plexxer

> Habitat is built on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive -- some would say "toy" -- home computer to support user interaction

> There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology -- developing the animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64

The authors seem to have some opinions on the venerable C64.

On mine, the force of the carriage returning was enough that it jostled the bell and it rang softly. Perhaps that is what you were remembering?

I am still confused. What is a typical use case?

The article stated half of a million, so very likely yes.