John writes about a wide variety of topics on Substack.

Christmas 1981 still stands out as one of my favorite memories. I was nine years old and about to unwrap one of the best hauls of my childhood. Some of my favorite presents from that year were Mighty Men and Monster Maker1, a nine inch Remco Dracula2, and, best of all, a Commodore Vic-203.

The man I recognized as Captain Kirk (William Shatner) was all over TV telling America how affordable the Vic-20 was4. Computers were the future. Everyone knew it. That was an unquestioned truth that adults repeated so many times that even a young kid like me absorbed it.

I already owned an Atari 2600, and I still loved playing Pitfall and Asteroids (Adventure had been my favorite, but I’d beaten it long ago). A computer felt different though. A game console was for entertainment. A computer was for learning. All of the adults said it would teach me the skills that would one day lead to a high-paying job in the coming information age.

The problem was that computers didn’t teach you anything. They merely gave you the opportunity to learn. They also gave you an opportunity to play new games that didn’t exist on the Atari, and for the first several months that’s exactly what I did.

I think the Vic-20 I received came bundled with Radar Rat Race5, although my parents may have bought it separately. Regardless we had a lot of fun running through those mazes. The other standout game was Scott Adams’ Adventureland6. It was an early text-based adventure with a two word parser. Eventually, though, even those games became familiar, and I longed for something new.

One day, I decided to open the Vic-20’s User Manual. Part of it was devoted to BASIC Programming. And just like most kids in the early eighties, I carefully copied the simple program7 that caused the screen to cycle through its colors in a seizure-inducing blur.

What happened on that screen wasn’t particularly impressive, but the realization that I had made those colors appear because of what I had typed was a revelation to me. For the first time I understood that computers weren’t just machines for experiencing worlds other people had built. That little beige box could become a tool for creating a world of my own.

From there I graduated to PEEK and POKE. I used them to draw simple images. I never got very far with graphics, but I quickly discovered what IF… THEN and GOTO could do together. Once I understood that I could use those to create a program that could ask a question and branch to different outcomes, I realized I could build my own text adventures. I had never before heard the term “spaghetti code,” but I was about to write a lot of it.

None of my games were especially complicated, and they probably weren’t very good. That wasn’t the point. The important lesson was that these strange boxes weren’t just for consuming what someone else had made. They could become workshops. I could use them to build worlds that had existed only in my imagination.

And then one day all of my new found creative powers came to an abrupt end.

I was happily copying a program from some computer magazine of the day when the TV screen went blank. The cyan border that had become as familiar as an old friend on the Vic-20 disappeared, replaced by nothing more than a flickering gray field on our RCA television. No cursor. No “Ready” prompt. No indication that anything was waiting for me to act. Just a lifeless screen.

I didn’t know what had happened. Then I noticed the power light on my computer was dark. I flipped the switch, but nothing changed.

Eventually, I admitted defeat and asked my dad if he could help me figure out what was wrong. Together, we opened the machine and he instantly spotted the problem. The Vic-20 had blown a fuse.

He told me he’d look for a replacement the next time he went into town. I waited.

And waited.

Eventually, we learned that Radio Shack didn’t have one in stock. The store owner ordered a replacement, but it wouldn’t arrive for another three weeks. Next-day delivery wasn’t really a thing normal people could afford in the eighties. Sometimes you just had to wait.

And so I waited. Waiting was difficult because I had just discovered the joy of making things.

I spent the time the best way I could. I committed my ideas to paper. The next game was going to be my most ambitious yet. Every extra day without the computer gave me more time to imagine it, and by the time I finally finished designing it in my head, I was certain it would be my best game ever. Maybe even as good as anything Scott Adams had ever made!

Eventually, the day came when we went to get the replacement fuse. Only they’d sent the wrong one.

Another three weeks.

I went home disappointed, but at some point during that wait an idea began to form. The only thing preventing my Vic-20 from working was a lack of conductivity. What if I fixed that myself?

As a child I’d done experiments with nine volt batteries and had already learned something about aluminum foil: it was a great conductor. If I wrapped the fuse in foil, I could make the connection work. I could have my computer up and running again any time I wanted. That would allow me to type in my game, save it to cassette, and then shut everything down until the proper fuse arrived. It was a perfect plan.

It worked… for a while.

The Vic-20 powered on, and I began typing. For several hours everything was exactly as I’d hoped it would be. Then, halfway through typing it in, that familiar flickering gray screen came back.

Only this time there was something different. There was also a smell. It reminded me of burnt toast.

I didn’t wait for my dad this time. I opened the machine myself and found the problem. The aluminum foil had blackened, and the motherboard was the source of the smell. My attempt to save my computer had destroyed it. Needless to say, repairing my Vic-20 was now going to require a lot more than a replacement fuse.

It was another two years before I had a computer again. This time it wasn’t a Christmas present or a surprise gift. I was expected to earn it. By then I was twelve years old. We’d moved into a house on a hill above a dirt road, and we heated that home with wood. My dad had ordered a truckload of logs, and they were dumped into the culvert between the hill on which our home stood and the road.

He made me a deal. If I split and stacked all of that wood, he’d buy me a new computer as payment. I agreed. He cut the logs into pieces that would fit our stove, handed me an axe, and I got to work. It took the entire summer, but when I had finished I’d earned my computer: a Commodore 128, the 1902 monitor (supported both 40 and 80 column modes!), and the 1571 floppy drive.

It’s almost been half a century and I’m still using computers to make imaginary worlds. The tools have changed. The Vic-20 has been replaced by machines whose capabilities would have felt like something from Star Trek when I was a child, but the feelings of curiosity and wonder are still the same. I still get just as excited by the possibilities.

That excitement has led me to create artwork for gaming companies and self-published authors, often combining traditional drawings with digital painting on a Wacom graphics tablet. I write fiction on a Mac and publish stories through my Substack. The machines are more powerful now, but the magic remains the same.

Footnotes

Let’s take a look at some of these Apple and Atari connections.

