Basic. Amiga. Bbs. /pub/cbm/ LOAD”$”,8. Commodore computers up to BASIC 2.0 (like the Commodore 64, the VIC-20 and the PET 2001) only had a very basic understanding of mass storage: There were physical device numbers that were mapped to the different busses, and the “KERNAL” library had “open”, “read”, “write” and “close” functions that worked on these devices.
There were also higher-level “load” and “save” functions that could load and save arbitrary regions of memory: The first two bytes of the file would be the (little endian) start address of the memory block. With no special knowledge of “block storage” devices like disk drives, BASIC 2.0, which was not only a programming laguage but basically the shell of Commodore computers, could not express commands like “format a disk”, “delete a file” or “show the directory”. All this functionality, as well as the file system implementation, was part of the firmware of the disk drives. Sending a Command Getting Data Back. The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk (25C3) Tutorial. Description: This is the video of the presentation titled "The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk" given by Michael Steil at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress.
Talk Outline: Retrocomputing is cool as never before. People play C64 games in emulators and listen to SID music, but few people know much about the C64 architecture.