TIL A small donut shop on the west side of Indianapolis uses cash registers made from modified Commodore-64s.

I see c64, I upvote.

I dug out my childhood c64 a few years ago and have been exploring computing again on it since then. As an adult with a much more informed knowledge of electronics and computing than my childhood version, I really appreciate the c64 even more.

A few months ago I started programming on it and found it quite fun! Instead of having to work through intermediaries or APIs you have direct access to the hardware. You access the actual contents of video memory by HEX address. Sound generation (on the SID chip) is another HEX address. Load some values directly into the CPU registers, shift them in memory, and you're deriving output directly.

There's something very vicerally fun about knowing your commands aren't being abstracted (well except HEX to actual binary), but instead talking directly to the ICs inside the computer. I'm realizing its a computer one person can truly understand EVERYTHING about from end-to-end. From power switch to any piece of software, its a knowable quantity of information for a single human. How many decades ago could we say the same thing for PCs or Macs?

PEEK POKE!
- I typed those in when I was a kid from a magazine copying the computer code into the c64 to play a game but never understood what they were then. I do now! PEEK is the BASIC command for reading a register or piece of memory. POKE is writing a value to that register or piece of memory. I also remember being confused about what a "high byte" and "low byte" were. Now I know that the memory address space is 16 bits, but the data bus is 8 bits. So you need two 8 bits ( 2 bytes) to equal 16 bits. The "high byte" is the the most significant 8 bit digits, and the "low byte" is the least significant 8 bit digits for a total of 16 bits! If you look at the 6510 CPU (the brain of the c64) you can actually see all 16 memory address lines (in red) and all 8 data bus lines (in green).
  So from typing letters and number on the screen of a c64 to that command going to the CPU, to the result going to memory, you can actually understand every bit of it in one small paragraph and a picture.

I feel like all of us are picturing the same exact shop owner right now, never having met them.

Oh, the stories they can tell.

Edit: Whoa, saw the X post pics. Was not far off! Ha!

To me, she has a look that says, "I learned how to use a computer back in 1983. What, I'm supposed to learn how to use two?"

I recall reading that a train station in Germany was using a C64 to power its' departure displays well into the 2000s.

Also a school district had an Amiga controlling the heat system.
Found a link: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/80s-era-amiga-controls-the-heating-for-an-entire-school-district/411781
Germany (or more specifically, Berlin) lost potentially hundreds of covid cases during the height of the pandemic because the fax ran out of paper.

RIP Tommy Johnson who ran Monroe, Louisiana's Cottonport Coffee in the early 2000's

He wrote the cash register program himself and ran the whole shebang on Linux.

Miss ya, man.

I love showing people scene demos running on my PAL C64, then seeing their reaction when I tell them that the CPU clock is 985 kiloHertz.

There's too many good ones but the most famous may be Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design in 2008.

I've been into Demoscene stuff for years! Thanks for the link!
- pouet.net is the demoscene Smithsonian. Feels good running the good stuff on real hardware that I've accumulated from thrift stores, rummage sales, and Craigslist (remember that?) over the years.
  The longer that friends stay over, the more hardware I pull out, and they get subjected to the likes of Eon by The Black Lotus on Amiga 500 and Area 5150 by CRTC & Hornet on IBM 5160. I think they got 1,000 composite video colors out of the original IBM CGA Graphics Card and sampled music playing through the PC speaker on a 4.77MHz i8088. 😂
  I should start a computer museum but I have no money and I don't think there's any money in it. I've considered doing an event at my local downtown old-timey theater that reopened several years back... They will rent it out for stuff like that.

They make very good donuts, too.

Wasn’t there an automotive workshop in Poland that was still using a C64 for engine tuning or something?

Modified how?

They didn't come as cash registers out of the box.
- They didn't come as cash registers out of the box.
  It's okay to say that you don't know. I don't and I want to know. No need for arrogance.
  From the pictures it looks like they are sitting on top a spring loaded manual cash box with a key. If the cash boxes are electronic and the C64s are interfacing them somehow, I'm more impressed that they are still working with all that mechanical action in a particle dense environment. If the software is loaded from disk or tape drive, yeah I'm pretty impressed by them working too. Maybe the C64s are dust proofed in some clever way or they have a routine to open them up for cleaning? And if the cash boxes and the breadboxes are connected, I want to know more about it. Finally, are there more modifications than this? I see there are stickers on some buttons. Any additional hardware attached? Or is it actually and literally an out of the box C64 sitting on top a manual cash box running some custom software in BASIC?
  Edit: words be hard