5 ms·

It seems like everyone and their mother had one of these. Every time i read the backstory of a famous person in tech, inevitably their childhood was spent progr

It seems like everyone and their mother had one of these. Every time i read the backstory of a famous person in tech, inevitably their childhood was spent programming a commodore. What made it so fascinating?

kjaftaedi 7y ago
Endless possibilities. The owners manual came with schematics in case you wanted to wire it up to just about anything. Compute magazine published software in the magazine, and you'd have to sit there for hours typing code into the console, but at the end you've have software that someone else designed. If you had a modem you could dial a bbs and talk to people or trade games. Copying games and software was trival which allowed all sorts of things to flourish. I even had a point and click mouse for mine and had purchased a module that would do speech to text, albeit very rudimentary. Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Commodore was built around the idea that the computer is just a processor for something larger.. whatever you wanted to build, and not limited to software.
- jackhack 7y ago
  >Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Could you please expand on this thought? I'm genuinely curious as to what you mean by proprietary. I cut my teeth on an Apple ][ with integer BASIC one would load from a tape. (Later, a ][+ with built-in Applesoft Basic and a floppy drive.) I'm puzzled what you mean when you refer to proprietary prouducts. I had an Epson dot-matrix printer, a 110/300 baud Hayes modem, and later AppleCat modem (1200 baud, full duplex, oh yeah!), a time/calendar card. A few different no-name joysticks, etc. The Apple ][s expansion bus slots actively encouraged aftermarket support. Anyone could create a peripherial. Software came from magazines, commericial sellers (back of Nibble or Popular Computing magazines), shareware, my own imagination, BBS downloads, etc. I think in more ways than not, the experience with the Apple ][ was in common with Commodore 64/128 users. The industry was blossoming, and competing by offering wildly different solutions with a common core.
  - panzagl 7y ago
    Didn't Apple IIs require a monitor vs a TV? The Apple joysticks were also different from the 9 pin Atari/C64 ones. But they weren't 'proprietary' as much as 'differnet and more expensive'.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      Not just the joysticks. A useful Apple ][ system was double or triple the cost of a similarly capable C-64. Apples were great machines, but because of their timing and price they were considered business machines. At least until IBM changed the world.
    - DerekL 7y ago
      You could use an RF modulator and connect it to a TV, but it wasn't included with the system.
heelix 7y ago
It was attainable on lawn mowing money. I was 12 when I picked up one. A few games on cartridge, which was reasonable compared to the Atari/Intellivision game consoles at the time. As a bonus, you could create/type in games. I started with a tape drive to save the hours of peek/poking around. Eventually floppies became a thing (dang that was spendy at the time). That 300 baud modem and all those glorious MUDs and news groups.
Razengan 7y ago
> What made it so fascinating? Like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the biggest factor was probably the relatively cheap price. Households who may never have considered purchasing a computer otherwise, could dabble in one thanks to the Speccy and C64. Other reasons: • The sheer hands-on access: You could DO things the instant it was powered on. Even if nothing else (except a TV of course) was connected. Almost nothing was off limits. You could program right away, unlike the $500+ devices of today that you can't even use as a simple calculator without needing an ""operating system"" and updating it and creating an account and picking a password and giving your phone number then downloading an ""app"" from the internet! (exaggerated snark but you know) • All of the software that was made for it would run on it. Let that seemingly obvious statement sink in for a second. When you purchased a C64 or Speccy game or app, there was a very high assurance that it would run on all C64s or Speccies out-of-the-box. That greatly reduced the barriers for non-techie people to warm up to computers. If something needed extra hardware, like RAM or peripherals, it would say so on the box right up front, though it was mostly for the 16K/48K Spectrum differences and supporting software for third-party add-ons. • The subculture. This is the best part for me. There were lots of weird and funky magazines. Everybody was new to it all. Everyone was excited about everything. Entire new genres were being spawned before your eyes. All the developers were learning as they went. When you look at early C64 games and compare them with later stuff by say Thalamus or Apex, it will seem like they are for entirely different systems. So even without buying new hardware, it was like you effectively got free upgrades throughout the machine's lifetime! :) Bruce Lee (1984): https://youtu.be/gRGGWWvvO0o?t=31 https://youtu.be/gRGGWWvvO0o?t=31 Creatures (1990): https://youtu.be/SDDkxfJCB9Y?t=2m35s https://youtu.be/SDDkxfJCB9Y?t=2m35s and yes, those catchy soundtracks spawned a whole another subculture of their own (see SID chiptune remixes.)
