I met Jim only once, at a TPUG conference. He had recently published a book on learning Assembly which I bought and brought with me to the conference. Timidly, I approached him and asked him to autograph the book. The people with him cajoled him for being an "author" and celebrity. Jim remained unphased, signed my book, and asked me a few questions about my experience with the C64. He remained a perfect gentleman.
@@BillAnt So cool...I ran the Baldwinville Connection and my buddy had the Templeton Connection BBS's. I do remember having a $500 phone bill one month and my father almost killing me!
@@brucehallett1989 - I ran the "Phantom Guild" for many years on both the C64 and Amiga, typical warez/message boards. Had two separate dedicated phones lines, and hacked my own ATT, MCI, and Sprint "phreak codes" for calling overseas to grab the latest games. heh
I was also about 15 when in 1986 I bought his book on Machine Language programming. Today I am a senior software engineer, with dozens of published software products. How bits work, how bytes are represented, how a CPU works, all of that , I learned from this guy right here (his books). Thank you Jim!
I would have watched this over and over, if I had this on tape when I was a kid. Instead, I had to figure it out on my own, along with guesswork, and a handful of magazines. Also.. It is 2022 and I am watching this and am fascinated that I am learning things that I didn't know at the time. 40 years late, but what can you do, eh?
Me too. In 2020, I returned to that world and finally managed to discover many mysteries about the functioning of this machine (which I did not have the opportunity to do when I was 8 years old, in 1984) and realize the ancient dream of making a video game for this computer (my game is called Planet Balls C64, if you are curious).
Spent countless hours playing and programming on the C64! It was an AMAZING era! Crisp autumn night, in the cozy but mildly disorganized basement, playing Maniac Mansion, an Halloween movie playing on the CRT tv in the background, the smell of fresh pop-corn made by my parents upstairs... HEAVEN :) Truly HEAVEN!
I had the pleasure of knowing Jim and working with him. I met him after I bought my first Commodore PET. His knowledge of BASIC and 6502 Assembly and Machine code was genius level. The fact he could talk to you as an Educator, Evangelist and Marketing rep here shows just how vast his knowledge and passion for the craft. RIP Jim
I had an uncle who I believe had a C64. We just had Atari, and eventually got an IBM compatible PC. Now, I own a C64 keyboard with 64 preloaded games, and am learning how to program in BASIC. It's actually really cool.
@@TwiigssGames Stick with it, thats how I got started. I have been programming professionally since my first PET. I never went to college, when IBM PC first came out there was such a need for people who programmed BASIC. All the programming professionally at that time was COBOL and Fortran on main frames and BASIC on PC was very similar to PET BASIC.
@@charles-y2z6c See that's exactly what I'm thinking. I never went to college either, and in high school, 10th grade, I took a computer class, and we learned COBOL. But there was never an opportunity to where we were offered to learn after that. A friend of mine went to DeVry college and he learned C++ and AS400. He showed me stuff in C++, but most of it I forgot, and the MS Basic stuff he showed me made a bit more sense. So my hope with learning C64 BASIC is maybe there's techniques I can learn, that I can transfer to MS Basic, then into maybe C#. Python I tried a little bit of, but it doesn't seem usable for game programming.
@@TwiigssGames Right now i do a lot of C# That with SQL server. There is a lot of work out there. Python is cool stuff, but its a lot more competitive. Different culture too. My advice is to make sure you program every day, and every day try to learn one new thing. Could be as simple as understanding how many bytes an integer holds, but every day learn one new thing. You will do fine, all the best.
The downside was typing pages of dyslexia-inducing character walls, wiping out your bugs, even waiting for corrections as the damn thing didn't work anyway, only to find the game was crap in the end. Sure the listings helped you to program and a good BASIC is enjoyable but HAVING to type to gain a collection wore its welcome. Kids very soon got games on covermount tapes as content got cheaper to licence, showing type-ins were largely a compromise to begin with. And bloody good riddance to them.
@@MrDustpile Agreed. Most of the type-in games were mediocre at best, there was the odd occasional hidden gem like the Crossroads games, but for every Crossroads and Crossroads II, there was like ten Last Ninjas (NOT THAT Last Ninja, LOL)
The commodore 64 was gonna be my key to learning programming to get a headstart in computer science, but I got hooked on the games and DIDN'T LEARN A DAMN THING!
Came for the nostalgia and stayed for the quality. This presentation is remarkably well written and produced. Butterfield explains so much and yet he does it in simple, clear terms. An example of excellent education.
This is not nostalgia. This is the basic principles of programing that is still being taught today. Principles never change. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Infinite years into the future long after we are all dead.
"A huge amount of memory!" How times have changed! This was the computer I spent programming during my summer break in college and it was so much fun I switched to computer science as my major... Still doing it over 40 years later! Loved this computer!
It is amazing to know that so many people like myself share the same love and poignant nostalgia for the Commodore 64. I had the original machine with the tape drive and the TV adapter. At some point I purchased the 1541 drive and the 1702 monitor and had THE OFFICIAL Commodore desk that had the drawer and the slot to put the drive in and a workspace on top and a place for the monitor. My brothers and I would sometimes stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning playing a game like Sammy Lightfoot or I remember one night starting a game of Lode Runner and playing a single game ( you gained lives as you completed levels ) for hours on end. I learned 6502 machine language through Jim Butterfields assembler and wrote my own programs and sent them to the computer magazine for publishing. When I went to teacher's college in another city, I took my Commodore 64 with me to my dorm room and used it every night for hours with my new friends. When I began teaching, I taught classes that used the c64 and networked with students in many schools sharing knowledge and games with them. I have had every incarnation of computer since those days, programming them and building them, and have taught JAVA and object oriented programming to many students over the years, but, there is no compare to the joy of those early years with the Commodore 64. I suppose in some way for us, it is looking back to a time where the Commodore 64 was such a radical change in entertainment from both a gamming and intellectual learning perspective, that nothing since has ever or will ever replace those Magical times. I Love My Commodore 64 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's incredible how much powerful and versatile the Commodore 64 is shown here.Jim is a marvellous teacher and popularizer but a bit of magic is also the video editing:everyting is quick and on the spot.But we all remember that we spent half of the time waiting the tape loading apps and games....