Breakout

Steve Jobs actually worked at Atari for a hot second and the first mention of Atari in the book covers the story about the Breakout game. As the story goes, Nolan Bushnell tasked Jobs with creating Breakout and Jobs in turn brought Woz to do the actual work on the board. In the end, Woz came up with a clever design that used far fewer chips than expected, but Atari did not end up using it.

Apple Company Name

Before naming themselves Apple, several other names were considered for the fledgling company. The name Apple was a good choice, but according to Jobs another bonus of that name was that it “would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book”. That may seem silly now, but in 1976, Atari was a large and growing technology company that definitely loomed over Apple.

Ron Wayne

Not many people know about the 3rd founder of Apple: Ron Wayne. That’s because he only stuck around for a couple weeks before selling his share back to Jobs and Woz. The connection? Jobs had met Wayne when they both worked at Atari.

Atari Declined to Loan Apple Money

Needing cash to buy the components for the Apple I, Jobs went to everyone he knew asking for loans. He needed about $10,000 (approx. $58,000 in 2026), and even went to his bosses at Atari but they turned him down.

The Apple II Power Supply

Another guy that Jobs knew from Atari, Rod Holt, designed the switching power supply for the Apple II, notable because it ran cool, was small and relatively low-cost.

Apple II Color

The original Apple I did not have color. Neither did the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. The Apple II did have color and Woz used an idea he came up with while working on the Breakout game for Atari. Basically, the Apple II output color by adjusting the timing of the video output to hit parts of the RGB phosphor in the CRT to generate colors. This technique didn’t provide a lot different colors, just six colors actually, but that is much better than black and white! Here are the details since I may be summarizing it badly:

Apple Offered to Atari

The Apple II required even more cash that Apple didn’t have so Jobs had to go out looking for more funding. At one point he even went to Atari again, this time offering Nolan Bushnell 1/3 of Apple for $50,000. I bet he wishes he took that deal!

An Apple Video Game System

Woz had been assigned a project to create a $500 game machine to compete with Atari’s products. Woz never finished this project.

Home Computer Crash of 1983

Just after John Sculley was brought in as the Apple CEO in 1983, the home computer market crashed. This obviously affected Atari greatly, so much so that the company would be sold off to Jack Tramiel in 1984. Apple was also affected, with its profits dropping 80 percent along with a steep decline in stock price.

The Atari ST

The last mention of Atari in the book is in reference to the Apple IIGS. It was released in 1986, during the apex of the Atari ST. Some were not convinced that an Apple II hybrid-style computer would succeed against more powerful entry-level systems such as the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. Eventually the IIGS sold about 1.5 million machines, which puts it in about the same ballpark as the Atari ST and Amiga.

Divergence

After this there is no mention of Atari in the rest of the book. I suppose that make sense because after 1986, Atari started sputtering a bit. It remained a much smaller company than Apple and never was a serious competitor, even if their products did overlap somewhat.

In 1996, Atari essentially went out of business by reverse-merging with a JTS, makers of disk storage solutions.

However not everyone remembers that just a year later, Apple was not in great shape either. It was burning through cash and seemed destined to also go out of business as well. But in late 1997, Apple acquired NeXT with Steve Jobs and things took a different and much better turn.

The Atari brand name managed to survive throughout the years and is now an actual company (the former Infogrames) that primarily focuses on retro hardware and software.

What other connections between Apple and Atari are you aware of?

Leave a comment

This guest post is from , a long-time Goto 10 reader. For more of Jim’s writing, be sure to check out his Substack, Lost in Cyberspace.

If you’re interested in writing for Goto 10, please get in touch.

— Paul

Dad was an electrical engineer. By training, by vocation. By how he saw the world.

Working for an Air Force contractor in the 1960s and ’70s, Dad designed (and had the patent for) the first air-collision avoidance system, as well as an early transonic airspeed indicator.

And with that background, it was little surprise to us kids when Dad started building a kit computer in our basement. It was a CMOS KIM-I - and by “kit,” I mean he sent them a check, and they mailed him a large blueprint schematic of how to build this early 6502-based computer.

He ended up adding an RF output so he could hook it up to a small 11-inch RCA TV, and a serial port he connected to a surplus Teletype.

After that, he bought us a Fairchild Channel F - the first videogame system to store game software on carts.

And that led to his buying an Atari 400 when they came out shortly after we moved to California. Originally, it just had a cassette drive - with the loud beeping to let you know it was still loading the program. I remember one of our first games was a Star Trek-based game (not licensed, I don’t think) in which you had to search different sectors for the Klingons.

After he added a floppy drive, I began spending my own earnings from flipping burgers on more and more games. One favorite was “Decathlon” by Activision.

It was never as popular as Epyx’ “Summer Games,” and with good reason: The 1,500 meter race was nicknamed “The Joystick Killer.” You had to keep rocking your joystick left and right and left again, continuously, to keep your player sprinting at full speed. It took 3.5 to 4.5 minutes to finish this game, by which time your hand was bruised and your arm numb.

But my siblings and I - and the neighboring kids - loved that game, because with 10 events total, it was one of the longer multiplayer videogames available in the early 1980s. And the graphics were decent.

But with those square, black Atari joysticks?

Brutal.

Even buying a Wico Command Control “batstick” joystick wasn’t a huge help. The challenge was with a multidirectional joystick, as your arm tired you would begin pushing the stick up or pulling it down, breaking the rhythm and slowing your player.

So Dad swung by an electronics surplus shop one day, and picked up a joystick from an old video game. A single-axis, two-directional joystick. It only moved left and right.

It had been removed from the cabinet of whatever game it was for, with its surrounding panel still attached, including two large red plastic buttons. It was about 4 inches deep by about 14 inches long; the joystick itself topped by a red metal ball for grabbing it. And it was definitely industrial strength.

Dad finished building a little case around it, put rubber feet on all four corners, and then wired it to an Atari joystick plug.

We’d plug that thing in only for “Decathlon” (and, later, for “Summer Games”) No more trying to hold the Atari or Wico joystick between our legs for stability: We just placed that bad boy on the table in front of the monitor, and suddenly that 1,500 meter race could be finished without blisters.

