Thursday, March 31, 2022

Commodore Magazine (January 1987)

Commodore Magazine was one of the first magazines I ever bought on a regular basis. It covered the Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and Amiga line as well as Commodore's PC clones. I only had the Commodore 64 but I enjoyed reading about the Amiga since I wanted one at the time. The January 1987 issue includes:

Departments

Letters - Comments on previous articles and reviews including Invisible BASIC, Kinney Video Digitizer, and more.

News - Making the news this month is Epyx's 500XJ Joystick, a laser printing service using GEOS and QuantumLink, an update to the 128 Buyer's Guide, The Commodore Show at L.A., and more.

Software Reviews

Mind Walker - An odd sort of puzzle game for the Amiga.
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? - Explore the world looking for Carmen Sandiego with this game for the Commodore 64.
Vizastar 128 - Vizistar 128 is a combination spreadsheet/database/graphing program. It takes advantage of the Commodore 128's additional memory and 80 column display.
Color Mail - A program for the Commodore 64 published by Hallmark for creating and sending (via CompuServe) electronic greeting cards.

Tips & Tricks - This month, a Commodore 128 mind reader, a disk buyer's guide, tips on using the second side of a disk, making tabs and labels, storing disks, making disk mailers, a program loading tip, and a screens saver.

Technical Tips

How to Build a Light Pen - A complete parts list and instructions for building a light pen for your Commodore 64.
CP/M Public Domain - A guide to obtaining public domain CP/M software that will work with the Commodore 128.

_{Table of Contents from the January 1987 issue of Commodore Magazine}

Telecommunications

Connect! - A beginner's guide to telecommunications including the definitions of some commonly used terms such as Answer/Originate Mode, ASCII, Baud, Bit, Buffer, Bulletin Board, and more.

Computer Tutor

Mobsters! - A guide for creating and using Sprites and other Moveable Objects on the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128.

64 Users Only

Show Anything Slide Show - This type in program provides a slide show that will work with your graphics in a variety of formats, including KoalaPainter, Doodle!, Flying Colors, UltraBASIC 64, HES Graphics BASIC, CadPak 64, Two Color, title and B/Graph.

Jiffies

Kaleidoscope - A short program that displays an ever changing kaleidoscope pattern on your Commodore 64.
E.S.P. - A program that tests your E.S.P. abilities by letting you sense what shape will be displayed on the next card.
Basic Clock - This short program displays an on screen clock.

User Groups - A list of Commodore user groups around the country that have been officially recognized by Commodore as Approved User Groups.

Features

Inside GEOS - GEOS was the graphical user interface for Commodore 64 and 128 computers by Berkeley Softworks. This is an interview with the president of Berkeley Softworks and includes some of their plans for GEOS and associated applications.

1986: The Year In Computers - Some computer related highlights for 1986 including quotes from Ronald Reagan, Jay Leno, Matthew Broderick and others; first year success for the Commodore 128; the redesigned Commodore 64C; the first wave of software for the Amiga and much more. For context, 1986 included the Challenger disaster, Halley's comet, Microsoft announces public stock offering; Max Headroom is born...

_{Back cover of the January 1987 issue of Commodore Magazine}

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1062-1065)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

The first photo was processed in October 1969 and appears to be of some trees decorated with lights, perhaps for Christmas. It's a pretty bad photo though. The second has the same date and appears to be of a parade (Shriners are featured in the photo walking down the street). There's a sign in that photo that says "City of Rockford". The first Rockford that comes up in a Google search is in Illinois but there is also one in Minnesota and probably others. The third photo was processed in June 1966 and features a lake or maybe river. The last photo was processed in May 1962 and would appear to be of some historic building in Italy (the flag is a dead giveaway even if the building and statue didn't do it).

processed October 1969

processed June 1966

processed May 1962

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.

Al Gore’s 2009 Warning on Vanishing Polar Ice and the Perils of Censoring ‘Misinformation’

While speaking at a climate change summit in Denmark in 2009, former Vice President Al Gore made an alarming statement.

Citing research from Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, a professor of oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, Mr. Gore said it was likely that the north polar ice caps would soon be completely melted.

"These figures are fresh,” Mr. Gore said. “Some of the models suggest to Dr. Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."

In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore cited studies which said “in the next 50 to 70 years” the ice caps would be completely melted. What had caused the melting to suddenly increase by a factor of ten? Well, nothing. As NPR noted, Mr. Gore was misrepresenting the data of Maslowski.