Jim’s genuine enthusiasm and calm explanatory manner are still so strong today, that watching this made me install a C64 emulator and look for my old C64 which have stored away somewhere.
Possibly the world's first tech unboxing video? Sadly, we didn't get this VHS in the UK, so great to see after all these years, as Jim Butterfield was known as something of C64 genius, especially in teaching machine code. In the UK, some of the Commodore C64 packages came with an audio voice tape supplied to help with the setup of the computer. I learnt Basic back then mostly from the manual, and a few of Jim Butterfield's books, and spending days trying to figure out why the Basic game listing in the magazine I'd just spent hours typing in didn't work!
I remember as a kid buying the “Computer Gazzette” magazine. Spent hours and hours typing in basic programming and saving to tape. Then, waiting till the next magazine issue to get the fixed coding so the programs would work. My best friend at the time Joe lived right around the corner when I was young and lived in Gresham OR. He had all the upgrades. So fun!
The Gazette that came with a floppy cost a dollar more if you didn't want to type in all the code. The 'Forbidden Crypt' had so many lines of code, I went through a hundred syntax errors before I found all the errors and got the game to work. That was so much fun.
I thought it was just us that went thru that process of getting the games to work. I sent in a few games to the magazine but they didn't publish any of them. No worries though, I learned so much that it launched me into the computer field where I find myself still.
What you have here is textbook textbook classic presentation presentation. Extremely well-thought-out each lesson building naturally with a sturdy camera instead of a horrible camera work you see on so many UA-cam instructional videos.
I worked for the same company that Jim was working at, he was in the engineering department way back in the 70's, and I was working in the computer maintenance department. We only had main frames from Collins and some PDP 8's and 44's, huge disk drives with 39 inch disks, and had just installed a new Phillips system at the time ... all this was for switching messages and telex and early implementations of data switching X25 and SDLC protocols .... WOW brings back memories of all the guys that I worked with at the time (TORONTO --- Front Street )
Very easy to listen to. No wasted words and straight forward. The production crew did a great job with showing the right amount of screens, keys, and such. What a great tape, thank you Jim!
I have made a good living as an IT professional for the past nearly 30yrs. I owe it all to my C64. Especially, typing in programs from magazines, then debugging when they often did not work properly. I learned SO much that way.
I got my c64 in '84 and I had to learn how to use it from the manual.. No internet, only one other guy I knew at the remote USCG base in Kodiak AK had one. I loved the computer, so many hours of enjoyment 👍
It was his book that helped me understand Assembly language. It wasn't as difficult as I thought once I realized it was just a stripped down BASIC with limited variables and rudimentary commands.
Jim was a genius who wrote many useful utilities. I paid for a couple years of my EE degree writing assembly utilities and Jim's utilities were invaluable.
I was so extremely lucky to listen to the wonderful Jim Butterfield when he visited our ICPUG computer club in the UK around 1984/85. Thank you for posting this video!!
@@charles-y2z6c I never saw Jim until now. I greatly respected him because of all the useful utilities he created which I used at MECC to convert Oregon Trail and other code to work on the C64. I heard he had died and I think it was back in the 80s? What happened?
@@chrisfuller1268 jim passed away from cancer in 2007. At that point it had been a while since I saw him. Most of the work that he helped me with was on the PET in the late 70's early 80's. I only saw him a handful of times, at Toronto computer shows, one year at world of commodore my company had a booth. we wrote letters back and forth mostly on 6502 machine language and he came down to Rochester for our PET user group once. He was a legend in the field, very generous with his time and knowledge. I still code and owe a lot of my start to him. I remember Oregon trail, nice work. The 8 bit guy mentions it a few times.
@@charles-y2z6c I asked visitors from Commodore Canada who were visiting MECC about Jim because I was so impressed with all the utilities he had written and was told Jim had died. This was in the 1983-85 time frame. They must have been kidding with me, but the joke went over my head. I had a 10 Mega-byte PET hard drive bigger than my C64 and a PET 2-drive unit plugged into my C64 via an adapter I bought somewhere. Those were most definitely much faster methods of drive access. I'm surprised we don't hear much about PET anymore as it was a great computer system. The highlight of the visit of Commodore Canada to MECC was I got to see and touch and look at the operating system source code. What did you do for Commodore?
I wish I could have met and thanked Jim personally.My first computer was a second/hand vic20,which I want to resurrect.Before I got it,I would visit any shop that sold them and program simple games/demos on their display models.The staff would need convincing that I hadn't plugged in a cassette deck.(I never needed one😸)Naturally,they loved it when I did this,as this demonstrated to customers that they were NOT just a games console,and that THEIR KIDS,could do similar stuff.I have a c64 which I still write games on in basic.If I saw a game I liked,I would just design my own,in basiic.I helped sell so many devices,that they kept offering me a Saturday job until I accepted.I love Jim's simple explanations.Thankyou for sharing this😸
I still have the Commodore 128D I bought at the Nuremberg PX when I was stationed in West Germany back in late 80s and it still works! I played Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" on it last year!
