CYBERSPACE — Being a stone cold computer nerd doesn’t mean you can’t get online and tweet with the best of them, porn folk and regular Joes alike. Thanks to the innovation that only lurks inside the brain cases of die-hard geeks, Commodore 64/128 users can now participate in the Web 2.0 phenomenon known as Twitter.com.Johan Van den Brande, apparently one of the legions of Commodore 64/128 fans who never quite recovered from the system’s domestic demise, has developed a Twitter client that allows the TV-connected 1982 computing monster to get online and drop 140-character communication nuggets.
It’s true that the client loads at a nearly glacier speed as compared to modern load times, but the data on its 5.25-inch floppy disk does eventually get the job done. Once installed, any functional system attached to a television, a C64 Ethernet card and an internet connection can join the 21st century.
Making it possible for the vintage system to luxuriate in the interconnectedness of micro-blogging is a little gem called BREADBOX64, which employs the MMC Replay cartridge with RR-Net add-on and the Contiki embedded operating system in order to work its modern day social networking miracle.
According to Van den Brande’s website, the Twitter app grew out of his interest in the open-source Contiki OS. Given that the C4 is still wildly popular among some compu-populations – and hardware add-ons are still bring produced – Van den Brande’s fascination may well provide a small but eclectic segment of geekdom a new way to connect with the outside world.
For those who don’t know, the C64 had amazing graphics and sound for its day and used a 6502 CPU from MOS Technologies, running at a nose-bleed-inducing 985Khz and showing its stuff on a screen with a maximum resolution of 320 x 256 and keeping its secrets handy on 64KB of RAM. It was a gamer and compiler’s dream machine.
BREADBOX64 allows that dream to become a modern reality, giving users the capability to post messages and view friend’s timelines, which are updated every two minutes. The client can be run on a C64 emulator, such as VICE, and can be loaded onto any system running the Contiki OS.
Those keen to learn more may want to follow breadbox64 on Twitter.
Those curious to see the process of installation may enjoy this YouTube.com video: http://tinyurl.com/m9d35u.
