I love RetroPie and have decided to sell off most of my retro collection except a few machines that I have the most nostalgia for because of it. I used to be a "original hardware only" guy. However, I dont really have the time or the space to keep all the machines and games I want so RetroPie is a great thing,

Yes, the C128 was a successor to the C64 but it didnt really do that great and only a limited amount of (mainly business/productivity) software was made specifically for it. The massive success of the C64 was also a drawback. Because of the massive installed base of users and the C128 could "dual-boot" no one made software for the 128 side. The C65 WAS a backwards compatible machine being worked on by Commodore in the 91/92 time frame. It was called the C65 and was essentially a faster, better C64. It had a faster processor, better sound and graphics and more memory but the project was canned due to imminent bankruptcy by Commodore. I dont think the machine would have saved Commodore, it was an 8-bit machine in 92. No one was buying an 8-bit machine in 92. Just the fact that Commodore was working on a new 8-bot machine in 91/92 shows you how out of touch they were.

I emailed them this just now: "Your use of an inappropriate and unfounded DMCA takedown notice has made my decision to purchase a new FPV camera for my R/C planes easier. It will not be a GoPro camera. Issuing a DMCA takedown notice for a bad review is childish and shows that you, as a company, have little faith in your own products if you are afraid that a negative review is going to hurt your business. I actually own a GoPro camera that I have used for a couple of years and was planning on upgrading it soon. I will NOT upgrade it to another GoPro camera as I simply cannot do business with a company with a severe lack of morals and respect for their customers." I also posted on their FB page.

Full disclosure - I am a teacher at a public middle school in an area with a 90% free and reduced lunch rate, high unemployment and 85% poor minority.

The problem is really how you evaluate teachers and schools, there are so many ways to take data and interpret that data. Do you give a standardized test and grade every student exactly the same and base a teacher’s performance off of the pass/fail ratio? If so, those teachers in buildings like mine which have traditionally low performing students will look bad. The cynics will say that it shouldn’t matter but I have many students who come to me from foreign countries who have had little to no formal education and do not speak English. Even after a few years in the United States their English is many time not proficient enough to pass a formal exam. The teachers in my building do a great job but I see more and more good teachers leaving our building for “better” students because the pressure is so high teaching traditionally low performing students and they don’t like being called a bad teacher when in fact they work their tails off to get the results they do.

Do you base a teacher’s performance off of the progress made by students while in that teacher’s classroom? Take a baseline score and see how they progress through the year. Critics of this method will argue that a failing grade is a failing grade no matter how much progress the students have made.

We have created a system in the US in which every child is treated exactly the same, assumed to be that same and assumed to be able to meet the exact same “high” standards. The realist among us realizes that this is far from the case. Because of this attitude that everyone is the same our high achieving students are being cheated because we teachers spend the majority of our time trying desperately to bring the low end up and ignore the high end while those in the middle are coasting along. We refuse as a nation to serve each student in the way they should be served. The trend in education today is to mix all students together in a classroom and this creates a nearly impossible scenario for a teacher who may have over thirty kids in a classroom (I know physics instructors in our district with over 40) in which they have to serve all levels of students at once.

I will step off my soapbox now.

Wow, 30 years! It is hard for me to believe it has been that long, the C64 and the C64 community was a HUGE part of my youth. I first got in to computing in the very late 70's or extremely early 80's. I learned BASIC before I even had computer and began writing text based BASIC games in a notebook before I received my first computer. I begged my parents for a computer for Christmas and in 1982 I received a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a with no storage device. I spent many hours typing in programs and not turning the machine off so my work was not wasted. Eventually I got a tape drive but the TI kicked the bucket about 8 months after I got it.

I desperately wanted a C64 with a 1541 disk drive but back then the whole package was close to $1000.00 and my parents couldn’t afford it. My dad suggested I get a job and made a deal with me; if I could earn 1/2 of the money he would front the other 1/2. I was 13-14 so job options were limited, we lived in an exceptionally large trailer park near the army base my dad was stationed at and they had LOTS of vacant lots with overgrown grass. They agreed to pay me $3.00 a yard to keep them mowed. I worked my tail off and by the end of the summer I had made more than enough money and was able to get the C64 and 1541 along with a printer, joysticks and a few games.

I LOVED that C64 and quickly fell into the C64 scene in whatever area we were in. I went to copy parties, we spent uncountable hours in my room playing C64 games and programming. Not long after I got my C64 I discovered BBS's and spent an enormous amount of hours calling BBS's to download the latest C64 games and programs and play the latest BBS games.

However, my first love was always programming. Although I collected a large number of C64 games, I spent most of my time exploring the machine. Delving in to it, learning everything it could do. I had the C64 programmer’s reference and lots of magazines and other materials and devoured them. Coding was my creative outlet, I was not a great writer, I couldn’t draw, but coding was how I explored my creative side and it absolutely lit me up, it fired something deep within me. I LOVED hitting problems and spending every waking hour trying to solve that problem and once you did, it was the greatest feeling.

Around 1985 I decided to code my own BBS software and spent a few years working on it and eventually got my own BBS up and running on dual 4040 CBM drives around 1988 or 89 in Norman, OK.

The C64 was special (along with many of the old 8-bit machines) in that you HAD to know something about the machine to operate it, and when you booted it up, it booted into a development environment, begging you to write your own programs. Todays machines don’t have that same appeal.

One thing that bothers me is that the C64 is largely ignored in the retelling of the history of the PC. The C64 absolutely demolished the sales of the Apple ][ and every other 8 bit machine of that era. Commodore beat Apple to market with their PET machine. The Apple ][ was not as big of a hit has most documentaries want you to believe. The C64 may have been more important in that era than the Apple ][ ever was but most retellings of that era leave the C64 out completely.

I am a teacher today (middle school science) and I look around and I don’t see kids excited about programming because most don’t realize you can. The machines that are on the market today come with no development environment, in addition, the complexities of coding in an object-oriented GUI world turn many kids away. There are easier options available, but you have to go out and actively search for them and as a young kid you might not find them.

I run a robotics club and teach kids as young as 6th grade C and they LOVE it. I started an interactive fiction club and taught kids TADS and they ATE IT UP!!! You would think in todays world of high definition 3D graphics kids would be bored to tears with a text adventure game but they LOVED Zork and couldn’t wait to make their own games.

I have become interested in iOS development lately and will be starting an “App development club” very soon (once I find enough Macs!) and am researching ways to make it easier for a 6th-8th grade student to understand. I have about 40+ kids interested and plan to start after our Spring break. I think I will begin with simple non-obect oriented C console programs, introduce object-oriented concepts and Objective-C and then move on to very simple iOS apps after that,

Anyways, the article brought back a flood of memories from my child-hood. I still have a C64 with a 1541 drive and boxes of disks in the garage, I think it is time to pull it out and use it a bit.