Dad later brought home some kind of weird controller that used embedded mercury tubes to detect changes in motion. It was black, covered in a soft plastic with a honeycomb pattern, and 5, 6 inches tall and maybe two inches wide. You held it straight vertical to start, then could control gameplay by tilting it in different directions. It had a single, small red button on top. Again, this was not an Atari joystick - it may have been an industrial controller from work, but Dad rewired it to work on the Atari. It was somewhat slow to react to changed positions, though, so while technically impressive it ended up being impractical for actually playing a game with.

And when we stopped playing the Fairchild Channel F in favor of the Atari 400, Dad even rewired one of the Fairchild joysticks to work with the Atari. They were notoriously fragile, though, and after awhile Dad got tired of taking it apart to re-solder the connections and retired it.

But maybe the most impressive bit of hardware customizing on that Atari 400 Dad did was when he bought a surplus Atari 800 keyboard, built a custom case for it, and then connected it to the Atari 400 by adding a Centronix 24-pin parallel cable. I’m not sure of the details on the 400 chassis itself, but I do remember it plugged in on the left-side of the case, where dad had cut a hole so he could put the serial connector on the motherboard.

I used that to type most of my homework assignments the first couple years of college. Once Dad bought an ST, he sold me his 800.

All of the above peripherals are in boxes somewhere in the old Computer Museum of America collection in storage at San Diego State University. If I run across them while I’m helping with the cataloguing of the collection, I’ll be sure to take photos.

However, I did use some Apple II machines because that was what we had in high school. I remember eagerly signing up for Computer Math I and II my sophomore year. These classes were essentially an Apple II lab (mostly the II+, but I believe some IIe models as well) and they were primarily about learning how to use BASIC.

Apple II and AppleSoft BASIC

At that time, about 1985/86, I already knew BASIC from our Atari 800XL. But AppleSoft BASIC was a different thing than what I was used to. AppleSoft BASIC was written by Microsoft and that family of BASICs was predominant back then. Atari BASIC was a different dialect with some different behavior that I’ve written about before. Primarily, strings worked differently and your code was checked for syntax errors when you pressed return on the line rather than just when you typed RUN.

Anyway, it was fun being able to spend an hour of my day playing around on a computer, even if it was a lowly green-screen Apple II with pretty bad graphics. Although the Apple II could definitely do color, I don’t remember any of them having a color display. I suspect that was a feature for the school because it made them less desirable for playing games.

I remember that one assignment involved writing a BASIC program to display the gifts from the 12 Days of Christmas song as an attempt to teach us how to use the FOR loop. That proved surprisingly difficult for most of the kids in the class, so after I finished it quickly, I would assist others.

I don’t remember a lot about these Apple II computers. They were big and bulky and seemed to have an industrial feel. I seem to recall the disk drives had a metal case, but perhaps the Apple II did as well. They were certainly a contrast from the svelte Atari 800XL I had at home.

Apple IIGS and Pascal

For my junior year, the high school added a new class: Pascal Programming. I was excited for this one because we would be using the brand-new Apple IIGS systems that the school had just acquired. Considering the IIGS had only just come out in 1986, this was my first glimpse at a somewhat new computer. At this point I had not used an Atari ST or Macintosh.

The class was taught by a first-year math teacher, who I also had for Algebra III. She didn’t really seem to know anything about programming or Pascal and was apparently just assigned the class because no one else wanted it, or because she was new and had no choice.

One of my classmates was Dominic Giampaolo, who was a year ahead of me. Dom and I were the two “experts” in the class and would help the teacher and other students. I remember Dom and I would have discussions about which computer was better, the IIGS, Amiga or Atari ST.

Dom eventually went to work for Apple and was one of the primary developers that worked on the APFS file system that is now used by all iOS and Mac devices.

The Apple IIGS was a fun computer. To me, it was everything the original Apple II was not. It was fast, colorful, stylish and easy to use. It sort of felt like a color Mac to me, although I had not used an actual Mac at that point.

The system had a GUI and was mouse-driven. I don’t specifically remember what we used for Pascal on the IIGS, but I remember it was integrated with the graphical UI, so it was most likely TML Pascal.

Compared to Kyan Pascal on my Atari 800XL, the Pascal on the IIGS was wonderful. It had an integrated editor, was fast and being mouse-driven, felt like the future.

However the IIGS was, like the Commodore 128, a bit of a Frankenstein computer.

The IIGS was compatible with most older Apple II software, but it could run in a faster mode at 2.8MHz, with a Mac-like GUI, using its 65C816 16-bit processor.

It also had a rather cool case design, but did require an external floppy and monitor. At about $1000 for the bare computer, it cost much more than an equivalent Atari 1040ST system from the time. But I suppose, for an Apple computer, it was probably somewhat reasonably priced. It certainly cost much less than a Macintosh!

Western Digital Design Center 65C816 CPU

The IIGS was made possible by the WDC 65C816 hybrid CPU. Since the 68000, used by the Macintosh, Atari ST and Amiga, was not compatible with the 8-bit 6502, Apple decided to use this strange CPU from Western Digital.

This CPU was introduced in 1985 and probably seemed like it would be an obvious upgrade for the aging 8-bit computers that were prevalent at the time, but that didn’t really happen.

For its high-end 8-bit computer, Commodore decided to stuff two CPUs in the case and offer three modes: C64, C128 and CP/M. For its 130XE, Atari didn’t do much beyond increase the RAM to 128K. Apple is the only one that put in the work to actually try and build a true successor to their popular Apple II computer.

Computers with backwards compatibility always had a problem, though: How do you convince developers to make software that uses the newer features when they could instead stick with the old stuff and its larger market?

That hurt the 128, which had few 128-specific titles. I think the IIGS fared better, with the power of Apple behind it, but I suspect most developers that were interested in the new GUI stuff probably instead focused on the Macintosh.

