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Twitter comes to the Commodore 64

Cory Doctorow at 10:38 pm Mon, Jun 15, 2009

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You know what it's like, you're out on the town, doing something cool, and you have an urge to tweet about it for your tweeps on Twitter, but the only device you've brought out with you is your Commodore 64. Now there's BREADBOX64, a Twitter client for the C64.

With BREADBOX64 you can post status messages and view your friends timeline. The timeline refreshes every two minutes. After starting you provide your twitter username and password separated by a colon. After pressing enter, the timeline is retrieved and shown. At the bottom of the screen there is an input field for you to type aq status message. Pressing enter will post that message to twitter.

You can run BREADBOX64 on a C64 emulator. I use VICE, because that one supports networking. However, you can better test it on a real system if you have the hardware ready at hand. If so, copy the D64 to a real disk, put it in your 1541 and go ahead!

BREADBOX64, a twitter client for the C64. (via Waxy)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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  • dculberson

    Can I port this to TI BASIC? (And no, not the calculator language, thank you very much.)

  • Anonymous

    Hi,

    In one of the articles, it says that Twitter Will Be Obsolete In A Year.

    Here is the link to it -
    http://www.webguild.org/2009/06/twitter-will-be-obsolete-in-a-year.php?p=p2

  • Anonymous

    xdmag, druranium – doesn’t seem to have been done for the speccy yet. It’s certainly possible though via similar expansion projects e.g. Spectranet or ZXMMC+. The network card is doing quite a lot of the work in this sort of setup, the micro “just” needs to be a simple terminal and run a NIC device driver.

    Contiki is an amazing OS though.

  • laderoda

    Now where the heck was this when I was writing my M.Sc. thesis on my C64? I had absolutely NO access to Twitter, so I was COMPLETELY out of the loop in 1986.

  • Anonymous

    So what. I’ve been watching Blu-rays on my 2600 for years now.

  • Anonymous

    Wonder why standard of comments here so much better here than under same article on BBG?

  • Laroquod

    Stuff like this really begs the question of why Twitter didn’t happen sooner, since the interface itself is indeed so simple. Obviously not really on the C64 due to connectivity issues that are easily solved today by emulators, but why wasn’t there a Twitter say, a year or two after ICQ?

  • Anonymous

    FINALLY!

  • hohum

    Well, I wanted to try this, but it seems my Quantum Link account has been terminated…

  • Anonymous

    I have been waiting for this since 1984!

  • Anonymous

    It’s taken this long for the Internet to catch up to the C64

  • sinisterscrawl

    Wow. Great. Once again us ColecoVision owners get frozen out. What happened to you, BB? I thought this was supposed to be a directory of “wonderful” things, not Jack Tramiel’s personal whore.

  • legion

    The vilest part of that article is that I actually know what a 1541 is. Thanks for making me feel just that much older, Cory.

    Butthead.

  • NotACat

    I’m shocked and saddened at the lack of camels in this post.

    @Legion: to some of us, the 1541 is a new-fangled gadget, much improved on the rackety old thing we had to hang off our 3032. How old do you think that makes us feel, huh?

    Cue Peter Jurasik intoning: “I was there at the dawn of the new age of intelligent peripherals”. Andreas Katsulas, we miss you…

  • xdmag

    Where’s my ZX Spectrum client?

  • druranium

    how can I get this to run on my timex sinclair?