Classic Computer - Commodore 64 office 1985

Mini office 11 for the Commodore 64 classic computer was long before Microsoft got its act together and dominated the productivity market with its office suite. It first came out in 1985 and updated in 1986/7. But was it any good and did it improve on the previous version in a way that made it useful?

[gettingpast]

In the mid 80s I worked in a repair shop as a kid, and my job was to set up a computer for inventory management. We ended up with a commodore 128 running in 64 mode, using the Timeworks "Inventory Management" program. Admittedly I secretly picked the 128 because I wanted to play with it (I had a 64 at home). I spent the entire summer counting dusty parts in bins and entering them into the database. Once all set up it ran until the mid 90s! Happily printing receipts for customers and managing inventory until it was eventually replaced with a clunky windows computer which did the exact something at twice the effort.

[mustafareason]

If you have mini office I then this might be of interest.


The word processor is written in 100% assembler, the graphics prog was a combo of basic and assembler for the drawing. The DB and spreadsheet are basic using same protection code.The basic isn’t visible because the length bytes at the start of each line, which are only used by list, was set to zero. There is an Easter egg in the word processor if you type Ctrl-Alegend snt 1985 it will display the authors name e.g Ctrl-A and then blind type “legend snt 1985” plus enter. It also existed on the BBC.

If you want to restore the basic you need to count the bytes following the length marker till the first null, then write this into the length marker, skip forward length bytes and repeat. If I remember the end of prg was 3 null bytes, not sure without looking.

The double height characters used a character rom with the top half of the characters expanded to 8x8 in the first 128 characters and the lower half of the characters in the next 128 chars. The effect was achieved by print a char from 0-127, crsr-dn. Crsr-left, char 128-255. The difference between the status line and double height was a raster interrupt to change the active font. Down side was that you only had limited chars available as the font set effectively contained only 128 chars not 256. This was the closest we could get to the Beeb version.

Somewhere I still have the source for all of these, it’s a long time since I wrote this.

[paulnunnink]

First it was Speedscript that made the vic 20 for me, and later the C64. Next came GEOS on the c64 that I used heavily. The 80's micros always were more about productivity then games for me and they performed well!