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Computer manufacturers of today could still take some of those lessons from the C64. It was a computer for true programming beginners that started you right in a BASIC interpreter. Yet it scaled with the user’s expertise, all the way up to machine language programming and hardware hacking. If you mess something up you could soft or even hard reset to the prompt in under a second. What computer today can do this? I had high hopes for the Raspberry Pi but in its default configuration, you still have to wait while booting an operating system, provide storage, figure out your hierarchical file system and shell commands, and do on. The Pi should ship by default with a ROM that drops you into Python or something 250ms after you power on.
jchw 7y ago
I think the real answer was it was one of the first computers that made sense; it was relatively cheap, especially compared to IBM, but had 64k of memory and color graphics (and better color graphics than IBM had, at that.) It boots directly to BASIC and comes with a book that explains the machine and how to write code for it. I don’t think that was uncommon for the era, but seriously, imagine that today! The Commodore 64’s appeal never really ended. I was born in ‘93 so there’s not really any nostalgia in it for me, but I just recently bought a broken Commodore 64 and got it all working. For one thing, there’s something to be said about the simplicity. 3 screws gets you into the computer, and ~6 more gets the motherboard out. The board is simple, only 2 layers, and you can debug it with a logic probe and not really much else. Most chips have fairly distinct functions, except the VIC-2 and SID chips which each handle a laundry list of things aside from their primary jobs of generating video and audio signals. It’s an interesting machine because it is a fairly consistent platform. People still write demos and games, and they still run on pretty much any Commodore 64. Well OK, you probably need a PAL one, but that’s a single jumper, a different VIC-II, and a different clock away. (Someone this October just created a module that lets you switch by using 4 relays that connect to the jumper, 2 VIC chips and 2 clocks. I installed this in my C64.) You can count instructions, race the beam, flip registers mid scanline, and all kinds of fun stuff, and it will probably work on another C64 just the same. The community has created some seriously cool stuff, both software and hardware wise. Hardware wise the 1541 Ultimate-II is mindblowing. It plugs into the userport and floppy drive ports (and optionally, datasette port) and emulates, with cycle accuracy and even a speaker producing drive-like noises, a Commodore 1541 floppy drive, a REU memory expansion, and a host of other devices. It even has ethernet for FTPing to. In short, the thing is, it’s quite honestly still fascinating. It is a computer you can understand, yet seemingly holds unlimited tricks, and there’s an enormous ecosystem that is somehow still growing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tabtab 7y ago
  To clarify, "PAL" refers to the European TV standard, correct? Commodore had to make a different sub-model for Europe versus US because the TV signals are governed by different standards in each continent. The screen refresh rate in particular is different. Some software depended on (assumed) one or the other, probably because it was intended to be continent-specific or used hardware tricks to squeeze out higher perceived performance.
rusk 7y ago
It was cheap, durable, and ubiquitous. It had sound and graphics capabilities far in excess of any of it's contemporaries (at that price point, at least). It was also quite open and came with a manual with lots of neat technical detail. It also had quite a nice keyboard, even by today's standards. They really don't make them like that any more.
- lb1lf 7y ago
  > It was cheap, durable, and ubiquitous. This, this and this. Where & when I grew up - rural Norway in the eighties - just about everybody had one, ensuring that no matter what you wanted to do, someone nearby were into the same thing; magazines with code listings, books and -ahem- evaluation copies of software were all over the place; as were peripherals - this basically meant that any latecomer to personal computing chose the C64 as it was everywhere, creating a huge positive feedback loop if you got into the C64. Poor kids next door - their parents got a good (for the seller!) price on a Dragon 32; the nearest Dragon 32 to theirs probably was in Aberdeenshire or thereabouts...
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Or MSX. Don't know in Norway, but in Sweden the Sinclair Spectrum was also very popular, but not as popular as the C64. Rough partition - affluent kids, C64, less affluent kids but still with geeky or generous parents, Spectrum. The poor suckers (like me) Spectravideo MSX :-D
- jandrese 7y ago
  Durable only if you aren't counting the power supply. The C64 power supply was a notorious source of failure.
  - rusk 7y ago
    Yeah ridiculous
thought_alarm 7y ago
There's a lot that's wrong with the C64, but despite its problems it was a big success because: - It hit the sweet spot of price vs. performance at the perfect time, just as the video game market began to crash. - Unlike most other cheap computer manufacturers, Commodore took a completely hands-off approach to software, which allowed a rich software ecosystem to spring up very quickly. Among the computer geeks in my neighborhood at the time, 1982/83 was all about the Colecovision game console, and 1983/84 was all about the C64.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Besides the wide availability in chainstores (like Target) and low price (~ $100 towards the end), you could find 2 or 3 books that spelled out how -everything- inside worked, and how to access it ... using the built-in BASIC or, if that was too slow, assembler. So it was pretty much wide Open. Many MANY magazines supported it with type-in software that adventurous users could freely modify. (Among them, 'The Transactor' dived deepest.) And empowered -many- users to comprehend important basics.

