In 1978, after finally saving up enough money, I got myself a Commodore PET computer. I became immersed in it, and soon was programming all sorts of things, and learning assembler to make things go really fast. I soon discovered the Toronto Pet User’s Group, which grew over time to be perhaps the most prominent Commodore group in the world.
A big reason for that was the group’s star attraction, a middle aged man with a great deep speaking voice and a talent for writing and explaining computers to newcomers. That man was Jim Butterfield. His talks at meetings were the highlight for many members, and he did both beginner’s talks and fairly high level ones. Jim had been working on reverse engineering the OS (really BIOS) of the PET, and one of my early cute hacks was a very simple loop that copied the computer’s “zero page” onto the screen at every vertical refresh (ie. 60 times/second.) The PET had characters for all 256 bytes, so this was like a live window into the computer’s guts, even beyond das blinkenlights found on mainframes. You could play with the computer and actually watch everything change before you. For his reverse engineering goals, Jim loved the little program and promoted it and we became friends.
Later, Jim would be hired to write the manuals for some of my software projects, including my set of programming tools known as POWER. I’m sure his name on the manual helped sell the product as much as mine did. He was the Commodore world’s rockstar and father figure at the same time. We were only in occasional touch after I left Toronto and then Canada, but the incredible longevity of Pet and C64 hacking has kept his name in people’s minds. He had a sense of humour, charm and love that is rarely found in a technical guru.
Cancer finally got him on June 29th. There’s a bit more at the TPUG page.
You can see this rather embarrassing advertisement that was published to sell software written by myself, Jim and fellow Mississauga software author Steve Punter with a picture of the 3 of us dressed as football players.
