Getting On-Line

So the Commodore64 had a great disk loading system, QWERTY-style keyboard arrangement, and it was pretty powerful.  If don't have eleven minutes to spare for a video, skip to the next paragraph.  If you have about eleven minutes to spare with the intention of watching some old Euro-dance inspired computer background music graphics from yesteryear with a bunch of computer nerds digitally spray-painting their grafitti all over your life, then this is place for it.

There were many, many demos made in the scene to basically showcase the power of the Commodore64 machine.  This "demoscene" was living then via telephone modems that users would dial into other computers and share relevant information such as you dissing everybody to show how cool your computer code can be.  It lives on today with the Commodore64 still being a platform these demos are developed on because of its versatile sound synthesizer and incredible palette of colors that instead of limiting some causes them to excel still lives on today all over the internet but popping up in the "warezscene" which was also around for the time of the Commodore64.

Most users primarily used modems then to pirate stuff like sweet computer games and secondarily to show how awesome they were at programming, even though they sure weren't programming titles that would be respectable enough that to even pirate.  Kids these days.  But anyways, great system.  Used it all the time.  I must have played my favorite computer title of all time, "Neuromancer" for well over a period of years before finally completing it, with the help of a freely available walkthrough document on America On-Line.

So you're a curious kid, living in the foothills on southeastern Missouri and you've heard about the internet and how you can digitally send messages to people for basically free (after purchase) and get pictures and communicate and get all kinds of stuff for free.  America On-line sent three and a quarter inch floppy disks across the nation to many people, but not so many in rural Missouri.  Luckily, my dad subscribed to PC World and we received one!  You just have to sign up, and to sign up you just have to have a credit card number and fill in the blanks.  Well, I'm not exactly proud of this today but I made it happen.  I typed in my parent's credit card onto a computer screen and bendorfd was logged in, hogging the phone line for likely a little less than ten hours that month and rightfully so as I had to write everything down so that card would never get charged.  


I went swimming with my friends and used a local payphone and had to pretend I was my dad and I was canceling the service before the first month was up because I couldn't afford it.  They believed me.  I had all of the credentials of my father and I think I even put on a fake deep voice like any kid would.  I was eleven years old pretending to be my father on the telephone not to mention I had charged ten hours of long distance to my parent's telephone bill.  Yeah, that's right.  America On-Line sure didn't have a local access number in the tiny town I lived in!  Ten hours times ten cents a minute.  It cost my family a good portion of money that month.

But hey, it helped me beat Neuromancer and it got me online.

* All images were from Wikipedia on each image's respective page.