kjaftaedi 7y ago

Endless possibilities. The owners manual came with schematics in case you wanted to wire it up to just about anything. Compute magazine published software in the magazine, and you'd have to sit there for hours typing code into the console, but at the end you've have software that someone else designed. If you had a modem you could dial a bbs and talk to people or trade games. Copying games and software was trival which allowed all sorts of things to flourish. I even had a point and click mouse for mine and had purchased a module that would do speech to text, albeit very rudimentary. Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Commodore was built around the idea that the computer is just a processor for something larger.. whatever you wanted to build, and not limited to software.

jackhack 7y ago
>Apple IIs were popular but largely limited to proprietary products. Could you please expand on this thought? I'm genuinely curious as to what you mean by proprietary. I cut my teeth on an Apple ][ with integer BASIC one would load from a tape. (Later, a ][+ with built-in Applesoft Basic and a floppy drive.) I'm puzzled what you mean when you refer to proprietary prouducts. I had an Epson dot-matrix printer, a 110/300 baud Hayes modem, and later AppleCat modem (1200 baud, full duplex, oh yeah!), a time/calendar card. A few different no-name joysticks, etc. The Apple ][s expansion bus slots actively encouraged aftermarket support. Anyone could create a peripherial. Software came from magazines, commericial sellers (back of Nibble or Popular Computing magazines), shareware, my own imagination, BBS downloads, etc. I think in more ways than not, the experience with the Apple ][ was in common with Commodore 64/128 users. The industry was blossoming, and competing by offering wildly different solutions with a common core.
- panzagl 7y ago
  Didn't Apple IIs require a monitor vs a TV? The Apple joysticks were also different from the 9 pin Atari/C64 ones. But they weren't 'proprietary' as much as 'differnet and more expensive'.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Not just the joysticks. A useful Apple ][ system was double or triple the cost of a similarly capable C-64. Apples were great machines, but because of their timing and price they were considered business machines. At least until IBM changed the world.
  - DerekL 7y ago
    You could use an RF modulator and connect it to a TV, but it wasn't included with the system.

heelix 7y ago

It was attainable on lawn mowing money. I was 12 when I picked up one. A few games on cartridge, which was reasonable compared to the Atari/Intellivision game consoles at the time. As a bonus, you could create/type in games. I started with a tape drive to save the hours of peek/poking around. Eventually floppies became a thing (dang that was spendy at the time). That 300 baud modem and all those glorious MUDs and news groups.

Razengan 7y ago

> What made it so fascinating? Like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the biggest factor was probably the relatively cheap price. Households who may never have considered purchasing a computer otherwise, could dabble in one thanks to the Speccy and C64. Other reasons: • The sheer hands-on access: You could DO things the instant it was powered on. Even if nothing else (except a TV of course) was connected. Almost nothing was off limits. You could program right away, unlike the $500+ devices of today that you can't even use as a simple calculator without needing an ""operating system"" and updating it and creating an account and picking a password and giving your phone number then downloading an ""app"" from the internet! (exaggerated snark but you know) • All of the software that was made for it would run on it. Let that seemingly obvious statement sink in for a second. When you purchased a C64 or Speccy game or app, there was a very high assurance that it would run on all C64s or Speccies out-of-the-box. That greatly reduced the barriers for non-techie people to warm up to computers. If something needed extra hardware, like RAM or peripherals, it would say so on the box right up front, though it was mostly for the 16K/48K Spectrum differences and supporting software for third-party add-ons. • The subculture. This is the best part for me. There were lots of weird and funky magazines. Everybody was new to it all. Everyone was excited about everything. Entire new genres were being spawned before your eyes. All the developers were learning as they went. When you look at early C64 games and compare them with later stuff by say Thalamus or Apex, it will seem like they are for entirely different systems. So even without buying new hardware, it was like you effectively got free upgrades throughout the machine's lifetime! :) Bruce Lee (1984): https://youtu.be/gRGGWWvvO0o?t=31 https://youtu.be/gRGGWWvvO0o?t=31 Creatures (1990): https://youtu.be/SDDkxfJCB9Y?t=2m35s https://youtu.be/SDDkxfJCB9Y?t=2m35s and yes, those catchy soundtracks spawned a whole another subculture of their own (see SID chiptune remixes.)

ryandrake 7y ago
Computer manufacturers of today could still take some of those lessons from the C64. It was a computer for true programming beginners that started you right in a BASIC interpreter. Yet it scaled with the user’s expertise, all the way up to machine language programming and hardware hacking. If you mess something up you could soft or even hard reset to the prompt in under a second. What computer today can do this? I had high hopes for the Raspberry Pi but in its default configuration, you still have to wait while booting an operating system, provide storage, figure out your hierarchical file system and shell commands, and do on. The Pi should ship by default with a ROM that drops you into Python or something 250ms after you power on.

