optimized than in those times. For example, I would program same mouse driver that takes only 5 mb memory from RAM and do same things. That is just example. But they would stop me, because it would cost some additional time - "just dont care dude, RAM is cheap now, at least, they would be forced to buy 8GB". This is way of thinking now.
But back in the day, thay had 64kb, and knew, most people cannot effort superexpensive electronics anyway, so in order, so people buy they programs and hardware, they have to be supercreative, and make most optimized things in terms of space saving.
There used to be times, when programmers didn't suck...
I still use GEOS. A couple of things: 1- if you don't use a RAM expansion like GeoRAM or , better, the Commodore ram carts that had DMA, it will swap a lot on disk, specially with geopaint. 2- if you value your sanity, two disk drives are the bare minimum. BUT, with more ram you can do crazy stuff like freezing in ram the geos system and rebooting it from the cbm dos in two seconds and also have ram disks that speed up work in an incredible way. You can cache parts of the os so they don't have to be reloaded from disk.
Windows O/S, especially 10 is filled with bloatware & bloat code because modern machines have lots of power, lots of memory and lots of disk space for "virtual memory" to handle it. Bloatware. Yes, and it's also true that writing "tight" code is an art that costs money in labor costs. Knock it out. Get it done. "Elegant" solutions are not relevant in today's market.
Years ago, a company sent me to learn to code dBase IV for DOS. This was circa 1993 or so. The instructor told how a company she worked for developed an accounting program, in dBase, for IBM AS400's (which was a standard office mainframe of the era.) They wrote the code to work in 500mb memory only to discover that nearly all AS400s were sold with only 200mb memory because the extra 300mb memory cost like a half million dollars! Learning to Code, Tight & Elegant is a lost art!
*Chortles* I like how you managed to keep the awkwardness of pre-first date chat between you and your wife. Keep the magic alive!
You could also use a geoCable and connect to a parallel port printer, I used my MPS1250 that way (it has both serial and parallel ports), also with the correct printer drivers you could get to up to 240x216dpi on that printer (3 passes per line, so reeeeally slow). Or you can be even more fancy and use an HP LaserJet compatible printer and probably win the race.
New running gag..Perifractic vs. Ladyfractic in word pronunciation. That deserves to be at the front of every video. Love the Excelerator Plus disk drive!
Trust me we still have these struggles every day!
Also, I purchased a copy of The Chrononaut. Didn't even know you were an author. Thank you! You also inspired me to buy my first Kindle reader, hehe
My first customer!! 🎉
😉 Seriously, thanks mate!!
Dude, I can tell you my experience, trying to print from a C64 word processing program. Basically, it took as long to actually load the application as it would booting the MacBook, loading Word and writing the text. An then you want to actually *print* the document? Flip over the floppy to load the printing module and wait forever for it to load just to do that.
1:35.
I thought for a moment, "I'm not sure if that's how I'd portray Amigans". Then I realised that right now I'm actually wearing a dressing gown, I've got long hair and a beard, and I own an Amiga and prefer AmigaOS to windows and mac. Now I see that it's probably a very good representation. Bravo
oh, the sound of the dot matrix printer brings tears (of pain) into my eyes... =D
Ahhh the dulcet tones of the dot matrix printer how I miss you
Holyshit I forgot the screeching sound of a dot matrix printer. Thank you for that
Puppyfractic is like me at 2 am: IS CHEESE A LIQUID?????
Hahaha
I had GEOS for my Apple IIe, and I think it might have beat the modern Mac in this test thanks to the Apple II's super fast floppy drives (thanks, Woz).
When it comes to Apple I think Woz did it better, and I seriously lost respect for the Apple after the Apple II GS, and the whole deal with Woz leaving the company due to Jobs, and his BS!!!
Haha. The Apple II had some good I/O and floppy drive speed - thanks to Woz's optimizations no doubt. It also had terrible graphics, which were a Woz optimization too. Its easy to forget nowdays that the Apple II was really a generation behind things like the C64, Amstrad CPC or Spectrum 48K. It belongs to the first generation of late 70s home computers like the Commodore Pet and the TRS-80.
