Mark Seelye, 24, is a paragon of personal success in the information age. He has bootstrapped a lifelong interest in computers and technology into a consulting position with BDS Inc. By day, he works on middle-tier Intranet structure in Visual Basic for a large retail client in Minnesota and pulls down salary and bonuses that put him in knocking distance of six figures.
But some nights, after his wife and daughter are in bed, Seelye retreats to his roots and boots up his Commodore 128 for a bout of furious hacking, the sort that enhances his ego rather than his bottom line. Seelye is more than just a database consultant – he is “Burning Horizon,” renowned Commodore demo programmer.
He is also one of many – perhaps tens of thousands in this country alone – who still use 8-bit computers, either as a sideline or in some cases as their primary computer. Many, for self-enrichment, sharing, or even the commercial market, continue to develop new programs for these machines even though their heyday ended more than 10 years ago.
Seelye and others like him toil underground on their forgotten machines, working out creative frustrations on computers with pitiful power compared to the desktops and workstations they master by day.
So what lures these men and women back to their old 8-bits? Some enjoy the simplicity and rigid structure of the machines, where system resources and memory lie naked to the skilled assembly coder. No worries about core dumps, protection faults, or crashing a server – it’s just the artist and the canvas.
Others see an opportunity to explore possibilities the mainstream 8-bit programmers of the 1980s never considered. “There are millions and millions of states a 64K computer can be in,” said Stephen Judd, an 8-bit enthusiast and PhD candidate at Northwestern University in Evanston. “That’s enough to keep anyone busy.”
And arguably, there has never been a better time to learn. Development systems are plentiful and dirt cheap at garage sales and resale shops, and the Internet has made it easy for 8-bit developers to share knowledge. Entire reference manuals have been transcribed into text, and webmasters store vast amounts of classic source code for eager students. Native compilers as well as cross-compilers for Windows 95, Windows NT, Linux, and other operating systems abound. And, perhaps best of all, the 8-bit coders enjoy a captive audience, which promises accolades and recognition if not great monetary reward.
Still, serious development is going on out in the various 8-bit markets. Some are not as orphaned as you might think. For example, it was not until the mid ’90s that Apple formally cancelled all Apple II-series support, ending the line of patches and bugfixes to the Apple IIGS operating system. But even today skunkworks IIGS projects, such as the GUS emulator for the PowerMac, continue.
Most other 8-bit systems have seen their parent companies sold or dissolved, but that hasn’t necessarily killed development. What about multi-megabyte RAM disks and Zip drives for Atari 800s and 20 megahertz CPU cards for Commodore 64s? They’re here, thanks to dedicated development from the few companies that can profitably research and build hardware for these aging platforms. And the dedication to software development has seen a port of Wolfenstein 3D, the first-person action game that started the Doom/Quake revolution, to the Apple IIGS.
Doug Cotton, technical service manager for Creative Micro Designs, an East Longmeadow, Mass., developer of Commodore hardware, said he understands the ongoing interest in independent 8-bit development.
“Some do it purely out of enjoyment, since there’s not much financial reward involved,” Cotton said. “Others do it for the challenge. And some fall in the middle – they’re able to make enough money to recoup the investment of their time, but without the love of the challenge, they could never justify it.”
The passage of time and the development of new add-on hardware has expanded the horizons of 8-bit programmers, and so has the changing face of software development for mainstream systems. A new product like GoDot, an image processor for the C64 distributed by CMD, takes its cues not from the old Commodore paint programs but from graphics packages like PhotoShop.
Despite small markets, scattered users and aging equipment, there are still good opportunities for an 8-bit programmer to earn a little “pizza money.” Video 61, an Atari sales and development company, currently has five programmers working on new game titles and welcomes new submissions. Loadstar, a Commodore disk magazine, pays out hundreds of dollars for the original software it publishes each month.
As with any market, if one meets the demands of consumers, they will answer with their hard-earned dollars. And sometimes the satisfying rattle of an old floppy drive is the perfect escape from the astounding growth of today’s computer climate.
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Jason Compton is an Evanston-based freelance technology writer. He can be reached at jcompton@xnet.com.