jchw 7y ago

I think the real answer was it was one of the first computers that made sense; it was relatively cheap, especially compared to IBM, but had 64k of memory and color graphics (and better color graphics than IBM had, at that.) It boots directly to BASIC and comes with a book that explains the machine and how to write code for it. I don’t think that was uncommon for the era, but seriously, imagine that today! The Commodore 64’s appeal never really ended. I was born in ‘93 so there’s not really any nostalgia in it for me, but I just recently bought a broken Commodore 64 and got it all working. For one thing, there’s something to be said about the simplicity. 3 screws gets you into the computer, and ~6 more gets the motherboard out. The board is simple, only 2 layers, and you can debug it with a logic probe and not really much else. Most chips have fairly distinct functions, except the VIC-2 and SID chips which each handle a laundry list of things aside from their primary jobs of generating video and audio signals. It’s an interesting machine because it is a fairly consistent platform. People still write demos and games, and they still run on pretty much any Commodore 64. Well OK, you probably need a PAL one, but that’s a single jumper, a different VIC-II, and a different clock away. (Someone this October just created a module that lets you switch by using 4 relays that connect to the jumper, 2 VIC chips and 2 clocks. I installed this in my C64.) You can count instructions, race the beam, flip registers mid scanline, and all kinds of fun stuff, and it will probably work on another C64 just the same. The community has created some seriously cool stuff, both software and hardware wise. Hardware wise the 1541 Ultimate-II is mindblowing. It plugs into the userport and floppy drive ports (and optionally, datasette port) and emulates, with cycle accuracy and even a speaker producing drive-like noises, a Commodore 1541 floppy drive, a REU memory expansion, and a host of other devices. It even has ethernet for FTPing to. In short, the thing is, it’s quite honestly still fascinating. It is a computer you can understand, yet seemingly holds unlimited tricks, and there’s an enormous ecosystem that is somehow still growing.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tabtab 7y ago
To clarify, "PAL" refers to the European TV standard, correct? Commodore had to make a different sub-model for Europe versus US because the TV signals are governed by different standards in each continent. The screen refresh rate in particular is different. Some software depended on (assumed) one or the other, probably because it was intended to be continent-specific or used hardware tricks to squeeze out higher perceived performance.

rusk 7y ago

It was cheap, durable, and ubiquitous. It had sound and graphics capabilities far in excess of any of it's contemporaries (at that price point, at least). It was also quite open and came with a manual with lots of neat technical detail. It also had quite a nice keyboard, even by today's standards. They really don't make them like that any more.

lb1lf 7y ago
> It was cheap, durable, and ubiquitous. This, this and this. Where & when I grew up - rural Norway in the eighties - just about everybody had one, ensuring that no matter what you wanted to do, someone nearby were into the same thing; magazines with code listings, books and -ahem- evaluation copies of software were all over the place; as were peripherals - this basically meant that any latecomer to personal computing chose the C64 as it was everywhere, creating a huge positive feedback loop if you got into the C64. Poor kids next door - their parents got a good (for the seller!) price on a Dragon 32; the nearest Dragon 32 to theirs probably was in Aberdeenshire or thereabouts...
- jacobush 7y ago
  Or MSX. Don't know in Norway, but in Sweden the Sinclair Spectrum was also very popular, but not as popular as the C64. Rough partition - affluent kids, C64, less affluent kids but still with geeky or generous parents, Spectrum. The poor suckers (like me) Spectravideo MSX :-D
jandrese 7y ago
Durable only if you aren't counting the power supply. The C64 power supply was a notorious source of failure.
- rusk 7y ago
  Yeah ridiculous

thought_alarm 7y ago

There's a lot that's wrong with the C64, but despite its problems it was a big success because: - It hit the sweet spot of price vs. performance at the perfect time, just as the video game market began to crash. - Unlike most other cheap computer manufacturers, Commodore took a completely hands-off approach to software, which allowed a rich software ecosystem to spring up very quickly. Among the computer geeks in my neighborhood at the time, 1982/83 was all about the Colecovision game console, and 1983/84 was all about the C64.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Besides the wide availability in chainstores (like Target) and low price (~ $100 towards the end), you could find 2 or 3 books that spelled out how -everything- inside worked, and how to access it ... using the built-in BASIC or, if that was too slow, assembler. So it was pretty much wide Open. Many MANY magazines supported it with type-in software that adventurous users could freely modify. (Among them, 'The Transactor' dived deepest.) And empowered -many- users to comprehend important basics.