"It's unclear to me how this figure was arrived at," Dr. Maslowski told The Times UK. "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this."

Gore’s office soon issued a statement saying the 75 percent figure was a "ballpark figure" Dr. Maslowski had used in a casual conversation with Gore several years earlier.

Fortunately, both Gore and Maslowski were wrong.

In 2021, the Arctic sea ice extent was 4.72 million square kilometers, about 11 percent more than the 4.16 million kilometers in 2007, according to NASA’s estimates.*

Stretching the Truth

As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data—or “spreading “misinformation.”

In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion,” NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way—at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.

Earlier this month, San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud.” In August, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Twitter is hardly alone, of course. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.

Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability.”

Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions,” and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.

‘Freedom of Communication Is Indispensable’

What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.

In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook.”

“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team,” Psaki explained.

All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.

This week I’ll participate in an event at the Kirby Center in Washington, DC, hosted by the Academy for Science and Freedom. Led by leading scientists Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff, the event will explore the future of science in the face of widespread censorship, which has eroded faith in science.

To rebuild that trust we must remember that censorship is about power, not science, and recall the wisdom of one of history’s greatest scientists: Albert Einstein.

“[F]reedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge … it must be guaranteed by law,” Einstein wrote in a 1940 essay on freedom and science. “But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”

That spirit of tolerance is missing today and must be restored. Scientists and public officials will make mistakes—just ask Al Gore—but purging ideas from the public square is a sign of a dogmatic society, not a scientific one.

*Correction: The Arctic sea ice extent was 4.72 million square kilometers in 2021—not kilometers. We regret the error.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Al Gore’s 2009 Warning on Vanishing Polar Ice and the Perils of Censoring ‘Misinformation’

Monday, March 21, 2022

Info (Spring/Summer 1987)

Info is a magazine that covered various Commodore computers throughout its life. In 1987 that included the Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and Amiga. One of the interesting things about Info is that it was produced entirely using Commodore computers. The Spring/Summer 1987 issue includes:

Gallery - Screen shots and summaries of 6 new software releases including Starglider (Commodore 64), Bard's Tale (Amiga), Uridium (Commodore 64), MandFXP-Enhanced (Amiga), Scrabble (Commodore 64), and Deja Vu (Amiga).

New Amigas - An introduction to the new Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000, replacements for the original Amiga 1000.

Product Roundup - A comprehensive round-up of software available for the Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore 128 CP/M and Amiga). Over 2100 products are included with name, price, distributor, issue in which it was reviewed and a brief description. This feature makes up the bulk of this issue.

Double-Take - A photo of the Three Stooges with the Stooges replaced with Commodore executives Sam, Jack and Leonard by Amiga photo manipulation software.

_{Table of Contents from the Spring/Summer 1987 issue of Info}

CES Report - Berkeley demonstrates several new GEOS related software titles including GEOS v1.3, GeoCalc, GeoFile, GeoDex, and more; Progressive Peripherals shows off Superbase Personal for the Amiga, Vizawrite for the Amiga and C128, and Vizastar for the C128; Firebird shows off Tracker, Talking Teacher and Starglider; Epyx introduces Street Sports Basketball, Street Sports Baseball, Sub Battle Simulator all for the Commodore 64 with Temple of Apshai, World Games and Winter Games coming for the Amiga; Electronic Arts introduces PHM Pegasus, Bards Tale II and a reissue of Archon II for the Commodore 64; and lots more.

Mail - Praise for the magazine from someone who found out about it on QLink; comments upon the latest version of GEOS disabling work disks not copied in the officially proscribed way in order to curb piracy; a debate on Compuserve's copyright policy...apparently Compuserve was trying to claim copyright on public domain software; a reader writes about an appearance of an Amiga in Miami Vice; and more!

_{Back Cover of the Spring/Summer 1987 issue of Info}

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Electronic Gaming Monthly (July 1989)

While VideoGames & Computer Entertainment may have been my favorite gaming magazine, EGM was a close second. It got its start basically at the dawn of 16-bit gaming. The July 1989 issue covered a wide variety of systems from the Genesis, TurboGrafx-16 and of course NES to the PC, Amiga and even the Commodore 64, a testament to its staying power (though not for too much longer). This issue includes:

Cover Story - Next Generation Gaming - An article covering the next wave of gaming systems including the Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, Super Famicom/Nintendo (The U.S. version was still a couple of years away at this point), the Game Boy (the first successful cartridge based mobile). There is detailed information for each including technical specs and early games and peripherals.

