News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful. Parent comment

Re:C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful by philipkglass on Friday December 10, 2021 @05:20PM (#29516144)
On the C64 text was PETSCII [1]. On your Mac in Chrome it's Unicode. Running a basic multilingual plane text editor on the C64 is probably impossible due to RAM constraints. Even with a RAM expansion and imagining it had a framebuffer I'm doubtful that the C64 could edit Unicode text at interactive speeds.

In the 1980s only a small portion of the developed world's population used home computers. Today the majority of people use computing devices. Most of them use languages that cannot be represented with PETSCII or ASCII. It's amazing what motivated people can do with low power machines, but let's not forget how going back to the 1980s would discard valuable capabilities as well as bloat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETSCII

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful by emptyparadise on Friday December 10, 2021 @10:08PM (#29518044)
Maybe C64 is out, but do you really think we need all the bloat of today to support Unicode text?
[ Parent | on HN ]