I spent 3 or 4 years coding in assembler on the C64. I’ve been a retro fan of the machine for far longer now but haven’t really immersed myself in it like I did in the early to mid nineties.

Despite the time that has passed since then, and all that had happened, some things are still stuck in my brain and one of those things is the common hex locations used for various functions.

BASIC programmes were stored at $0801 so when you typed the following it was stored there in memory.

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10

If you were programming in assembler you could create a BASIC programme to execute it like this, and it would run the assembler at $080d, the hex equivalent of 2061, and the next byte of memory after this BSSIC instruction.

10 SYS 2061

This all popped into my head when I saw my posting streak for my photo blog today.

Yay, 2061 days posting photos on inphotos.org.

Other numbers that live in my brain without thinking are $1000 and 4096 (where many sid tunes lived), or even $c000 and 49152. I have so many disks with chunks of code at $c000.

So, this is what those numbers mean to me. A nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Do you have a similar association with numbers from long ago?

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Donncha Ó Caoimh is a software developer at Automattic and WordPress plugin developer. He posts photos at In Photos and can also be found on Mastodon. View more posts