EGM's Review Crew - Reviews of the following games:

Guerill War (NES) - A translation of SNK's top down action arcade game.
Ironsword (NES) - A decent sequel to Wizards & Warriors.
Fester's Quest (NES) - I'm convinced this game is impossible. If you say you finished it you are a liar.
Mega Man 2 (NES) - The second game in what was one of the most famous franchises for the NES.
3 Stooges (NES) - Really, a collection of mini-games. It was better on the Amiga.
Adventures of Lolo (NES) - An action/puzzle game with lots of addictive game play.
Operation Wolf (NES) - One of the better light gun games available for the NES. I remember a friend renting this one from Blockbuster.
Q*Bert (NES) - A classic arcade game I never really liked. However, if you like the original or other ports, then you will like this one.
Mappyland (NES) - Another good translation of a classic arcade game.
Flying Dragon (NES) - A karate game that really isn't anything special.

_{Table of Contents from the July 1989 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly}

Next Wave - Sneak peeks at upcoming games including Double Dragon II: The Revenge (NES), P.O.W. (NES), Thundercade (NES), and Super Dodge Ball (NES).
International Outlook - Previews of some games released internationally (usually Japan) and that may make it to North America. Games looked at include Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) and Gradius (NES).

Top Secret! - Tips, tricks, strategies and maps for various games including Blaster Master (NES), Zanac (NES), Mega Man (NES), Star Soldier (NES), Wizards and Warriors (NES), Milon's Secret Castle (NES), Kid Icarus (NES), Ring King (NES), John Elways' Quarterback (NES), Metal Gear (NES), RBI Baseball (NES), Metroid (NES), Posiden Wars 3-D (SMS), Track and Field II (NES), R-Type (SMS), Simon's Quest (NES), Rambo (NES), Double Dragon (NES), Legacy of the Wizard (NES), Desert Falcon (Atari), Zanac (NES), and many more!

Interface: Letters to the Editor - Questions about the Mega Drive (Genesis), Mega Man 2, the chip shortage going on at the time, and more.

Press Start - A look at a new joystick for the NES from Beeshu called Gizmo. It looks a little odd and this whole thing read like an advertisement.

Gaming Gossip - Rumors and gossip from Quartermann including rumors that Namco and Atari are developing 16-bit machines, Dragon Warrior is coming to the U.S. for Christmas and much more.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1058-1061)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

The first three photos in this set were probably taken during the same trip and are dated August 1963. They appear to have been taken in the Western part of the U.S. but I don't recognize the locations. The last photos is a cat pic and was processed in October 1971. Because cat pics were popular long before the Internet.

August 1963

processed October 1971

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Tips & Tricks (January 1997)

Though descended from my favorite magazine, VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, Tips & Tricks was never a magazine I paid much attention to. Many loved the hints, strategy guides and cheats it provided but I was always more interested in news, reviews and that sort of thing. The January 1997 issue includes:

Departments

Power Up! - An introduction to the staff which includes Chris Bieniek, Wataru Maruyama, Ione Flores, Nikos Constant, Bett Hallock, Tyrone Rodriguez and Deborah Lockhart.

Readers' Tips - Readers write in with tips on Daytona USA as well as various questions and comments.

T&T Select Games - Overviews and previews of recent and upcoming games including:

Jet Moto (PlayStation) - A racing game featuring a vehicle something like a Jet Ski.
Crime Wave (Sega Saturn) - A vehicle combat game featuring a top-down point of view.
Ten Pin Alley (PlayStation) - A bowling game of course.
Suikoden (PlayStation) - An RPG that allows not only individual and group combat but full scale wars.
Powerslave - A Doom-like game in which you wield magic as well as weapons.
NFL '97 (Sega Saturn) - A football game featuring licensed teams, stadiums and players.
NBA Live '97 (PlayStation) - Because we need a new basketball game every years...
FIFA Soccer '97 (PlayStation) - ...and soccer too of course.
FIFA Soccer Gold Edition (Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo) - A soccer game for the 16-bit systems.
FIFA Soccer '97 (Game Boy) - Blurry soccer...
Madden '97 (Game Boy) - Blurry football...
Burning Road (PlayStation) - A racing game out of France that is somewhat similar to the likes of Daytona USA and Ridge Racer.
Toshinden URA (Sega Saturn) - Another tweek to the Toshinden 3D fighting game franchise.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo) - The pinnacle of Mortal Kombat on 16-bit systems.