After all, a hybrid has compromises. And in this case, the big compromise was performance. The 65C816 CPU ran at 2.8MHz, which was much lower than the 7.8MHz of the 68000 in the Macintosh (Atari ST was at 8MHz and Amiga about 7.1MHz). Even if the 65C816 might have been more efficient, people were starting to care about MHz by then and a slower number certainly didn’t help sales.

The IIGS was discontinued in 1992. By then the Classic Macintosh was similarly priced and the Color Classic was right around the corner and there just was not much need for the IIGS to stick around.

I see them pop up on Facebook Marketplace from time to time and I think about getting one, but I’ve managed to hold off. For now!

If you used an Apple IIGS I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Leave a comment

Enjoy this guest post from Sung J. Woo! — Paul

Do you remember Swinth? That may not be the filename you typed to load it and run it – the copy I have on my floppy is from 1988, and it is misspelled: SNYTH. But it runs just the same.

Light Fantastic was another name Swinth went by, and it is an apt descriptor, though a better one might have been Music and Light Fantastic, because as impressive as its proto-screensaver graphics were, the music is what people still talk about to this day.

An easter egg exists if you type LIST before running it, displaying the people responsible for this landmark demo. Glen E. Bredon created Swish, the graphics portion. Jim Winings uploaded the music. Carl A. Meahl Jr. figured out how to put the two programs together.

Note that a significant name is missing, that of the composer of Synth Sample.

Through the vagaries of the internet, I was able to track down Carl “Butch” Meahl, Swinth’s author, and the composer of the wondrous music, too: Georg Feil. Dr. Bredon and Jim Winings are unfortunately no longer with us.

Here now is the story of Swinth from its living creators, in their own words.

Georg Feil, author of Synth Sample: My twin brother Max and I got our C64 at the end of 1982. I remember seeing the famous Christmas Demo in the store. But we had owned a PET computer for a few years so we knew and loved Commodore computers already.

I started developing Synth, which was used to create Synth Sample, in 1983, so 43 years ago. I’m 62 now but still play keyboards around various venues in Toronto in my band. My goal in 1983 was to make my computer play some of the music I really loved, like Vangelis. I was not a musician but fortunately making Synth led to a part-time career in bands and music. I had actually attempted making music on my PET computer a couple years earlier. I wrote a program called Composer, but with no SID chip it could play only one note at a time and I realized this was too limited. Another important goal for Synth was to be able to export the music and “attach” it to other programs easily, so that game developers could use it as a music and sound-effects workstation then integrate the results into their game.

Butch Meahl, author of Swinth: Well, I had just gotten out of the Navy. And in the Navy, my last tour of duty was in Millington, Tennessee as an instructor. I taught machine language in the Navy “A” schools, and I was in the computer lab. That’s where I got my start with actual machine language and processors. The first thing I did was buy a Commodore 64.

The first program I bought was the Macro Assembler Development System. Then I signed up with CompuServe, an old bulletin board at the time. And I started downloading programs and disassembling how they worked.

One of the programs was Synth Sample. It was a program that ran in the background so you were able to run other programs in the foreground. While that music was playing, I got on CompuServe and browsed around and downloaded other things.

A few months later, Swish came out.

Cameron Kaiser and Matthew W. Miller, via comp.sys.cbm on July 26-27, 2000: I read in comp.sys.apple2 that Glen Bredon died. He was the author of, among other things, the Swish demo that was eventually incorporated into Swinth, and tons of other utility programs for both the C64/128 and Apple II systems. Originally, Swish was included with Merlin 128 and was a demo of a fast line-drawing routine he had developed.

Terry Winings, younger brother of Jim Winings who uploaded Synth Sample to CompuServe: Jim lived in Ft. Lauderdale and I lived in Chicago then. He had a software company he called Winning Edge Software. We both worked for Motorola then and they had a quality improvement initiative they called “First time yield.” Jim’s program was to measure that. I believe he may have sold it to a couple of companies. It didn’t go much beyond that, but he had great hopes. He had a Commodore 64 and IBM compatible PC. He would have been thrilled to know someone was interested in his efforts.

Georg: I didn’t know Jim Winings. My brother and I were at University of Waterloo, in residence. There was a lot of file sharing going on in residence, students with C64s became friends and would visit each other’s rooms with floppy disks. After I made Synth Sample I gave it to a friend in residence named Paul Kellam. He was an expert C64 coder and hacker and probably had a lot of contacts through his game hacking activities. He was particularly interested in C64 music, and later even “commissioned” me to create a Synth song for him – the Hogan’s Heroes theme. After I gave it to Paul I have no idea how Synth Sample spread. I hadn’t even put my name on it as I was just giving it to my friend. That must have been early 1984, then in the summer of 1984 I was on a co-op work term in Ottawa and went into the conference centre for some kind of computer exposition. There I heard Synth Sample coming from multiple C64s in the big hall. That was the first time I realized it had gone “viral.”

I designed Synth to be able to play multiple sound effects/songs at the same time using the SID chip’s 3 voices, just with a few SYS calls. For example, a game could easily play music using two voices, and sound effects using the third voice. This is one reason that Synth works completely in the background. My brother Max wrote a game called Space Pods and used Synth for all the music and sounds. Unfortunately, despite some conversations and meetings with software companies, Synth never became an actual product that people could buy and use for composing or games. Synth Sample itself was created as an example of how Synth could automatically attach music to any program.

Butch: I started playing around with Swish and Synth Sample together, running them through the disassembler. I got the source codes for both programs and modified them because they loaded in different areas of memory. It took about three or four months; I disassembled the two files and studied them in detail. Swinth was a precursor to multi-tasking. You were playing music in one program, and the graphics in another program, and you had to get the interrupts right for them to work together. I’d put Swinth through my stereo, and my TV, too. I had a big 36-inch CRT TV!