Great video. Reminded me of printing high school assignments on my A500 just before the Guru Meditation struck...
Christopher Dounis great memories indeed.
Makes me wish I was born 20 to 30 years earlier to enjoy all of the amazing old hardware.
Loading from sd2iec is great and even better with a Epyx Fast load cart.
Nothing like going back to watch some great, retro Retro Recipe shows !! 😃
Thanks for tuning back into this one!
Thank you so much for saying "1/2000th the speed" instead of "2000 times slower" (like way too many would). ;-)
its actually 250 000 times slower
As soon as you panned to the old printer I felt a wave of nostalgia. I had the MPS 1250 printer. It's got identical functionality to the MPS 1200 here, but replaced the serial pass-through connection with a Centronix parallel connector, so you could use it with anything that used that standard as well.
The sounds of that dot matrix printer took me back, especially with an Atari 400 in view! (Not that I had a printer in the late 70s.)
I even still remember some of the Atari basic commands such as _graphics, setcolor, plot_ and _drawto_ that I spent hours typing out on that awful membrane keyboard. Those *weren't* the days, lol.
I'm a touch typist and I actually got use to the membrane keyboard. Of course, I also learned that one could abbreviate the keywords like gr. for graphics, se. for setcolor, pos. for position, etc..
Next challenge .. How long to write a Hello World program =)
Me: bored to tears waiting for my idea pad 3200 to boot up
Also me: fascinated and awed by a computer double my age
I owned a Commodore 64 in 1982. I was always amazed at the graphics and sound capability in an 8bit machine with 64kb of memory. Wished I still had it. I almost had purchased an Apple IIE that I thought would be a better computer but then Price Club (Now Costco) had them on sale for $600 and not a lot more for the monitor and floppy drive. I used PaperClip as my word processor. And became quite fond of BBS's which was the next best thing to the yet available Internet as we know it today. Man....I was so cutting edge. hahaha. Load "paperclip", 8, 1
would have been more fair if they used the same printer. Id like to see the same race using an Amiga 500 with a Gotek drive
GEOS, dot matrix, epic battles against the clock... so many traumatic memories. Thanks @perifractic!
I sure that date does not mean 2019, more like 1919 who remembers Y2K scare back in day.
@Gábor Lukácsik I believe DOS could not even store dates before 1980, so the comparison would be mute. This is still evident on FAT filesystems.
In 1984 I had to write a program to compute some engineering calculations. Round 1 was on the Engineering Departments VAX 'whiteware' system using Fortran (I was the only user). Round 2 was on my humble little C64 in basic. Each one recorded processing time and the C64 won by a factor of roughly 20x.
My wife is also American. Every time. Condominium. Petroleum. Aluminium!!!
If this is just a room in your home I love the museum style labels for each system.
Ahh nostalgia, I'd forgotten the distinct sound of a dot matrix printer.
here in my town, there are still a few stores that have matrix printers to print invoices, just love the sound of them
His wife acts like they where in a fight a day before and now he suddenly starts to ask questions again
It will be unfair to compare the two machines from different eras both are great computers in their own right. Brilliant video all the same thanks for posting coming from a man who’s first computer was the Commodore Vic-20.
Poor puppyfractic falling from the couch 😁😘 and good speed test here.
you just have to love the sound of a 9 pin printer at work. the 24 print heads could really sing.
I found it interesting that GEOS was chosen for this. I knew very few people who considered GEOS much more than a novelty when it was released. Something to show your Mac friends your computer could GUI too, but nothing we ever actually used for much. It was just too slow and cumbersome and the truth is the C64 didn't really have the resources to power it effectively. The 128 version was what it should have been.
Anyway, back in the day I would have fired up Fontmaster II, not GEOS.
Heh, when I was in high school, I used to charge university students to use my C64 and Fontmaster II to type up and print their thesis papers.
That's what I was thinking. The C64 would have stomped here if he'd loaded a word processor straight from the basic prompt, instead of loading a whole operating system. These old computers were slower, but they had to process so much less data that in a practical test C64 should have been printing by the time the macbook was done booting.