Nowadays new generations dont know if what they study has any merits for their future. Nor do they know if they ever find a job with it. You dont know if the power is cut, or the food supply ends. You dont know if a nuclear bomb detotanes in your backyard and you see people walking arround with masks on fresh air and alone in cars. All of that created such an instabilty inside the population that no one knows and can be secure. Its like the ground was completly swiped away from underneath your feet and there are 2 types of people that handle this situation. Type A. ) pretend problems dont exist Type B) understanding problems at hand Both however will have the same end result. You cant hide from its consequences. Its indeed a shithole we are living in, created by those that want shitholes. The 80s and 90s were fairy tale parks in comparison to this crap nowadays.
I meet Jim Butterfield teaching me the Commodore PET computer at the Batteries Included story at the Village by the Grange when I was a wide-eye Grade 9 student. Spent every Friday there!
Wish I had access to this video back in the 80s. I wanted to do more advanced stuff with my C64, but it was hard to find out how. There wasn’t really any information in my local library. Magazines which were very few in my country were hard to come by and there was obviously no way to inquire about questions or issues. It took a lot of dedication. But the struggles made me the professional developer I am today. I am extremely persistent and will not rest until a problem is solved.
I'd long forgotten the name Jim Butterfield. Here in 2022 almost 40 years later and this computer is still relevant! There are hacks to connect this computer with an HDMI cable to a monitor instead of a TV set. There are devices you can plug into one of the ports that contain every Commodore 64 game you would ever want to play! Still have mine from October 1982 that I gladly paid $595 for. Its still working! I only use it at Christmas to play the Christmas song disks on my 1701 monitor. I have five others that I can use if I want to play a game.
@@starmc26 Ah, you're one of those people who think modern computers just do everything by themselves, no programs required, apps just appear magically out of nowhere and go through the sky to the cloud above your head to be processed because there's some magic in them there cloud and not just a bunch of electronic instructions going through thousands of miles of underground and undersea cable to some remote computers somewhere.
I got my Commodore 64 during the Summer of 1985 and I loved that machine. I wish I would have had this video then. Seeing it now I realize my C64 did many things I did not know it could do. I miss the 80's.
I bought one of these new. So many memories. Not all good. The 1541disk drive was a beast that took forever to load some games. Anyone remember worrying about the disk drive overheating? We had the cassette recorder too. The sound of the dot matrix printer meant you couldn’t print anything at night for fear of waking up the whole house. Remember the 300 baud modem and having to access bulletin boards systems (BBS) at night due to long distance charges? People now days have absolutely no idea what effort it took to use a computer.
I remember how hot the disk drive used to get. I was a young airman in the Air Force in the early 80s and worked on the F16 digital flight simulator. It took a dozen mainframe computers to run the simulator all with many small muffin fans inside to keep the circuit boards cool. When those fans began to slow down the AF manual said don't fix, replace. I salvaged a couple of those fans, cleaned them, lubricated them, and back up to full speed they went. Some buddies and I wired them to plug into a standard AC outlet and mounted them to the tops of our drives. Heat problem solved. Good times.
@@cac0865 The 1741 disk drive put out the heat too. I was in the Air Force too in Late 80"s and early 90's Law Enforcement (81152). I bought an Amiga 500 from the BX at RAF Bentwaters in the UK. I remember that I could buy a video game off the shelf and find viruses. It was crazy. Thank you for your service.
This is awesome! Thank you for preserving this for all us to see. There was a time when I lived for Compute! magazine. I'm reading 'the Home Computer Wars" by Michael S. Tomczyk, the marketing Commodorian for that period.
I had one of these as a teenager, happy times :) I started programming basic on a Vic=20 but the "Commode 64" (as it was often called in the UK) opened my eyes to the joys of assembly programming. Three and a half decades later and I still get a kick out of coding :) Gotta admit though, I don't miss having to put line numbers on everything !
UMM the VIC20 was a precursor to the Commodore 64, I had both of them at the same time so I know this for a fact . I too programmed Basic on these 2 machines the commodore 64 was more capable than the Vic20, but I had a TRS-80 Model 1 the first true PC, My Trash 80 even had the expansion RAM, I also built a color board for my TRS-80, I found the schematics in a BYTE magazine back in the day and I had a wirewrap kit, so I was able to build a color board, that allowed me to use a Color TV and write programs so my Model 1 was in color
When i was five, my father which we lost 14.03.2022 bought one of these machines to my brother and sister. I was learn how to read and write while i try to open games:)
It's just incredible where we are now vs where we were in the early 80's. I remember these vividly, but myself and most of my friends all wanted the atari 2600 or the atari 5200. In any case, i count myself lucky to be in the group that saw the world both before and after all of these incredible technological achievements. Thanks for the posting the vid!
I still to this day remember the old programs LOL and yes i remember POKE 53280,0 RUN I used to like POKE 53280,0 RUN POKE 52381,0 RUN I Literally did this every time i turned the computer on, even if it was to run a game
What a wonderful video. Thank you. I remember getting my C64 as a child. Loved writing simple programs and showing my mum; she thought I was a child genius. Happy memories.
This is the most amazing thing I have watched since the Commodore 64 came out. The best computer of it's time so happy I was part of so many firsts in life. I was born at the right time. I still love the Commodore 64 tho many hate it.
36:01 Commodore 65! Love this video. I had one of these and now I don’t feel so bad that I only used it for flight sim and Olympics. Glad to see I wasn’t the only one that didn’t have patience to type all those programs in. Thank you!
Really enjoyed this. Jim was good at explaining things in a common-sense way. This would make a good intro to personal computing in 2022, almost 40 years later. Never had a c64 but I had something similar called a Sinclair Spectrum.
I remember these days learning. I may be older but glad I was part of all of this. It may sound so dumb to people young these days but this is exactly how it was.
Wish I had this video when I bought my C64. Eventually got the black screen. Was going to replace it with the Amiga but found that all my 64 hardware was not compatible so I settled for the 128D. Just powered it up a few days ago and it still works.