Georg: I was 16 when I got into the PET computer and wrote a heck of a lot of PET software. By the time the C64 came out and I turned 19, I had a lot of experience programming Commodore computers. The key step was learning 6502 assembly language. The Synth “executor” which plays the music (the invisible part of Synth Sample) is 100% assembly language. It’s hard to say how many hours it took to create Synth, because for me it was so much fun and I was also creating music with it as soon as Synth was even partly working. So a lot of the time was actually spent making music, not writing code. The most annoying part was creating the Synth user manual/online help system. There’s a lot of documentation built into Synth, a whole interactive user manual. I wrote a specialized text editor program and then used it to write the documentation. I remember that while writing the documentation I would go to bed and still be typing sentences in my sleep.

Butch: I never knew the two gentlemen that created Swish and Synth Sample. I tried getting their permissions to go ahead but they never responded. So I just made sure I put their names out there along with the program, so that way, everybody knew where the two programs came from. They were members on CompuServe. My user number there was 74765,276. I typed that in so many times! A number like my social security number embedded in my mind. CBM-310-DL6 and CBM-962-DL2 were the file identifiers on CompuServe that I downloaded to create Swinth.

Georg: Synth Sample itself was very fast to create. As I’ve mentioned, Synth was designed to attach music/sounds to other programs, and I had already made a bunch of music in Synth, so making Synth Sample was just writing a bit of BASIC code and running Synth to automatically attach the music. Creating the music was not a fast process though. As a non-musician I was learning about music, training my ear to recognize different notes and chords, experimenting with sounds on the SID chip, developing Synth software, and transcribing my favorite music all at the same time. At least musically I was just a beginner.

Some comments regarding the songs I chose to include in Synth Sample.

Stationary Ark, by John Mills-Cockell – you would not believe the long road this tune has had to get here. A brilliant old friend of mine (Tim Donnelly) played this live on C64 using my software, I transcribed his performance from a cassette recording with no reference to the original composition by John Mills-Cockell. Tim never mentioned where he got it from. I filled in some gaps and incorporated it into Synth Sample, where it was known as Tim’s Song until others traced the origins. Later, John Mills-Cockell friended me on Facebook unprompted. I asked him about a recording of his original soundtrack. I got back a fairly vague reply that implied even he does not have a copy of the recording.

Saturdays in Silezia, by Rational Youth – a fluffy pop song I taped off the radio. Seemed simple enough to render on the C64.

Tubular Bells, Part 1, by Mike Oldfield – I just thought this was ultra cool. Used as the music to The Exorcist, unfortunately.

Magic Shadows (closing theme), by Harry Forbes – it was a half-hour movie show on TV Ontario, sort of the Canadian equivalent of PBS. They’d show old movies in half-hour installments. I have no idea if there’s an album. I taped it off the TV.

Butch: Oxygene 2 (from Oxygene), by Jean Michel Jarre – the best song I like from Swinth is Oxygene 2. I bought Jarre’s album when it first came out in the 70s, and I’ve played that album to death!

Georg: Canon in D major, by Johann Pachelbel – a very popular classical hit. I transcribed the notes from a Transactor or Compute! article (the only Synth Sample piece not transcribed by ear).

The other songs by Rational Youth and Vangelis were just what I was into at the time. Over the years I’ve gotten many thank-you emails from people telling me Synth Sample helped them discover the original versions of this music.

Butch: I was unmarried, which is why I was able to work on Swinth. I just started working at the Postal Service in Clarksburg, West Virginia. I kept playing with the Commodore 64 for a couple of years. In the Postal Service, I was electronics tech and took care of the computers. That’s when I started with IBM PCs and Microsoft DOS. Which was basically when the Commodore 64 was retired. Now, I still have it up in the attic along with all the disks and everything. I probably still have the source code for Swinth.

I’m retired now. I spent 32 years with the Postal Service. My wife and I bought an RV in 2024, and the first thing we did was drive out to California. We’ve got 23 states under our belts now, so we’re almost halfway through. We’ve done all the southern states, from Florida to New Mexico, California, all that. Now we’ve got to do the northern states. We just want to see the whole country.

I never imagined Swinth going the way you’ve told me – I’ve looked it up online, and yeah, there’s a lot of stuff out there. I’m amazed!

Georg: The C64 had a huge influence on my life. It led me to become a musician, and make many life-long friends (most of them musicians). It taught me how computers work, helping me on my career as a software developer and computer science professor. I’ve met many great people as a result, from random strangers talking about Synth Sample to work colleagues who also used the C64, and of course Jim Butterfield who actually figured out who made Synth Sample. In the current horrible age of AI the C64 is the happy place I go back to.

For the last few years, I’ve been running the Sheridan Robotics Club where we use things like Arduino and ESP-32 which are really fun and have a lot of the spirit of the C64.

Synth (the Synth music editor) is still available for download on the Commodore Scene Database. The text “code” files used to create the songs in Synth Sample and a bunch of other songs are part of it: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=57436

Thanks to Butch Meahl, Terry Winings, and Georg Feil for conversing with me, and to the Wayback Machine’s archive of HardSID.com, whose page on Synth Sample compiled some of Georg’s song comments contained in this article.

© 2026 Sung J. Woo

Sung J. Woo writes at From Nothing to Something.

Read more

Mark Miller wrote his Atari Origin Story and Sung J. Woo wrote about how influential the Commodore 64 was in his life (Sung has another article coming in August, so stay tuned for that).

Those articles have been so well-received that I’d like to invite other readers to share their retro computing experiences here at Goto 10. If you grew up at the dawn of the personal computing era, like many of us here did, then I’m sure there are loads of others that would love to read your story.

Although my stories and articles are usually Atari-related, you can write about whatever retro computer inspired you. I know there are lots of folks that would like to hear more first-hand stories about the TI 99/4a, VIC-20, C64, Tandy, Apple II and Amiga computers. I used a few of those back in the day, but didn’t really have enough experience with them to have much to share.

Although, I do have an Apple IIgs story that I need to write up at some point.

As you know, Goto 10 articles are pretty casual, so you don’t have to worry about being an experienced writer. With that said, I don’t want any AI-written articles on Goto 10. I’d rather have authentic, personal stories than soulless AI-written perfection. Write with your heart, not with Chat.

