Those of you who are Gen X and grew up with parents who bought you computers at a young age, you are so fortunate. Reading those manuals and learning to code in assembly gave that cohort an amazing fundamental understanding of computing. It's similar to the understanding of the Internet's underpinnings that we Millennial geeks gained by experimenting with HTML and the Web, before everything was sealed up and packaged for consumption.
But I sure would love to experience some long summers as a kid in the early 80s with nothing but time and a Commodore 64 and its manual.
I think it's still an amazing resource for anyone wanting to learn how computers work. It literally changed my life. Before I got the C64 when I was 15 years old, I had an Atari 400 and then Atari 600. There was very little available to me in the way of documentation for the Atari for anything beyond BASIC programming, and I found that very limiting. The C64 and its manual opened up a whole other world to me. I taught myself assembly programming in about a week. I got into BBSs, and eventually into the "demoscene" where I got to use all the assembly programming I learned. This built the foundation for the rest of my computing life and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Indeed it was a golden age, when microarchitectures could really be grokked in their fullness by teenagers.
The C64 user manual was like a goldmine for me. I don't know how many supplementary materials I used (I read Compute!'s Gazette a lot) and I had already owned a VIC-20. By the time my IBM PC came along, I knew the C64 inside and out, really well. I knew the sprites subsystem and I'd programmed entire games. I knew bank switching, ROM/RAM, Kernal routines, font mapping, ASCII table, assembly and BASIC alike. I was never an electrical engineer, but I could tell you, more or less, how the 6510/6502 processed any given program and how that machine code used registers, memory, I/O, etc.
By the time I hit college I was learning Pascal and systems architecture, assembly on M68000 systems, and we were really off to the races. I was illicitly using accounts to program MU* servers and learning C, gdb, Unix. I could install and configure software and really got noticed, in my first job, for basically becoming a "shadow Unix admin" who got stuff done.
Sadly I never had the chops to be an actual IT professional or have a career. All of that knowledge and talent could've landed a career and a very stable lifestyle for someone else, but for me it was sort of an albatross. My aspirations to a corporate office job as a knowledge worker, weren't in line with what I could actually sustain.
But indeed they were golden years. I don't regret getting to know computers like that. I just wish that they had stayed as pets, rather than enslaving us like today.
msarnoff•8h ago
Ultimate Guide to the C64: https://youtu.be/ZsRRCnque2E?si=v4qQ9mCx3MafEwAq
Ultimate Guide to the Game Boy: https://youtu.be/HyzD8pNlpwI?si=gn-F8yuRPJKoXmC7
Ultimate Guide to the Apollo Guidance Computer: https://youtu.be/xx7Lfh5SKUQ?si=3qbvMohcGo6mBLrJ
andrepd•3h ago