Wow! This would have been wonderful for me to see back in late 80's. I enjoyed the games and attempted one basic program but never really got the full C64 experience. Thanks for uploading!
I loved my Commodore 64! I loved using this computer growing up, we had such awesome games too! My commodore broke years ago but I still do have the monitor and it is the best old school monitor a person could buy, love it for my classic gaming. Load “*” ,8,1 RUN
Well, this is amazing! Thanks for digitizing this and keeping it on cloud storage! In twenty-thirty years I'll get back to this with the same kind of relaxness, making me feel calm! Thanks!
I got my C64 in the same year this video was done, 1983. My (kind of rich) aunt from Hawaii visited us in Germany and bought it and the floppy disk drive for me :) I spent so many hours with this thing.
I still have mine in its box and play very occasionally. Spent hours learning basic and managed to programme it to play Othello and a couple of other games. You could send off by post to rent games for a week or two here in the UK instead of buying them. Up to an half an hour of audio tape loading every time you wanted to play. Those were the days!
I never owned one we had a trs 80. But I started watching this video and couldn't stop. What a great piece of history this video is. Jim is great. Now I want to go back in time and buy one. Sure I could get one now but it wouldn't be the same.
When our local computer club started logging in to BBSs I didn't get the purpose of it, it all came with Windows just a couple of years later. Strange because the C64 was very capable of going online - all the more running GEOS.
How fun seeing this today. I am one of the camera people listed in the credits.. Glenn Schafer
Wow. You were there?
Why didn't you shoot in 4K?
@@jasoneverett I remember the cameras we used, they were $80,000 each.
Thanks for your service Glenn !
I was 10 when I first got the C64 with both the floppy drive and the tape player in 1982 and I still have it to this day and yes still works.
I met Jim only once, at a TPUG conference. He had recently published a book on learning Assembly which I bought and brought with me to the conference. Timidly, I approached him and asked him to autograph the book. The people with him cajoled him for being an "author" and celebrity. Jim remained unphased, signed my book, and asked me a few questions about my experience with the C64. He remained a perfect gentleman.
As a 15 year old kid in 1986, my C64, 1541 drive, MPS 802 printer, and 1670 modem made me feel like the king of the world.
I got mine in 1985
Got my C64 in 1984 then an Amiga A500 in 1986, even ran a couple of BBS'es on both machines.... ah the "good ol'" days. :)
@@BillAnt So cool...I ran the Baldwinville Connection and my buddy had the Templeton Connection BBS's. I do remember having a $500 phone bill one month and my father almost killing me!
@@brucehallett1989 - I ran the "Phantom Guild" for many years on both the C64 and Amiga, typical warez/message boards. Had two separate dedicated phones lines, and hacked my own ATT, MCI, and Sprint "phreak codes" for calling overseas to grab the latest games. heh
@@BillAnt I had a hard time using the "codes" because my town diddnt accept touch tone at the time is was only pulse dialing.
I was also about 15 when in 1986 I bought his book on Machine Language programming. Today I am a senior software engineer, with dozens of published software products. How bits work, how bytes are represented, how a CPU works, all of that , I learned from this guy right here (his books). Thank you Jim!
Too late! He went to the great Commodore Club in the sky long ago!
@@MisterCreamyDude Yes I know, but a very late thank you is still a thank you.
@sthede1000 Indeed it is my friend & I'm glad his memory lives on with this video and his great assembly language book. 😁
I would have watched this over and over, if I had this on tape when I was a kid. Instead, I had to figure it out on my own, along with guesswork, and a handful of magazines.
Also.. It is 2022 and I am watching this and am fascinated that I am learning things that I didn't know at the time. 40 years late, but what can you do, eh?
Me too. In 2020, I returned to that world and finally managed to discover many mysteries about the functioning of this machine (which I did not have the opportunity to do when I was 8 years old, in 1984) and realize the ancient dream of making a video game for this computer (my game is called Planet Balls C64, if you are curious).
That funny connecting to tv. I was happy when the 1701 monitor came out
I loved your game when i was a brat. Good stuff 👍🏻
Spent countless hours playing and programming on the C64! It was an AMAZING era!
Crisp autumn night, in the cozy but mildly disorganized basement, playing Maniac Mansion, an Halloween movie playing on the CRT tv in the background, the smell of fresh pop-corn made by my parents upstairs...
HEAVEN :) Truly HEAVEN!
Heh man i miss those good old days, when video games had an almost magically feel to them.
I was thinking Heaven, then hit the read more and saw your heaven comment. I remember many warm summer 2 am nights coding on my C64. Still code today.
Aw this is literally one of the best UA-cam comments ever. Similar memories: Pool of Radiance, Michael Jackson CD playing in the background etc.
Yup. Magnum PI or Simon & Simon on the tube. Probably playing Impossible Mission or H.E.R.O. on the 64. Classic times, but I didn't know it.
I was probably choking the chicken again to a porno mag I found by the road.
One of the earliest unboxing and tear-down videos ever recorded
Wow
I had the pleasure of knowing Jim and working with him. I met him after I bought my first Commodore PET. His knowledge of BASIC and 6502 Assembly and Machine code was genius level. The fact he could talk to you as an Educator, Evangelist and Marketing rep here shows just how vast his knowledge and passion for the craft.
RIP Jim
Yes indeed he was a genius.
I had an uncle who I believe had a C64. We just had Atari, and eventually got an IBM compatible PC. Now, I own a C64 keyboard with 64 preloaded games, and am learning how to program in BASIC. It's actually really cool.
@@TwiigssGames
Stick with it, thats how I got started. I have been programming professionally since my first PET. I never went to college, when IBM PC first came out there was such a need for people who programmed BASIC. All the programming professionally at that time was COBOL and Fortran on main frames and BASIC on PC was very similar to PET BASIC.