What’s in it for you? Fame and glory, of course! Your article will be read by thousands of like-minded retro computing enthusiasts. It’s fun to share memories of those nostalgic times. Additionally, you’ll get comp’d for a few months of a Goto 10 paid subscription, which contains the full archive of all my articles from the past 4+ years. (Guests posts will always be freely available.)

Interested? Reach out to me via email or through a Substack Chat DM.

These videos were all in an older AVI format that didn’t play nicely on my Mac, at least using QuickTime. They did work with VLC. I’m sure all of these ar…

Read more

Enjoy this article by Sung J. Woo. It may focus on the Commodore 64, but I think it applies to most of us that were around in the 80s. — Paul

(If you prefer, you can also listen to the audio version.)

The slogan was on the back page of Compute!, a magazine I often bought from the video game store of the strip mall where my parents operated a gift shop. The advert displayed a trio of competing personal computers on the top half of the page, the Apple IIe, the Tandy TRS-80 III, and the IBM PC, the cost of each machine near a thousand dollars or well above it. The bottom half starred a family of three staring at a computer monitor showing the planet Saturn: mother on the left, father on the right, and the son in the middle with his fingers over the brownie-brown keyboard. “The Commodore 64. Under $600,” the final lines of the ad read. “You can’t buy a better computer at twice the price.”

I sighed, heavily. Six hundred was cheaper than a grand, but it was still six hundred. As a twelve-year-old boy who got paid five bucks a day for helping out the family business, it might as well have been a million dollars.

A month later, I bought the October 1983 issue. Same exact ad on the back, except one enormous difference: “The Commodore 64. Under $300.” Two months later, it dropped under two hundred, an eye-catching $199, at our neighborhood Toys R Us, just in time for Christmas.

My family and I did not celebrate Christmas traditionally, as we were entirely too busy. For many retailers, Christmas is where the majority of sales happen for the entire year, and we were no exception. The whole month was crazy, but in a good way – at the end of the holiday season, my father would stack the bills on the living room coffee table, and it was like something out of a movie, literal pillars of paper currency. If there was any hope of having my own hands hover over a computer keyboard, this was the moment to seize, right after the new year began, before the household belt tightened again.

Did I ever seize the hell out of it! The excuse was that I had moved up to middle school, sixth grade, and a computer would enhance my future education. Did my parents buy my story? Possibly, because they bought the computer, plus the Datasette for another seventy dollars. It didn’t take long for my ruse to be exposed, when weeks later, I spent my life savings and forked over thirty dollars for Pooyan, a video game where I played an arrow-slinging mother pig who shot down wolves floating down from the sky on balloons. When my dad saw me unplug the joystick from my Atari 2600 and plug it into my Commodore, he knew he’d been had.

Except this wasn’t true at all. This 8-bit computer with 64 kilobytes of random access memory – to give you an idea how microscopic that is in our now very modern times, my Google Pixel smartphone has a quarter of a million times more space in its silicon brain. This breadbin-shaped plastic box, this fully-functional personal computer that a lower middle class family like ours could afford – if my father were still alive, I’d tell him that the Commodore 64 he and my mother bought for me more than forty years ago has given me a life worth living.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, but holding down a job that pays the bills is as essential as essential can get, and I wouldn’t be a Lead Application Developer for a Fortune 500 company if I hadn’t grasped the rudiments of computing from my C64, and not in the way most people might imagine. I never learned beyond the basics of BASIC, the programming language that came with the computer. Instead, what made me the coder that I am today are the pirated games I played. These games didn’t come with any instructions, so figuring out how to play them was often a bigger challenge than the game itself. That tenacious act of discovery, of trying and failing and eventually succeeding, over and over again, would become my full-cycle programming bedrock. Who would’ve thought unearthing all the keystrokes for Micro-League Baseball would one day lead to developing RESTful web services?

And speaking of baseball, there’s a line about sports in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City that speaks to another enormous part the C64 played in my youth:

More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country.

Because the only sport my father enjoyed was golf, I had no help in joining this vast fraternal organization, and even though I watched my New York Mets as much as I could, I didn’t learn the ins and outs of the American pastime until I mastered Hardball! on my computer. Hit and run, curveball versus screwball, the double switch – all the intricacies became obvious when I was throwing and hitting the ball. The reason why I’m able to follow all the popular sports as an adult is due to these sports titles – 4^th and Inches, GBA Championship Basketball, Powerplay Hockey, On-Court Tennis. The nickel defense, traveling, icing, the backhand slice: If I was familiar with these terms by watching, I learn them for good by doing on the C64.

When my aunt who lived in Austria visited us with her husband Josef a year later, we all exchanged hellos with him but not much more, as he could speak neither Korean nor English that well. But then his eyes locked onto my Commodore on the desk next to the couch. He pointed to it and smiled, I pulled over a chair from the dining room, and we spent the next couple of hours in front of the computer we both adored, with joysticks in hand and no need for language. Not long after their visit ended, I received a cardboard envelope in the mail; Josef sent me his favorite games on 5 ¼” floppy disks. It was the first piece of international mail I’d receive.

The C64 expanded my world, not only through my aunt’s Austrian husband but through the local Bulletin Board System (BBS), once I got my hands on the 1660 Modem, connecting our home telephone line to message boards and online chatting. Its speed topped out at 300 baud – roughly 30 characters per second. That’s slow enough that a person could read the words as they ran on the screen, ridiculous to even imagine today, and yet it opened me to stimulating conversations and real people. That’s probably the biggest difference between the online of today versus then, that it was still a local affair, as one only rang BBSes that did not incur outrageous long-distance charges. I was invited to parties where I met my fellow dialers; I attended users group meetings with a guy I met online who became a friend and co-worker at the computer store I’d eventually work at during high school.

