Why 3583 Bytes & What's With the Blue Box?

Posted by on Mon, Aug 15, 2016

My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20; it had 3583 bytes of available memory.

That’s about one five-millionth of a modern laptop! So little memory, but still so much you could do with it. While all the cool kids had a Commodore 64, the really cool ones hacked away on their Commodore Vic-20s!

Vic20 Ready Screen - 3583 Bytes Free
The standard Commodore Vic20 greeted users with \"3583 BYTES FREE Ready.\". Amazing tech for the early 80s!

I’m going to try and keep all my blog posts short - REALLY short. I want the text of my posts to fit in to the memory of an original Vic-20. I’ll try to distill ideas down to less that 3583 bytes (or about 500-600 words).

The 3583byte articles aren’t intended to deep dive into a topic. Instead, they’re supposed to raise questions and provide you with some background on an issue. With so few bytes to use, I need to get straight to the point!

So, when you see the blue box at the bottom of a post like so:

PRINT FRE(0)
 2780

READY.
You’ll know I made it with 2780 bytes free memory to spare! :)


Disclaimer: It’s my hook! I’ve taken liberties with what constitutes article content - headings, code and captions aren’t included just the main text of the articles.

Note: I have some longer reads too. These articles will explore in-depth issues and information about my (our) research in detail. Do you actualyl care about a paper on “A Network Timestamp Verification Mechanism for Forensic Analysis” (Hampton & Baig, 2016) – or do you just want to find that article on scraping data with Python and X-Path? :)