Posted By
MikeZ
on 2009-08-17
20:41:15
 |  Re: A reply to "The Letter (3-PLUS-1)"
Chicken: The thing missing from this thread is the fact that most of us in the USA who bought Plus 4s in the 1985 time frame were as old then as you are now. We bought it as an adult toy and after a while we let our kids play with it. We started using the integrated software because we could - not because we bought the machine for that reason.
I have to agree with SVS. Some of it was quite useful. I actually used the spreadsheet over a period of five years to track my financial progress toward retirement and I finally made a retirement decision based on that spreadsheet. But, again - I did it because I could. If I didn't have the 3-plus-1, I would have used Lotus 1-2-3 at work.
I never met someone who abandoned their C64 for a Plus4. It was usually those of us whose friends had C64s. That got us interested and we started with the very inexpensive
(1986 - $99) Plus 4s.
In those days we were all trying to communicate via BBS and a 300 baud modem on dial up with a long distance phone call required. Yet we still communicated.
I guess the main thing we did was write and exchange utilities. I can tell you I never saw any Demo files.
I spoke with Dave Johnson by phone a couple of times. He talked about writing the 3-plus-1 stuff and he told me he assembled it on a C64! I also had several conversations with Fred Bowen at Commodore and we briefly explored the idea of hooking two Plus4s back to back via the 6529 parallel ports. Yes - it worked!
I guess you could say that back then there was a lot of hardware experimentation and utility writing.
Maybe this will put things a little more in perspective - Cheers- MikeZ
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