> Isn't 20 gigs enough to store all software,
>commercial or private, that's ever been written for
>the C64...a thousand times over?

I was thinking the exact same thing when I saw those drives being advertised. I remember buying a game for the C64 (possibly "Curse of the Azure Bonds", one of the old TSR "Gold Box" RPGs) and it came on SIX floppies. SIX! That's one HUGE game! Except, those same six 5 1/4" C64 formatted disks could fit on a single low-density 3 1/2" disk today. You could probably put every game I ever bought for my C64 comfortably on a pack of ten HD 3 1/2" disks.

My first significant pieces of writing were done on my old C64. The first story I ever wrote that was longer than a page that I actually completed was something like 45 or 50 typed, double-spaced pages long, and it DID NOT FIT completely in the 64k of RAM of my C64 (or at least, what was left of it once the primitive word processor took up its chunk). I remember distinctly the day I filled up the C64's RAM for the first time--I thought I'd broken the thing. I was typing away at a line, and suddenly the words weren't showing up on the screen anymore. I stopped, backspaced over a few words, re-wrote them, and tried to continue again, and still nothing. It took me several seconds to realize what was going on. Then I had to save the file and start a new one in order to finish the story. I remember being greatly impressed with myself for having accomplished such a feat!

As much fun as I had with my C64 and as many great memories as I have of it, I have very little desire to spend actual money on a huge hard drive for one. I recently made a total impulse buy on eBay and bought a C64 with a floppy disk drive and a bunch of software. I got it in the mail, hooked it up to the TV, played around with it for like twenty minutes, and then packed it up again and put it in the closet. It'll sit there until I decide to go ahead and resell it on eBay, probably. For me, anyway, there's no going home again.

-- Dave