_{Table of Contents from the January 1997 issue of Tips & Tricks}

Game Genie/Game Shark Codes - Game Genie codes for the Genesis games Toy Story, Vectorman and Garfield: Caught in the Act; Game Genie codes for the Super NES games Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday (I swear I've never heard of that one); Game Shark codes for the PlayStation games Bubble Bobble, Crash Bandicoot, Olympic Soccer, Project Horned Owl and Robo-Pit; and Game Shark codes for Sega Saturn games Bubble Bobble, Iron Storm and Shining Wisdom.

Strategy

X-Men vs. Street Fighter - A detailed strategy guide for this arcade game featuring general moves and how to use them as well as details for each character. Also, how to play as a couple of hidden characters.

Kizuna Encounter - Another fighting game strategy guide, this one for the Neo Geo.

Wave Race 64 - A detailed guide for this Nintendo 64 racing game featuring Jet Skis. It was a pretty outstanding racer for the time.

The last half of the magazine features tips on dozens if not hundreds of games for the Super NES, Genesis, PlayStation, Saturn, Game Boy, Game Gear, 3DO and arcade.

Monday, March 7, 2022

Debunking the Myth That Minimum Wage Laws Are ‘Progressive’

The minimum wage is a sort of litmus test. And not only for economists. For social justice advocates, too.

Forget, for a moment, the economics of it. In essence, minimum wage legislation imposes compulsory unemployment on the poor, the unskilled, racial minorities, the young, the physically and even more so the mentally handicapped—the very people all men of good will most want to help. Before the advent of this law, the unemployment rate for white middle-aged people and black teens was just about the same. Now, the latter are unemployed at quadruple the rate of the former.

For the moment let’s just discuss the ethics and logic of the minimum wage. I now make you an offer: come work for me: you can wash my car, clean my house, etc. I’ll pay you $3 per hour. If I were serious about this offer, I could go to jail for making it. If you accepted it, you would also be breaking the law, but you would not get more than a slap on the wrist, since the judge would think I was exploiting you. Did I violate anyone’s rights? Did I violate your rights by making you this offer? Hardly.

As we should know from pure logic alone that an offer of employment such as I am now making to you, theoretically (I do not welcome being arrested), cannot help but improve your economic welfare. It is a proposal of an option you simply did not have before I made it. If you reject it, you are no worse off than you otherwise would have been. If you accept it, this job necessarily benefits you, at least ex ante (looking ahead), since, presumably, you had no better alternative than this one. I am your benefactor, not your exploiter.

Now for the economics of it. Some people believe the minimum wage is like a floor; raise it, and pay scales rise, particularly those at the lower end of the economic pyramid. If this were so, why be so modest as to want to raise it, only, to $15 per hour. Why not $1,500 hourly? Then, we would all be rich! We could stop all foreign aid to poor countries. We might just tell them, instead, to install a minimum wage decree at a high level.

No, the minimum wage is more like a barrier over which you have to jump in order to get a job in the first place and then keep it. The higher this hurdle, the harder it is for you to jump over it. Let us return to my offer to you at $3 per hour. Suppose you are very unskilled. Your productivity, the amount of revenue you can add to my bottom line, is only $3 per hour. If I hire you at $15, I’ll lose $12 per hour. Thus, I won’t hire you if I want to maximize profits. If I do so anyway, I will risk bankruptcy. Which is better for you: no wage at all, zero, nada, with this law in place? Or $3 per hour, with no such enactment? Clearly, $3 per hour is better than nothing.

Here are three objections to the foregoing. First, if you were totally unemployed, you might be eligible for welfare; if employed at a low wage, likely not. So the minimum wage, at least with a welfare program, is a benefit to the poor. True enough. But, here, we are not holding fast to ceteris paribus (all else equal) conditions. If we want to clearly see the economic effects of this regulation, we have to hold all else constant. Assume, either, no welfare at all, or, an equal amount of such payments whether on the job or not. Then, we can see clearly that something is better than nothing, and, also, that something plus a welfare payment is greater than nothing plus the same welfare payment.

Second, there is the claim of monopsony, which is a single buyer of labor, or, oligopsony, a situation in which there are only a few employers. This is a divisive concept within the dismal science (economics), which we need not discuss here. But one thing is clear: this applies, if it does at all, only to firms which employ highly skilled workers. For example, the NBA, the NFL, MLB and other such sports teams; to doctors, engineers, lawyers, computer experts, with very narrow specialized skills which can be utilized only by one or a very few companies. But these people earn vast multiples of the $15 per hour many are pushing for. Thus, this objection is not even relevant to our present discussion.

