Attic discoveries

[Captain Kidd]

Well we've moved and are currently renting a house. While looking for places to store stuff, I decided to check out the attic. It's the typical drop-ladder access type. In this case however, there's a ton of floored attic space available. (The house we sold [close tomorrow!] only provided attic access to get to the second floor HVAC unit.)

The light didn't work so I had to grab a, weak, flashlight to see by. There's some garbage up there. Left behind photos of presumbly the original owners (the house was a foreclosure) and a box of children books. Then I noticed some 5-1/4" floppies lying off in a corner. Focusing the flashlight beam on them, I discovered to my amazement: a Commodore 64 and floppy drive!

I've got to retrieve it and see if it still works. Talk about a blast for the past.

[soylentgreen]

It truly is a window to the past. A time when most people only had three tv channels...when a mouse was something your cat caught...when a 'hard drive' was having to take the Major Deegan home at rush hour...when 'flash memory' was something you shuddered to recall about that guy in the trenchcoat outside the Port Authority!

Check these out if you're interested.
c64.com (http://www.c64.com/)
Lemon 64 (http://www.lemon64.com/)
c64.org (http://www.c64.org/)

Just the tip(s) of the iceberg of the C-64 underground renaissance.

Commodore 64's and Amiga's are still huge in England. It's like an alternate universe where Commodore didn't repeatedly release product and turns it's back on customers as they did here in the states.

Take it from a grizzled veteran of the home computer wars of the mid 80s..."I was there when they killed the Vic 20! "I watched the Trash 80s disappear into the dustbin of history" "I lost alot of friends in Mattel's Coleco Adam push." *see below one of the propaganda leaflets dropped on our positions.

there are more of us out here than you can imagine. ;)

http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/7317/c64uberallesni8.jpg

[jrkeller]

My college roommate had one and we had great fun playing games. I used my departments Macintosh's for any real word processing.

My grandmother's house and especially her attic were loaded with all sorts of interesting things, some I still have.

[Nicolas]

The Commodore 64 featured the best games that later got ported for Sega Mater System, only to be surpassed by the latest big budget Disney games for the latter console. And of course, with a c64 you could do a lot more than gaming.

Nowadays they're popular for games, but a C64 with MIDI software is very sought after, as it makes for an old prgrammable 8 bit synthesizer (the SID chip available in every C64 is nothing less than a synthesizer). Something like a Fairlight, but el cheapo :).

The C-64 was ahead of its time. I played on it at a friend's house in the early nineties, when Sega still was selling ported versions of these games. On his C-64, he had high scores in these games of his older sister and brother...10 year old high scores :).

[mugaliens]

Anyone remember "peek" and "poke?"

[Nicolas]

peek gets value out, poke puts value in, basic BASIC ;)

Never used it though. I only used the C64 to game :D

[mugaliens]

Very good!

[Cugel]

Ah! The CBM-64 was the first computer I worked on as professional programmer. (The FinalCartidge and The Final Chesscard)
I can clearly remember you could change the color of the screen border with a single adress in the zero page. Great way of tracing assembly programs! And it had a 6502 running at 1 Mhz. (6510 actually) Which, I seem to remember, was a lot faster than my current 2.5 Ghz. Windows PC.

[Nicolas]

And which made it a lot more believable the moon landing computer could land the LM :)

[SeanF]

My attic contains not only an Amiga 500 and a C-64, but also a Commodore PET, complete with cassette tape drive.

I should haul them out sometime and see if they still work...

[BigDon]

Under the heading of just finding cool stuff in out of the way places, nothing beats being a furniture mover like myself. Especially when it comes to moving either the wealthy or folks who have lived in the same house for decades.

One of my co-workers moved a heavy dresser and found a small zippered purse with 30,000 dollars cash in it. The owner had come home late from an over seas trip and thought he had lost it at the airport. Gave the finder $300 for returning it.

We've made some grim discoveries too. But I'll leave that for another time.

One of my personal best was I was moving a nice wealthy couple and when I lifted the mattress and box spring to get them ready for the truck I noticed a stud type earring on the floor in the rug. As I packed their household the previous day I knew they had nothing "fake" or a knock-off. It turned out to be a 3/4 carat pink cocktail diamond. The lady of the house was quite happy to have it back. She had reported it missing to her insurance company a year earlier.

[Eoanthropus Dawsoni]

I bought the Atari 800XL instead of the Commodore 64. I still have it set up in my radio shack and fire it up once a year or so and play with it.

[Gerrsun]

Have found two velvet paintings, one was a desert landscape, and I dont remember the other one.

My wife's coworker said that her husband was up i nthe attic and came down with a small box with little cartoon hippos on it, when opened, inside was a mold of childrens teeth.

She thought it odd but remembered that the previous owner of the house had been a dentist.

Her husband went back up into the attic and came down with more boxes, and more molds of childrens teeth.

Soon they both went up and walked back to what they thought was a brick wall in the attic.

It was not.

Rather it was boxes and boxes of molds of childrens teeth that the dentist had piled up in the atticand forgotten about presumably.

She said they must have thrown out 10 garbage bags full of those things.

[Nicolas]

You don't normally find a lot left by the previous owner when buying a house here.

However, when we bought our house we did find a nice fisherman's bag with weights and stuff inside. And 2 professional mouth organs, which my mother sold before she knew I had an interest in instruments...

[farmerjumperdon]

My 1st decent telecscope was a found-in-the-attic item. A Telsi 80mm refractor. Nice EQ mount, decent optics, lousy old wooden wobbly tripod. Spent about $60 for a hybrid (.965 to 1.25) erecting prism and Voila!

The coolest thing is actually the very nice wooden box it came in.

[soylentgreen]

Anyone remember "peek" and "poke?"

Poke 53280,0 poke 53281,0

...turned the page and border black! We called that "Wicked!" back then. ;)

[mike alexander]

The last time we moved we were unpacking and near the end we ran across a box. It was labelled 'aTTic tHInG', and the writing wasn't ours.

While I assume it was just a box the moving company recycled, and it contained just some known miscellany, it had, for a moment, a genuine Stephen King feeling.

[Nicolas]

my money was on your horribly misformed twin brother being inside ;)

[Captain Kidd]

Heh, cool other finds. I still haven't gotten it down yet.

I had a hard time convincing my wife's mother, who came down to help, to label boxes beyond "stuff". We've got a few mystery boxes still laying about. The worse is we saved our boxes from the last move; so when she packed some of them, they were already labelled completely different. We gingerly handled "glasses - fragile!" boxes only to discover very sturdy items in it and almost put the "books" box on the bottom of a heavy stack only to get suspicious at the extremely light "books" upon which investigation proved the box to contain an extremely delicate crystal swan.

[Van Rijn]

Just had a kid at work mention, "Yeah, that controller has direct connections like they used to use on those dumb terminals you see in the history books - you know, back in the '70s." I was caught between smiling in memory and wanting to strangle him.

I still have an Apple II+ (stored away now) and I knew PEEK and POKE well, when I wasn't doing 6502 assembly. I also had an Atari 400. Friends and relatives had purchased Vic-20s, C-64s, Atari 800s, Osbornes, S100 systems, and a few other machines.