That dot matrix printer may have still lost it the race, though. They weren't exactly fast.
Wow, that triggered a memory flashback. Somehow, I still remember that I used Fleet System 2 as the word processor on my Commodore 64. And that got me thru my first 2 years in college, before I moved to my Amiga. Good times! ;-)
Sadly, most people nowadays would say the winner is whichever costs more. Great video just for the fun of being able to perform this test.
There were faster printers available than the Commodore printer even back then...
MUCH faster
@@massimomagrini4452 For ultimate speed in 1982 I would recommend a repurposed 1970s line printer. By 1986 big laser printers had caught up to the old speed but now with graphics.
That Commodor 64 user interface rocked for 1982. I'd never seen it before! I was looking at TRS-80, or DOS back during the days of the computer wars. It's cool you kept it and all those other beige toys alive.
Had an Atari 1024STE, some of us were laughing over Amiga 500 devotees. "Aluminium" definately!
That was a fun video Chris and thanks for plugging Fusion Annual too.. I don't have much content in the annual compared to the normal Fusion issues, but I do contribute a rather nice interview I did with someone called RJ Mical - whoever he might be :)
Never heard of her!
😉 Thanks so much! Puppyfractic can't wait to get her paws on it!
@@RetroRecipes was also nice to see that wee mention for something or other on the front cover of the ZZap annual ;)
@@skilgannon1971 Yeah, no idea what that's all about! 🙃
GEOS was amazing for its time.. Too bad the C=64 didn't have a hard drive with GEOS as the default OS. That would have been amazing.
would have been even better if GEOS was on a rom chip a Commodore really missed an oppertunity a C64 with GEOS aswell as a few basic office programs on ROM would have been the dominant Buisiness machine of the decade they could have simply replaced the rom chip that held Commodore basic with this and it would have been a beast wouldbe interesting to know if a C64 could be modded this way
Geos had a ram memory backed up with 12 volt battery akted as a hard drive. mine was equipped with a 16 mB ram memory
That's once again some great piece of entertainment, thank you! Who else here thinks that it's about time for a new C64 chiptune vid...feat. Puppy and/or LadyFractic?
Video side effect: Donkey Kong shirts are flying off the shelves.
I would love you operating a spreadsheet with your commodore 64, the first killer app in the History!!
Great video, I was going for the C64. By the way here in Australia we also say it as "Aluminium". Sorry Lady Fractic!
Only the US and Canada (in English, in French it's correct) say aloominum. Everywhere else in the world says it correctly. I like to annoy them by pronouncing it alaminum, ie just skipping the second i
@@SimonQuigleyI read somewhere that technically the US spelling is technically the correct way to spell and pronounce it. Can't be bothered finding the sources on that again. I've been pronouncing it Aluminium and it's here to stay in my vocabulary lol
@@ninpodarren There's a section in the Wikipedia article explaining the etymology and spelling.. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Spelling
@@ninpodarren But is it airplane or aeroplane?
I've accepted zed is a lost cause with my daughter, vs zee, but I'm damned if I'm going to accept airplane! It comes from the same godawful etymological school that gives us words like "beefburger".
Should have used a $50
Brother HL-L2320D laser printer for both computers. Pretty much an instant print though.
1:36 = The Dude is the Amiga? NICE!
That is because the Amiga has a way of "tying the room together".
Nice memories. My first PC was a commodore 64 and then Amiga 500 plus. Beautiful keyboards in particularly the commodore 64/128 ones.
My 1st PC was an Amiga 500+ 👍👍👍
The Dude should have been the ST: lazy and sloppy ! But don't get me wrong, I'm an ST lover :)
Haha. That was a fun little head-to-head. May you keep remembering your retro dreams.
Cheers matey! I wonder if GEOS on the Apple (P)IIe would've been faster... 🤔
I’m amazed that GeOS could fit within 64k, and that there was still enough memory left over to load a word processor. However, if the cartridge is used to load the software, am I correct in thinking that this frees-up the onboard memory?