@@charles-y2z6c See that's exactly what I'm thinking. I never went to college either, and in high school, 10th grade, I took a computer class, and we learned COBOL. But there was never an opportunity to where we were offered to learn after that. A friend of mine went to DeVry college and he learned C++ and AS400. He showed me stuff in C++, but most of it I forgot, and the MS Basic stuff he showed me made a bit more sense.
So my hope with learning C64 BASIC is maybe there's techniques I can learn, that I can transfer to MS Basic, then into maybe C#. Python I tried a little bit of, but it doesn't seem usable for game programming.
@@TwiigssGames
Right now i do a lot of C# That with SQL server. There is a lot of work out there. Python is cool stuff, but its a lot more competitive. Different culture too. My advice is to make sure you program every day, and every day try to learn one new thing. Could be as simple as understanding how many bytes an integer holds, but every day learn one new thing.
You will do fine, all the best.
Sometimes during UA-cams algorithm you hit a Gem nicely done Jim Butterfield
can you imagine had they kept on making the commodore 64 better and better instead of discontinuing it making it faster and faster
This guy was doing unboxing and teardown videos a few decades before the rest of the world caught on!
And he did it with style! :)
He was even talking about the internet, in 1983!
He knew youtube was coming.
True, feels like an early UA-camr unboxing and tearing apart a C64 😜
Unboxing doesn't make any sense to me at all. Usually done by the average person that thinks everyone is new to opening boxes. Very odd.
Respect for doing the first unboxing video
That was the golden age of home computing. Spending hours typing in programs from magazines, then debugging!
such good times
The downside was typing pages of dyslexia-inducing character walls, wiping out your bugs, even waiting for corrections as the damn thing didn't work anyway, only to find the game was crap in the end. Sure the listings helped you to program and a good BASIC is enjoyable but HAVING to type to gain a collection wore its welcome.
Kids very soon got games on covermount tapes as content got cheaper to licence, showing type-ins were largely a compromise to begin with. And bloody good riddance to them.
@@MrDustpile Agreed. Most of the type-in games were mediocre at best, there was the odd occasional hidden gem like the Crossroads games, but for every Crossroads and Crossroads II, there was like ten Last Ninjas (NOT THAT Last Ninja, LOL)
Yup, spending two hours writing DATA 10,23,243,19,20,20,31,123,254,[...] just to see Alfred E. Neumann's face across the screen.
@@tedremmets8331 LOL
RIP to Syd and Jim, bittersweet to discover these two guys years after they both respectively passed.
shame the commodore 64 was so slow cause had it been faster it could have down so much more
The commodore 64 was gonna be my key to learning programming to get a headstart in computer science, but I got hooked on the games and DIDN'T LEARN A DAMN THING!
Because you have access to games. In my childhood (behind iron curtain) I had to write own games. And BASIC is so slow... asembler? Without manual?
Same here. The other piece to it was that it was so easy to copy the games.
Didnt we all. Lmao
Same here LOL
and now we finally have the grafix we always wanted, and prolly appreciate them more than most hey ?
I really admired Jim. Back in the day, he was the authority! His articles & books were just as good as his talks.
Came for the nostalgia and stayed for the quality. This presentation is remarkably well written and produced. Butterfield explains so much and yet he does it in simple, clear terms. An example of excellent education.
I stayed for the highly advanced, modern graphics... ooooohhh... stars...
I remember seeing the a group of letters flying like a flock of birds and thought it was the coolest thing ever
@@timbatee7433 At that point in time it likely was "the coolest thing ever."
This is not nostalgia. This is the basic principles of programing that is still being taught today.
Principles never change. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Infinite years into the future long after we are all dead.
Crumbs, Jim Butterfield helped me into a 40 year career in Programming with his articles in CBM User. Genius fellow....
Man, I wish I had this video back in 84, to help my sales pitch to my parents for a C64.
Love this
"A huge amount of memory!" How times have changed!
This was the computer I spent programming during my summer break in college and it was so much fun I switched to computer science as my major... Still doing it over 40 years later! Loved this computer!
OMG! This is where it all started for me!!! Salute for sharing this video!!!
What an amazing era. The eighties were truly something else.
Absolutely
It is amazing to know that so many people like myself share the same love and poignant nostalgia for the Commodore 64. I had the original machine with the tape drive and the TV adapter. At some point I purchased the 1541 drive and the 1702 monitor and had THE OFFICIAL Commodore desk that had the drawer and the slot to put the drive in and a workspace on top and a place for the monitor. My brothers and I would sometimes stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning playing a game like Sammy Lightfoot or I remember one night starting a game of Lode Runner and playing a single game ( you gained lives as you completed levels ) for hours on end. I learned 6502 machine language through Jim Butterfields assembler and wrote my own programs and sent them to the computer magazine for publishing. When I went to teacher's college in another city, I took my Commodore 64 with me to my dorm room and used it every night for hours with my new friends. When I began teaching, I taught classes that used the c64 and networked with students in many schools sharing knowledge and games with them. I have had every incarnation of computer since those days, programming them and building them, and have taught JAVA and object oriented programming to many students over the years, but, there is no compare to the joy of those early years with the Commodore 64. I suppose in some way for us, it is looking back to a time where the Commodore 64 was such a radical change in entertainment from both a gamming and intellectual learning perspective, that nothing since has ever or will ever replace those Magical times. I Love My Commodore 64 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So nice of Columbo actor Peter Falk to agree to play "Jim Butterfield" in this video series.
Oh, just one more thing ...
I briefly met the guy in December 2006 only a few months before his passing away. Really nice and brillant guy.
The antenna switch box! The struggle was real and I loved every minute of it!