And when I wasn’t working or hanging out with friends, I was writing. Spurred on by reading the rich imaginations of Stephen King and Douglas Adams, I started out by writing short stories on the Paperclip word processor. When I graduated to the novel, which I attempted my senior year, I literally came to the end of the line; at some point, there was no more space in the memory of the word processor, so I had to save to disk and start a new document to continue. Eventually, I’d fill two full disks for my first book. The title page read:

Between the Stitches

A Novel

By: Sung Joon Woo

4/14/90

To

5/27/90

When I printed out the document on my dot-matrix printer, which sounded more like a shop tool than a computer peripheral, it was just over 200 double-spaced pages. Closer to a novella than a novel in length, but boy, did it have heft, at least in the physical sense! This is how it ended:

And he slowly pulled on the knob, quietly shutting the door behind him as he walked out into the new world.

A touch melodramatic? Of course, as it sprung from a fertile and febrile teenage mind. But then again, this was also a time when Electronic Arts, the nascent computer gaming company not yet the titan it would eventually become, featured a print ad that asked, “Can a computer make you cry?”

Despite my devotion to the machine, I know I didn’t cry when I let go of my Commodore, because I don’t even remember how or when I got rid of it, decades ago, probably through the local newspaper classifieds. But in 2018, I walked by a retro computer shop and bought the 1541 disk drive, because I kept the floppy disks that contained my early writing. I was able to transfer that ancient data to my PC, thanks to a custom circuit board some genius created, but the thing I remember most was when I flipped on the 1541’s power switch. The sound of the motor kicking up was so instantly familiar that it brought a lump to my throat. More than the sound, I felt the slight stirring of air by my fingertips, a wondrous marriage of analog and digital for my senses.

This is why when an enterprising YouTuber Peri Fractic (real name a much more ordinary Christian Simpson) managed to re-establish the Commodore International Corporation last year, buying up all the necessary trademarks and patents to exactly replicate the old machine with newer technology, I plunked down my cash and bided my time by watching the monthly update videos of manufacture and assembly. Peri promised it would beat Christmas, and he was good on his word, the package arriving with a week to spare. I couldn’t wait to feel my first computer again.

The Commodore 64 Ultimate now sits in my guest bedroom, on the floor, which was where my initial computing experience occurred. Back then it was connected to our television and not an LCD monitor our guests use to stream Netflix, but the vantage point is no different. As a boy, I could spend untold hours in that position, craning my neck to stare at the screen; as a man in his sixth decade, I’ll need to relocate it to a more ergonomic location if I want to keep using it.

Will I? I don’t know. What I do know is that right now, it’s pure joy just to see it there, sitting on the rug, waiting for me to turn it on.

© 2026 Sung J. Woo

Sung J. Woo writes at From Nothing to Something.

You might also enjoy:

In fact, their original slogan was “Power without the Price” and it truly was a great slogan that still resonates today. However, a cool slogan ca…

Read more

I recently wrote My First Atari ST and reader Mark Miller chimed in with his own Atari story in a comment to that article, which was both long and interesting. With his permission it is now a main article here on Goto 10 for all to enjoy. Check out Mark’s Tekkie blog for more of his writings. — Paul

Subscribe now

Oh man, memories!

I got my 130XE in 1988 just before going off to college, with 1050 disk drive, and an ICD P:R: Connection and Panasonic dot matrix printer. I used it for writing most of my school papers, using AtariWriter Plus, and it did that well enough for my professors. I didn’t use the computer itself for doing my programming assignments. As you saw, most everyone else who had a computer had 16-bit PCs or Macs. I knew several other people who used other computers; a few had 8-bits, like Ataris, Commodore 128, but mostly upgraded Apple IIs (to turn them into IIGS equivalents). The guys I knew with Ataris just used them to play games. The other outliers had Atari STs and Amigas. Using an 8-bit didn’t get much respect, but I didn’t really care. It felt like a challenge.

I was already some ways into my Pascal class. We were running a compiler on the campus supercomputer, a CDC Cyber. We shared processor time with atmospheric researchers who were running models on it. I knew about a full-screen editor we could run on the Cyber, called FSE, that made writing our Pascal code easier, but it used function keys on lab terminals for editor functions. I went to freshman orientation, and learned from our student advisor that there was a compatible terminal program we could get from the campus IT department that would allow one to run FSE from our computers at home, called Kermit. It only ran on PCs and Macs. I asked if there was a version for my Atari, and got a curt “No,” with a bit of a chuckle. Still, this did not deter me. It finally occurred to me one day that those function keys must be sending character codes to the Cyber, but I just didn’t know what they were. I’d bought a terminal program called Chameleon, and my roommate showed me how to use ftp on Unix, and how to download binaries from the Unix systems to my computer. (I used his Unix account, since I didn’t have one yet.) I’d learned about the Atari Archive at the University of Michigan, and (IIRC) found an 80-column VT-100 emulator there that worked pretty nicely with no 80-column card, called VT10Squared. It did soft emulation in Graphics mode 8. So, one day, I tried logging in to the Cyber with this VT-100 emulator, and made sure to set the emulator’s character bit width to 8 bits, no parity. As I remember, this VT-100 emulator worked flawlessly, which helped a lot. I fired up FSE on a scratch file, and started trying control codes, and using Escape with regular characters and control codes, and I was able to get most of the features to work! I wrote down the codes that worked, and started using it from my dorm room. This was one of my proudest achievements at school! :)

I knew about Pascal compilers for the Atari, and I recall kicking the tires of the PD ones after I’d completed my Pascal class. I tried porting one of my assignments to them, and it didn’t go well. About ten years ago, I heard about Kyan Pascal for the Atari, gave it a try with the last Pascal assignment from that class, and it ran perfectly! So, Kyan was quite capable. Funny thing. As I looked at the Kyan setup, it reminded me a lot of a Pascal compiler I saw one of my later roommates had on his Apple IIGS. As I remember, he wrote his Pascal assignments with it, and it worked out fine. Many years ago, I learned that Apple had bought Kyan Pascal, and shipped its compiler as standard on the IIGS.

