PC Museum Makes History (Re-post)
To celebrate its fifth year in business, the Personal Computer Museum has created a new program that allows the breakthrough, under $300 personal computer of the 1980’s – the Commodore VIC-20 to access Twitter, one of the world’s foremost online communities. CKPC FM 92.1 personality Ed McMahon (Mayor of the Morning) will create computer history with the first VIC-20 Tweet and afterwards museum visitors can tweet too. The first “tweet” will happen on Saturday February 20th at 11am EST. Find the museum on Twitter or Facebook at http://www.pcmuseum.ca/twitter.asp
“Many have asked ‘Why are you doing this? There’s not much demand for new VIC-20 software.’ It was the challenge of creating a bridge between the past and present. It’s amazing how far technology has progressed in the past 30 years. The software runs from a cassette tape on an unexpanded VIC-20 with only 5 KB of RAM and a processor that runs at 1 MHz,” commented Syd Bolton, Curator of the Personal Computer Museum.
To put this in perspective, an average PC today runs at 3000 MHz and contains 2,097,152 KB. That means the average computer today has 419,430 times the memory power and 3000 times the speed of a personal computer from the 80’s.
The museum created a software platform for many vintage computers to be able to "tweet" (called "TweetVER" which is short for Tweeting from a Vintage ComputER). For those who would like a copy of the software program, visit the museum’s website http://www.pcmuseum.ca for information.