Just learned the Commodore 64 had a built-in BASIC interpreter that took up only 9K of ROM

I was reading a coding manual from 1982 and it blew my mind that they crammed a whole programming language into less space than a single MP3 file takes today. Anyone else ever dig into the technical specs of old hardware and get surprised by what they pulled off?

2 comments

2 Comments

jesse_nguyen10h ago

That "cramming a whole programming language into less space than a single MP3 file" thing is wild when you think about it. It's like how we take all this modern memory for granted but back then every byte mattered, and they treated space like it cost money. Kinda makes you wonder what we're wasting all our extra storage on now.

gavin_reed9h ago

Blow their minds even more and tell them that DOS 1.0 from 1981 fit on a single 160KB floppy disk with room to spare. Meanwhile my phone's settings app is somehow 800MB and still forgets my WiFi password every other update. Really makes you appreciate how efficient things used to be before we started just throwing storage space at bad code.