I was a GEOS 64, and later GEOS 128 user back in the day doing my school work, and it really was impressive even then what they got those machines to do with such little resources, and it was a must that you got a mouse for use with GEOS otherwise using a joystick was a pain in the bunghole, but it saved me from having to get a whole new computer for a few years. I'm honestly sad we don't have a modern version of GEOS as an alternative OS for all the low end hardware that could be made useful again. Yes I know there are Lightweight Linux distros, and Chromium OS, but they are just not the same in my book.
There was Geoworks for the PC which later evolved into NewDeal Office and finally Breadbox Ensemble, all of which ran on DOS. I believe there was a plan to port Breadbox Ensemble to Android but the CEO of Breadbox died and so the company folded.
@@dbranconnier1977 Yes I know all about that, but I was hoping they could have open sourced it, and released it for the Open Source community to work on, and improve.
@@CommodoreFan64 Now that would be fantastic! Sort of like what they did with GEM from Digital Research Inc.
@@dbranconnier1977 Yes, exactly. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think every OS should be open source, or at the very least partly open source from the start.
sigh Should of used a laser printer.
They were around if rare.
Indeed. GEOS supported the Apple LaserWriter and PCL printers (in the early 1980s, that would have been HP printers, but later on PCL was adopted by other printer manufacturers as well...and you rest assured that modern printers like the Océ ColorStream 10000 will happily accept PCL - assuming you ever feel the uncontrollable urge to see if your C64 can keep up with a 1425 pages/minute printer). Well, I suppose that most modern PCL-compatible printers lack RS232 or Centronics ("parallel port" or "printer port") interfaces.
Hm, maybe with a Raspberry Pi as a serial-to-LAN converter?
Need to control my uncontrollable urge...
Great video! I still own a C=128, 5 1/2, 3 1/2 floppy drive, 512 memory cartridge, C= monitor, Jiffy Dos, and Most of the GEOS software, compared to MS Windows 3.1 and DOS 5.0 Commodore was just as good or better. I was even able to get a printer driver for a HP Inkjet / Deskjet 500 that worked with Geos instead of just printing with a matrix printer. Jiffy Dos allowed me to boot into C=64 mode without having to type keyboard commands. The computer itself was always on 24/7 and still will run like the day it was new, Never did find much use for the C= 128 side for available programs, except for Geos 128 versions. My first MS Window computer was a 286 16MHz Gateway 2000 that I purchased so I could use the Windows version of GEOS and it programs on it. Still amazed how good the C= computers were for programs and games compared to the expensive IBM Windoze computers were during the 80s. Hail to the Commodore computer the every mans computer ahead of its time.
What? I never knew about GEOS on the C64, colour me impressed!
yeah i had it in 1986 on my commodore 64c. they also had geos for pc. the only difference was pc had aol bundled in and the c64 had quantumlink (which was bought out by aol). i used it just like you would the amiga os or windows. loaded games from within it, or copied disks etc etc. was probably my most used program. though i used a standalone word processor which was FAR more complicated to use. (had to put in codes to change fonts and sizes as well as what you saw on the screen didn't match what was printed in terms of formatting. so i'd have to print a copy, add returns to get the format right then print a finished copy. that was all due to the printer i had an okimate 20)
You guys look like the cast of the movie ‘Hackers’ Dade and Kate. Awesome!
So you see... It's not only that "Size doesn't matter". Also "MHz doesn't matter" Greetings, Doc64!
It's not the speed of the clock, it's the amount of processing you get done each cycle!
not even 30 seconds in on this video I already subscribed... I think it's my fastest subscription ever... Well Done!!!
Try this again... with a Turbo Chameleon accelerator for the C64!
oh come you gave the dog a card! dude your dog cuteness is literally killing me
I miss the sound of my old Commodore Dot Matrix printers.
Now do the same challenge but with modern C64 upgrades giving the Commodore a speed boost!
