Now I don’t want to take too much credit here but TMC is probably where it is today in part because of the Commodore 64. In 1982 a computer consultant dropped a computer system into TMC but didn’t program it. He just took off. I think he was just too busy to do the job. The system was based on the BASIC programming language.
At the time I was 16 and working in the mailroom here at TMC. A few months earlier I had received a Commodore 64 as a gift and I spent many of my hours writing video games for the machine. I wrote a Star Trek and Centipede game. Neither were good enough to be sold retail -- I just having fun.
When I realized the consultant had chosen a system that ran on BASIC, the same language I learned on the Commodore, I realized I could just figure out how to program it for myself. I knew BASIC but nothing about how databases work. I spent hours programming the system and my main motivation was obsoleting my mailroom job. You see I could become a programmer and outsource my mailroom duties to the printer. Do you know how tedious it is to mail, sort and stuff 6,000 envelopes per month that were filled with magazines? It was a terrible job. Oh and that was the highlight of the job!
So that’s when I decided to learn about computers in college and further decided to change my major from biology (I was fascinated by medicine) to computer engineering.
This longwinded autobiography is just to set you up for the fact that Commodore may be making a come back into the market. Imagine that. I would buy something of theirs just for old-time’s sake.
Commodore
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