It's incredible how much powerful and versatile the Commodore 64 is shown here.Jim is a marvellous teacher and popularizer but a bit of magic is also the video editing:everyting is quick and on the spot.But we all remember that we spent half of the time waiting the tape loading apps and games....
“You might have something classier called a monitor”. Love it!
Irresistibly charming in its dorkiness. That unmistakable squeek of the Styrofoam. I could watch for days.
I miss these days. It seems like it was another world, a happier more innocent one.
A hand-me-down C-64 and an awesome Jim Butterfield book about every aspect of it launched my career.
Jim’s genuine enthusiasm and calm explanatory manner are still so strong today, that watching this made me install a C64 emulator and look for my old C64 which have stored away somewhere.
Possibly the world's first tech unboxing video? Sadly, we didn't get this VHS in the UK, so great to see after all these years, as Jim Butterfield was known as something of C64 genius, especially in teaching machine code. In the UK, some of the Commodore C64 packages came with an audio voice tape supplied to help with the setup of the computer.
I learnt Basic back then mostly from the manual, and a few of Jim Butterfield's books, and spending days trying to figure out why the Basic game listing in the magazine I'd just spent hours typing in didn't work!
I remember as a kid buying the “Computer Gazzette” magazine. Spent hours and hours typing in basic programming and saving to tape. Then, waiting till the next magazine issue to get the fixed coding so the programs would work. My best friend at the time Joe lived right around the corner when I was young and lived in Gresham OR. He had all the upgrades. So fun!
The Gazette that came with a floppy cost a dollar more if you didn't want to type in all the code. The 'Forbidden Crypt' had so many lines of code, I went through a hundred syntax errors before I found all the errors and got the game to work. That was so much fun.
I thought it was just us that went thru that process of getting the games to work. I sent in a few games to the magazine but they didn't publish any of them. No worries though, I learned so much that it launched me into the computer field where I find myself still.
The love I have for that machine is immense!
What you have here is textbook textbook classic presentation presentation. Extremely well-thought-out each lesson building naturally with a sturdy camera instead of a horrible camera work you see on so many UA-cam instructional videos.
I worked for the same company that Jim was working at, he was in the engineering department way back in the 70's, and I was working in the computer maintenance department. We only had main frames from Collins and some PDP 8's and 44's, huge disk drives with 39 inch disks, and had just installed a new Phillips system at the time ... all this was for switching messages and telex and early implementations of data switching X25 and SDLC protocols .... WOW brings back memories of all the guys that I worked with at the time (TORONTO --- Front Street )
I still have my Commodore 64. Spend many hours poke and peek on it .. Thank you for sharing .. Good memories ..
Nothing like a well addressed comment. I'll get my coat.
Very easy to listen to. No wasted words and straight forward. The production crew did a great job with showing the right amount of screens, keys, and such. What a great tape, thank you Jim!
I have made a good living as an IT professional for the past nearly 30yrs. I owe it all to my C64. Especially, typing in programs from magazines, then debugging when they often did not work properly. I learned SO much that way.
This is priceless, it’s like a retro computing ASMR
I like his voice and speaking style. ASMR to me.
I got my c64 in '84 and I had to learn how to use it from the manual.. No internet, only one other guy I knew at the remote USCG base in Kodiak AK had one. I loved the computer, so many hours of enjoyment 👍
I have Jim Butterfield's assembly language book. One of the best ever. RIP Jim.
He wrote two of those actually. He wrote an original version, and an "enhanced" version which also included stuff for the C128
It was his book that helped me understand Assembly language.
It wasn't as difficult as I thought once I realized it was just a stripped down BASIC with limited variables and rudimentary commands.
I have that same book, learned so much from it...
Jim was a genius who wrote many useful utilities. I paid for a couple years of my EE degree writing assembly utilities and Jim's utilities were invaluable.
Was it as good as his hardcore erotica fiction series?
Jim Butterfield aka "Commodore Columbo"
He always reminded me of the TV detective,
"Hi I'm Jim Butterfield, lets say you want to have a guy whacked, let me show you how it's done."
After a lot of rather careful work, you get the cement truck....
At this end we have the barrel opening; this is where the bullet comes out off.
Fantastic.....and of course with some plants in the background
I was so extremely lucky to listen to the wonderful Jim Butterfield when he visited our ICPUG computer club in the UK around 1984/85. Thank you for posting this video!!
Are you gay?
was that at plessy?
That was 1983. I wonder if people in 2063 will look back at today's technology with the same sense of wonder, amusement, and nostalgia.
This is very cool to see this vintage set up instructional video for the Commodore 64. Thanks.
Thanks for this blast from the past. I spent countless hours programming my commodore 64 and I loved it.
he's like bob ross only with an 8-bit
I had the pleasure of knowing him and working with him. He would have been pleased to hear you say that.
@@charles-y2z6c I never saw Jim until now. I greatly respected him because of all the useful utilities he created which I used at MECC to convert Oregon Trail and other code to work on the C64. I heard he had died and I think it was back in the 80s? What happened?
@@chrisfuller1268 jim passed away from cancer in 2007. At that point it had been a while since I saw him. Most of the work that he helped me with was on the PET in the late 70's early 80's. I only saw him a handful of times, at Toronto computer shows, one year at world of commodore my company had a booth. we wrote letters back and forth mostly on 6502 machine language and he came down to Rochester for our PET user group once. He was a legend in the field, very generous with his time and knowledge. I still code and owe a lot of my start to him.
I remember Oregon trail, nice work. The 8 bit guy mentions it a few times.