Puppy fractic tho
Oh that brought back a lot of memories, printing my college work in Near Letter Quality. I also had micro perforated fan fold A4 paper. So it looked like normal single sheets once separated. Still got useless marks but that was for my poor quality work not the paper ...
That is super interesting. My dad had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I never saw anything like that run on it.
Commodore 64 was a great little machine. You could purchase plug in cartridges with a variety of games and office work. I loved the household accounts, office and check writer programs. You could download your work on disc (floppies) or send to printer for hard copy.
I was thinking if you had a laser printer for your Mac it might faster printing out. I don't have any retro computers. I just have a Dell PC modern small desktop and a Dell LED printer.
HP LaserJet printer came 1984, started seeing them in business here around 1989. There's Geos HP LaserJet parallel drivers avail. Would be interesting to how using the same printer would compare, HP LaserJet drivers could probably be found for Mac to :)
My early 80s word processing workflow would not have fared as well. C64 + EasyScript + EasySpell. That spellcheck took a LONG time. And then printing to an Olivetti JP101 Spark Jet Printer which had a one pixel print head :). I needed to take the prints to the library to copy at a high contrast to get something I could turn in... Good Times!!
The C64 did won. The printer speed is not to be taken into account
I tend to agree, the title has Commodore 64 vs Macbook Pro, not Commodore 64 with era apropriate printer vs Macbook Pro with contemporary printer. That is a a laudible experiment, but I think having both computers against each other with like for like peripherals would be better!
You may have missed it but this video did show both computers against each other. Just stop the video where I mention the MacBook was first to load the document. It was also first to print the document. It won either way. So the printer was in fact irrelevant. But this wouldn't have been as fun without that dot matrix nostalgia would it...
@@RetroRecipes I suspect the C64 would have been much faster if it hadn't insisted on checking the, even for the era, insanely slow C64 floppy drive, in the name of copy protection. I used to own an Amstrad CPC, and the floppy drive speed was the one area where the CPC unarguably trounced the C64. Well, that and the built-in Locomotive Basic. The C64 had a lot of good features, but those 5 1/4" floppy drives were not one of them - they were the slowest drives, by a looong margin, of any machine of the era.
I think GEOS is a great example of.."if it only came out a few years earlier". The GEOS came out just after the Amiga 1000, and the C64 was still mostly sold in toy stores and catalog stores. People looking to do Desktop Publishing were not likely to even see GEOS being offered.
Might want to fix the subtitles, I don't think PuppyFractic likes to have her name modified to insult her/him 2:21
Edit: Well, that was quick
yes
yeah the subtitles in this episode are pretty bad. seems almost like the youtube auto transcribed subtitles, perhaps even worse. were they done by a third party who perhaps wasn't paying much attention?
That old machines are amazing! It brings to me good memories of the computer gold age, when everything was authentic
so on the end this was printers race :) ...cool idea anyway :)
I did all my high school work in GEOS. That was my OS! My teachers were genuinely surprised at my printouts as the majority of students were still using typewriters or 8088 machines at that time.
It recently occured to me that computers in the 80's had limited functionality compared to today's computers and perhaps that was a good thing. That those old computers could do some tasks effectively that were beneficial but they didn't absorb your entire life. Today's computers and all the technology that goes along with them has taken over almost every aspect of our lives. When you consider data mining the people who use modern computer devices it appears that computers are now using us as much as we use them.
I do wish i was born in simpler times back in the 80s... its ironic, because if i was born back in the day, I'd want to see how advanced things would be 50 years later, which is now... but now that NOW is NOW.... i don't want it... technology is slowly ruining society... i don't want to imagine 50 years from now...
Lots of different takes on this comparison but I think it’s a good example of how software writers do bloat the apps for “just in case” scenarios and eye candy on the screen. They don’t concern themselves with conserving enough resources to actually speed up the app from a real world perspective. My machine at work, supported by a three person IT department is much slower and glitchy than my home machine supported by me, who has fallen way behind in up-to-date knowledge but respects allotting plenty of resources to the apps I use but enabling only the bells and whistles I need.
Fun video! I miss my Atari 400xl....but not edlin