Commodore 64’s Latest Use: Twitter

Ahh, the Commodore 64, one of the more recognized PC classics in the world. This machine was released in 1982, and remarkably, only became discontinued in 1994. Though it’s unbelievably slow by today’s standards (1MHz processor!) and severely lacks memory (64KB!), it was a true blast to use back in the day, and even today, apparently.

With Twitter becoming a little more than just a fad (it seems), and developers not wanting to let the C64 die, what’s the most natural thing to do? Why, create a Twitter client for the C64, of course. That’s just what Johan Van den Brande did, and the result is “Breadbox64”. The client is built on top of a small OS called Contiki, and it’s capable of both reading and posting things to your Twitter feed!

I don’t know about you, but what impressed me most about this was finding out that you can actually go online with the Commodore 64… I had no idea. There’s apparently still quite the scene hovering around the C64, and hardware is still being pushed out today. To go online, you’ll first need the MMC Replay add-on and also the daughter card. It’s amazing to me to know that you can go online with a computer that was discontinued before the typical Internet even kicked off!

As an underlying OS (yes, an OS that runs on the C64 is possible), I use Contiki. Contiki is an open source, highly portable, multi-tasking operating system for memory-efficient networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. More specific, I use their uIP stack to communicate over the Internet with the C64. It is definitely worth looking at. Actually the breadbox64 project grew out of my interest in Contiki to use it as a basis for some real projects later on.