Third, several economists have not been able to find the unemployment effects implied by this directive in their econometric studies. Response: they should look a little harder, probe a bit deeper. They have not done their full homework.

The minimum wage law should not be raised, it should not remain constant, it should not be lowered. It should be ended, forthwith, and salt sowed where once it stood. It’s proponents may have good intentions, but in practice it is a malicious attack on the least of us.

Walter Block

Walter Edward Block is an American economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist who holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the J. A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Debunking the Myth That Minimum Wage Laws Are ‘Progressive’

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1050-1057)

See the previous post in this series here.

The first three photos are not labeled or dated but appear to be from a trip to a lake or river and show some water skiing action as well as the results of a fishing expedition. the final photo is rather blurry but it looks like there is some sunbathing going on and probably swimming but I'm not sure if it is from the same time or not. It was processed in July 1962. The others are likely from the 1960s as well.

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.

Ahoy! (January 1984)

While not quite as popular as RUN or Compute!'s Gazette, Ahoy! was another major Commodore magazine covering Commodore's 8-bit computers (primarily the Commodore 64). The premiere issue claims to have a circulation of 190,000 and includes:

Features

The Computer as Communications Device - All about going online with your Commodore 64 or VIC-20 and a modem calling the modem the "indispensable appliance of the '80s." At the time, a 300 BPS modem would set you back at least $100 and 1200 bps was generally considered unaffordable costing more than a Commodore 64 itself at the time.

The Interrupt Music Maker/Editor - A type-in program that includes a small music making program and a 'driver' that allows music to be played while doing other things with your Commodore 64.

An Interview with Protecto's Bill Badser - Protecto was one of the majory mail-order shops for Commodore computers and other Commodore related hardware. Bill Badser was one of the co-founders.

Multi-Draw 64: A Graphics Tablet - A type-in drawing program for the Commodore 64.

Can the 64 Crack the Peanut? - Peanut was the code name for IBM's PCjr. This article contemplates how successful the Commodore 64 could be against it. Apparently when rumors of the Peanut first appeared, Apple's stock dropped by half and there was similar panic regarding other computer makers. It was felt IBM would easily dominate the home market. It turned out to be an accurate but premature fear. Other computers would have years more of success and it would not be the PCjr that finally led to the PC standards dominance but cheap clones. The PCjr on the other hand was a complete flop.

_{Table of Contents from the January 1984 issue of Ahoy!}

Departments

Editorial - Editorial by Ben Bova about the Microcomputer Revolution, prominently featuring the Commodore 64.

Scuttlebutt - New products coming soon include the portable Commodore 64 (SX-64 or Executive 64), low cost printers from Alphacom, an EPROM burner called The Promqueen/64, new speech add-ons from Commodore and Alien Group, and much more.

Reviews

Astroblitz - A Defender clone for the Commodore 64.
Fort Apocalypse - A decent attack and rescue arcade type game somewhat similar to games like Choplifter.
Keyword Cross Reference - A couple of BASIC programs designed to generate a cross reference list given a series of inputs.
Moondust - A rather unique game available in cartridge format for both the C-64 and VIC-20.
Speed Racer - No relation to the anime, this is a not so good racing game.
Candy Bandit - An apparently terrible game for the Commodore 64.
Mailing List and Labels - A program designed for keeping track of mailing lists and printing mailing labels.
Suspended - Another Infocom classic text adventure for the Commodore 64.
Hometax - An income tax program for the Commodore 64 provided that you have a CP/M add-on.
Cannonball Blitz - A game by Sierra On-Line for the VIC-20 that happens to be very much like Donkey Kong.

Megalextoria

steem

Thursday, March 31, 2022

Commodore Magazine (January 1987)

Departments

Features

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1062-1065)

Al Gore’s 2009 Warning on Vanishing Polar Ice and the Perils of Censoring ‘Misinformation’

Stretching the Truth

‘Freedom of Communication Is Indispensable’

Jon Miltimore

Monday, March 21, 2022

Info (Spring/Summer 1987)

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Electronic Gaming Monthly (July 1989)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1058-1061)

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Tips & Tricks (January 1997)

Departments

Strategy

Monday, March 7, 2022

Debunking the Myth That Minimum Wage Laws Are ‘Progressive’

Walter Block

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1050-1057)

Ahoy! (January 1984)

Features

Departments