While I was still in school, I remembered back to when I heard about C compilers for 8-bit computers, such as Lattice C for the Apple II. I got curious if there were any for the Atari. I read up on the commercial ones, but their features were pretty limited. I’d learned C at school, and had gotten used to the K&R feature set. However, once again, going back to the Atari Archive, I managed to find a PD C compiler called CC8, written by someone who wanted to make improvements on the PD Ace C compiler. I was impressed with CC8’s features. It wasn’t a complete implementation, but it wasn’t bad. To use it, you had to set up Ace C on a disk, and just replace its compiler with CC8. I downloaded Textpro as my text editor. There were so many files involved, I felt like I needed subdirectories. So, I downloaded a copy of MyDOS, and used it to set up a disk for this compiler. I set it up to autoload the RAMdisk with both the compiler and the text editor, so these would load fast. I just barely got everything to fit on one enhanced-density disk, which was important, since I only had one disk drive! I had a little room left for saving source code, and generating object files, and executables.

One summer, I decided to try to port all of my Data Structures assignments from Pascal to C, using CC8, just to see if it could do it. I quickly realized the only way I could get this to work was to write my own heap manager, since no 8-bit C compiler had one. I decided to set my heap up in Page 6, just 256 bytes! Nevertheless, *all* of my assignments worked! No exceptions, and in 256 bytes of heap! The only major difference I had to account for was that Ataris didn’t have {}’s. So, every C compiler used an alternate syntax for blocks, $( to start a block, and $) to end it. I knew right away this meant I couldn’t use it for schoolwork, but I didn’t care. I was just tickled that my little computer could do what I thought only worked on the powerful campus computers!

I wrote about this compiler, and included complete source code for my heap manager, in a two-part article for Atari Classics Magazine. I think it was called “Advanced C Programming on the Atari 8-bit.”

An odd thing about 8-bit C compilers was none of them generated native machine code. They all generated what they called “p-code,” which ran in a VM, or runtime. I learned many years ago about the history of this, and it dates back to Intel 8080 computers, where a compiler called Small C was written. All of the 8-bit compilers were derived from this, and generated Intel 8080 machine code, which they called “p-code.” The VM we ran was essentially an 8080 emulator. This made compiled code shareable, but also made it so that compiled code didn’t compete with assembly for performance. I tried a speed comparison, and C code from my compiler ran noticeably faster than an equivalent on Atari Basic, but the difference wasn’t dramatic.

I got a Mega STe in 1992 from a computer retailer that was right near my college campus, and used it for my last year of school. I still have the invoice for it somewhere. I think it cost $1,100-1,200 ($2,600-$2,900 today). I tried something I heard from a friend who was going to a different university. I took out a student loan. He was able to take it as cash to buy his Mac SE-30. I tried to do the same thing, and...didn’t get cash. The university required that it be put toward either tuition or room and board, or both. I didn’t find this out until the loan came through. So, I used it for the semester. I worked it out with my grandparents who were largely funding my college costs. I promised I’d pay back the loan, but I wanted to use the money they meant for tuition for that semester for the computer. It took some explaining, but they agreed.

Even though I probably could’ve compiled code for school assignments on it, I didn’t. I didn’t even have a C compiler for it at the time, as I recall. I used ANSITerm for accessing my Unix accounts. I got around to porting some of my semester projects to my ST after I graduated, which didn’t require much in the way of code changes.

For starters, the 800XL was the family computer and in a central room. Although I certainly used it the most, I did no…

Read more

Read more

In addition to their wonderful magazines, Compute! also published books. The Compute! books for the Atari 8-bit series, such as Mapping the Atari and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Books of Atari, are highly regarded.

Compute!’s first Atari ST book was Compute!’s ST Programmer’s Guide. Released in 1986, it was not highly regarded. It only covers BASIC and Logo with a rudimentary overview of GEM and TOS. ST information was scarce at the time, so it was probably better than nothing, but I think most people stuck with the Abacus books that were also available.

Computes St Programmers Guide

19.1MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

However, in 1987 Compute! released their Atari ST Technical Reference Guide series, which consisted of three books covering VDI, AES and TOS. Written by Sheldon Leemon, who was relatively well-known in the Commodore and Atari world at the time, these books were excellent and a tremendous improvement over the Abacus ST reference books.

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. For a taste of Goto 10, check out these free articles at the Goto 10 web site.

Subscribe now

Read more

Writing programs and saving them on cassette was an exercise in patience that …

Read more

You control “Bounty Bob” as he climbs ladders and walks on the framework. Use the special equipment like the transporters, the lift, and the cannon to help Bob claim the mine. Collect the various possessions left by previous explorers, but watch out for mutant organisms that lurk everywhere and try to waste you!

Read more

I was very fond of this Mega STE and missed it so much that I purchased another one in April 2023, which now sits behind me in my office.

I used my original Mega ST…

Read more

As you might guess, most of my retro computers are Atari-related. I’ll try to list them in the order I acquired them. Let’s dive in!

Atari 800XL

I was given this system by my Dad. It’s not the same 800XL that we had when I was a kid, but it serves the same purpose. This one is actually a later model that has Atari BASIC rev. C. This computer rekindled my love for retro computing and started me on the path that eventually led to the creation of Goto 10.

I’m very fond of my time with our 800XL from about 1985 to 1988. I used to it learn how to program, using BASIC and Pascal, wrote many papers on it in high school and played many great games.

Read more

The first thing to notice if you’ve never…

Read more

Cartridges have the advantage of being super-easy to use, essentially turning the computer into a console for game cartridges. But cartridges could also be used for programming languages and productivity software.

Because the cartridge contained the software on ROM, it could be used with computers that didn’t have much RAM or by people that didn’t yet own any peripherals, such as a tape drive or disk drive.

Out of all the computers that used cartridges, the Atari 8-bit computers probably had the most cartridges available for it. My Atari 8-bit cartridge collection keeps growing these past few years and a recent bundle purchase has added even more!

Let’s look at some of the new carts I’ve acquired, with a little commentary thrown in for good measure.

I now have a fairly large number of duplicate carts, which are now listed for sale on the Goto 10 store ($5 each), if you’re interested in filling out your collection.

Read more