@@charles-y2z6c I asked visitors from Commodore Canada who were visiting MECC about Jim because I was so impressed with all the utilities he had written and was told Jim had died. This was in the 1983-85 time frame. They must have been kidding with me, but the joke went over my head. I had a 10 Mega-byte PET hard drive bigger than my C64 and a PET 2-drive unit plugged into my C64 via an adapter I bought somewhere. Those were most definitely much faster methods of drive access. I'm surprised we don't hear much about PET anymore as it was a great computer system. The highlight of the visit of Commodore Canada to MECC was I got to see and touch and look at the operating system source code. What did you do for Commodore?
@@chrisfuller1268
ua-cam.com/video/gWExT04GG4c/v-deo.html
This is better and more informative than my current IT studies (2022)
I wish I could have met and thanked Jim personally.My first computer was a second/hand vic20,which I want to resurrect.Before I got it,I would visit any shop that sold them and program simple games/demos on their display models.The staff would need convincing that I hadn't plugged in a cassette deck.(I never needed one😸)Naturally,they loved it when I did this,as this demonstrated to customers that they were NOT just a games console,and that THEIR KIDS,could do similar stuff.I have a c64 which I still write games on in basic.If I saw a game I liked,I would just design my own,in basiic.I helped sell so many devices,that they kept offering me a Saturday job until I accepted.I love Jim's simple explanations.Thankyou for sharing this😸
I still have the Commodore 128D I bought at the Nuremberg PX when I was stationed in West Germany back in late 80s and it still works! I played Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" on it last year!
i wish I could go back to the 80's. Amazing memories. Miss those more honest times and not this shit hole we live in now.
In retrospect things were better back then. Music, movies and games. Life was not so serious and more care free.
Graduated in '89, agree 100%.
@@ericnortan9012 same
Amen
Nowadays new generations dont know if what they study has any merits for their future. Nor do they know if they ever find a job with it.
You dont know if the power is cut, or the food supply ends.
You dont know if a nuclear bomb detotanes in your backyard and you see people walking arround with masks on fresh air and alone in cars.
All of that created such an instabilty inside the population that no one knows and can be secure.
Its like the ground was completly swiped away from underneath your feet and there are 2 types of people that handle this situation.
Type A. ) pretend problems dont exist
Type B) understanding problems at hand
Both however will have the same end result. You cant hide from its consequences.
Its indeed a shithole we are living in, created by those that want shitholes.
The 80s and 90s were fairy tale parks in comparison to this crap nowadays.
I had a Jim Butterfield book and never forgot the lessons about BASIC. IT was spiral bound with a beige cover and computer on it. Good memories
I meet Jim Butterfield teaching me the Commodore PET computer at the Batteries Included story at the Village by the Grange when I was a wide-eye Grade 9 student. Spent every Friday there!
@SubMan I still have his FIRST BOOK OF KIM.
Wish I had access to this video back in the 80s.
I wanted to do more advanced stuff with my C64, but it was hard to find out how. There wasn’t really any information in my local library. Magazines which were very few in my country were hard to come by and there was obviously no way to inquire about questions or issues. It took a lot of dedication. But the struggles made me the professional developer I am today. I am extremely persistent and will not rest until a problem is solved.
I'd long forgotten the name Jim Butterfield.
Here in 2022 almost 40 years later and this computer is still relevant! There are hacks to connect this computer with an HDMI cable to a monitor instead of a TV set. There are devices you can plug into one of the ports that contain every Commodore 64 game you would ever want to play!
Still have mine from October 1982 that I gladly paid $595 for. Its still working! I only use it at Christmas to play the Christmas song disks on my 1701 monitor. I have five others that I can use if I want to play a game.
It is NOT relevant.
It's an antique.
Is is completely relevant. To all of us who still find this amazing machine interesting and want to use.
@@starmc26 Ah, you're one of those people who think modern computers just do everything by themselves, no programs required, apps just appear magically out of nowhere and go through the sky to the cloud above your head to be processed because there's some magic in them there cloud and not just a bunch of electronic instructions going through thousands of miles of underground and undersea cable to some remote computers somewhere.
@@markboulton954 No, putz.... I'm in my 40's ,I am a product of the 80's and 90's.... This shit is NOT RELEVANT, WHATSOEVER.
This is a great piece of C64 history - thank you very much for sharing!👍😀
I love these old pieces of history. A great nostalgic touch for the soul.
I got my Commodore 64 during the Summer of 1985 and I loved that machine. I wish I would have had this video then. Seeing it now I realize my C64 did many things I did not know it could do. I miss the 80's.
This is incredible. My parents split the cost with me to get the top line accessories that were available. It was and still is an amazing machine.
Wow, teenage memories. Was my first computer I owned in the 80s. Nostalgia.
I bought one of these new. So many memories. Not all good. The 1541disk drive was a beast that took forever to load some games. Anyone remember worrying about the disk drive overheating? We had the cassette recorder too. The sound of the dot matrix printer meant you couldn’t print anything at night for fear of waking up the whole house. Remember the 300 baud modem and having to access bulletin boards systems (BBS) at night due to long distance charges? People now days have absolutely no idea what effort it took to use a computer.
I remember how hot the disk drive used to get. I was a young airman in the Air Force in the early 80s and worked on the F16 digital flight simulator. It took a dozen mainframe computers to run the simulator all with many small muffin fans inside to keep the circuit boards cool. When those fans began to slow down the AF manual said don't fix, replace. I salvaged a couple of those fans, cleaned them, lubricated them, and back up to full speed they went. Some buddies and I wired them to plug into a standard AC outlet and mounted them to the tops of our drives. Heat problem solved. Good times.
@@cac0865 The 1741 disk drive put out the heat too. I was in the Air Force too in Late 80"s and early 90's Law Enforcement (81152). I bought an Amiga 500 from the BX at RAF Bentwaters in the UK. I remember that I could buy a video game off the shelf and find viruses. It was crazy. Thank you for your service.
