Rich sez, "Apparently the Toronto PET Users Group is still alive and well, coding and hacking Commodore hardware for more than 25 years!"
"It's obviously a lot of camaraderie," Mr. Bloomquist says. He hadn't heard of TPUG before 2003, but his own tinkering earned him not only a welcome to the group but the title of webmaster. "One thing I always wanted to do was hook my 64 up to the Internet," he explains, "and now I actually have the design and engineering background to do it. So I did it." And he found he wasn't the only one; soon, an army of other Commodore 64s made contact with his special Web server. "Within a week, I had 2,000 callers," he says.
Going online with a decades-old computer — today's $600 desktops are thousands of times more powerful — is no small feat, and the motivation for Mr. Bloomquist and others is a mix of novelty and nostalgia. Computer fans are enjoying the eighties revival as much as anybody. For the generation born in the seventies, computers and gaming are culture. Machines like the C64, which had one of the largest game catalogues of the decade, are a big part of their past, and now they want to reclaim it.
(Thanks, Rich!)