I'm grateful people are preserving this kind of documentation.
This is awesome! Thank you for preserving this for all us to see. There was a time when I lived for Compute! magazine. I'm reading 'the Home Computer Wars" by Michael S. Tomczyk, the marketing Commodorian for that period.
this is soooo nostalgic when he says the Commodore 64 has a huge amount of memory - for the time he was correct
I had one of these as a teenager, happy times :) I started programming basic on a Vic=20 but the "Commode 64" (as it was often called in the UK) opened my eyes to the joys of assembly programming. Three and a half decades later and I still get a kick out of coding :) Gotta admit though, I don't miss having to put line numbers on everything !
UMM the VIC20 was a precursor to the Commodore 64, I had both of them at the same time so I know this for a fact . I too programmed Basic on these 2 machines the commodore 64 was more capable than the Vic20, but I had a TRS-80 Model 1 the first true PC, My Trash 80 even had the expansion RAM, I also built a color board for my TRS-80, I found the schematics in a BYTE magazine back in the day and I had a wirewrap kit, so I was able to build a color board, that allowed me to use a Color TV and write programs so my Model 1 was in color
When i was five, my father which we lost 14.03.2022 bought one of these machines to my brother and sister. I was learn how to read and write while i try to open games:)
RIP Jim Butterfield. Forever a legend!
Unboxing video from 1983? Jim was ahead of his time.
And ASMR possible Gamer
This is so cool... Jim's books were excellent, learned so much from him/them and his articles in Compute!/Gazette.
It's just incredible where we are now vs where we were in the early 80's. I remember these vividly, but myself and most of my friends all wanted the atari 2600 or the atari 5200. In any case, i count myself lucky to be in the group that saw the world both before and after all of these incredible technological achievements. Thanks for the posting the vid!
Jim was instrumental in helping many C64 users like myself learn the power of our computer. I was alway thankful for his efforts.
I still to this day remember the old programs LOL
and yes i remember
POKE 53280,0
RUN
I used to like
POKE 53280,0
RUN
POKE 52381,0
RUN
I Literally did this every time i turned the computer on, even if it was to run a game
I just watched a two hour video about a computer I never touched before in my life.
64K of RAM. Wow! I love watching these old computing vids. This was such an impressive machine in its day.
What a wonderful video. Thank you. I remember getting my C64 as a child. Loved writing simple programs and showing my mum; she thought I was a child genius. Happy memories.
It really is as relaxing as a Bob Ross video but for 8 bit enthusiasts. Very nice and comprehensive. :)
This is the most amazing thing I have watched since the Commodore 64 came out. The best computer of it's time so happy I was part of so many firsts in life. I was born at the right time. I still love the Commodore 64 tho many hate it.
36:01 Commodore 65! Love this video. I had one of these and now I don’t feel so bad that I only used it for flight sim and Olympics. Glad to see I wasn’t the only one that didn’t have patience to type all those programs in. Thank you!
You want to talk about a legend in home computing? Mr. Jim Butterfield is *that* and even more!
Really enjoyed this. Jim was good at explaining things in a common-sense way. This would make a good intro to personal computing in 2022, almost 40 years later. Never had a c64 but I had something similar called a Sinclair Spectrum.
I remember these days learning. I may be older but glad I was part of all of this. It may sound so dumb to people young these days but this is exactly how it was.
Wish I had this video when I bought my C64. Eventually got the black screen. Was going to replace it with the Amiga but found that all my 64 hardware was not compatible so I settled for the 128D. Just powered it up a few days ago and it still works.
I remember getting one of these for my freshman year. So many days and nights learning, debugging in assembly.
Wow! This would have been wonderful for me to see back in late 80's. I enjoyed the games and attempted one basic program but never really got the full C64 experience.
Thanks for uploading!
I loved my Commodore 64!
I loved using this computer growing up, we had such awesome games too! My commodore broke years ago but I still do have the monitor and it is the best old school monitor a person could buy, love it for my classic gaming.
Load “*” ,8,1
RUN
omg this reeks of the 80s and I love it
Well, this is amazing! Thanks for digitizing this and keeping it on cloud storage! In twenty-thirty years I'll get back to this with the same kind of relaxness, making me feel calm! Thanks!
Wow, isn't it amazing what computers can do nowadays!?
Saving programs to tape is impressive.
I remember upgrading my C64 from a cassette drive to a floppy drive. Those were the days!
And then the 3 1/2 inch floppy drive!
@@01chippe Yes! ❤
I got my C64 in the same year this video was done, 1983. My (kind of rich) aunt from Hawaii visited us in Germany and bought it and the floppy disk drive for me :)
I spent so many hours with this thing.
Amazing how far we got, even back then it was very cutting edge
Not really. Unix was around in the 70s.
Love it! The first ever unboxing video made in 1983.
I still have mine in its box and play very occasionally. Spent hours learning basic and managed to programme it to play Othello and a couple of other games. You could send off by post to rent games for a week or two here in the UK instead of buying them. Up to an half an hour of audio tape loading every time you wanted to play. Those were the days!
mine still works too - only take it out once every 10 years. lol
40 years old this year.... wow
This was a magical experience ✨
I never owned one we had a trs 80. But I started watching this video and couldn't stop. What a great piece of history this video is. Jim is great. Now I want to go back in time and buy one. Sure I could get one now but it wouldn't be the same.
4:00 Whoa, wait, communicating with other computers in other cities ?
He just glossed over this part, I think he may be onto something big here.
When our local computer club started logging in to BBSs I didn't get the purpose of it, it all came with Windows just a couple of years later. Strange because the C64 was very capable of going online - all the more running GEOS.
Watching this video it has been a blast in the past... wow good memories 🥰