8 ms·
Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
- andrewstuart 2mo agoMemory. Then as now it’s memory that matters. Anyhow if you want a brand new Commodore 64 get it here: https://commodore.net/ https://commodore.net/
- simgt 2mo agoFor me a good portion of the appeal of a nostalgic device like that is the display. Any recommendations?
- myself248 2mo agoEstate sales. You can score a dozen CRTs a week if you for some reason want to...
- the_af 2mo agoAn alternative that's a bit like cheating since it's not a real C64 but a lookalike running VICE is getting a TheC64. https://retrogames.biz/products/thec64/ https://retrogames.biz/products/thec64/ It looks a lot like a C64 breadbin, with an actual working keyboard, but inside there's an ARM and of course it outputs to HDMI and has USB ports for pendrives. It's a good middle ground between "just an emulator on your laptop" and "a real C64 with all the inconveniences".
- georgemcbay 2mo agoBlog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages. Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first. Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc). Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers. Long, strange trip.
- christkv 2mo agoDisk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.
- georgemcbay 2mo agoYeah, I was lucky enough to miss the "Datasette" days. I had the luxury of a disk drive, and even eventually had an Epyx Fast Load cartridge to speed (some) things up even further! Practically zooming for the time!
- tom_ 2mo agoThe C64 disk drive would still have left you with plenty of reading time.
- christkv 2mo agoYeah the bug in the hardware for the disk drive was a bummer. It was supposed to be 4-5 times faster but due to the hardware bug it shipped with a slow workaround. Its kind of amazing that you allow it to ship like that.
- TacticalCoder 2mo ago> Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so. Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive... We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.
- nurettin 2mo agoThat very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)
- Findecanor 2mo agoI have seen the date "September 1" be disputed on forums. Is there a credible source other than the book that the article refers to?
- reaperducer 2mo agoIs there a credible source other than the book that the article refers to? Plenty of computer magazines from that era on archive.org. Try Byte or Compute!.
- Marcuss2 2mo agoWhen it released, it cost $595 (back then, not in today's money), considering the price dropped to just $229 the following year, that was not a good buy when it came out.
- noir_lord 2mo agoNot unusual in that era though, home computers were evolving ridiculously fast. There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.
- TacticalCoder 2mo agoIt's even a bit crazier than that: the Commodore Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, a bit less than three years after the C64, in july 1985. A friend of mine, whose father was an art teacher, had an Amiga 1000 at home. Mind blown (I'm super lucky for later on another friend had an early SGI Indy at home for his stepfather was president of SGI Benelux). So I got to see and salivate on those mythic machines early on. Of course I was stuck on the C64 until the Amiga 500, way more affordable, came out. Still have my C128 and it was still working last time I cleaned it/tried it (when I was locked inside during Covid) and a few floppy disks were still reading fine (so I took a NOS --new old stock-- pack of 5"1/4 floppies and made a copy of Fast Hack'em and a copy of the Commando game): pure time capsule. Fetched two C64s too: I know the PSU is tricky on the C64 and I don't know if those work or not. I've got floppy disk readers too. But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
- mgkimsal 2mo ago> But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games... Yep. 10 here. A lot of the same feelings.
- AltruisticGapHN 2mo agoSomewhat relevant DOOM on C64 with variable height floor/ceilings https://kweepa.itch.io/doom64 https://kweepa.itch.io/doom64 And my favorite, Quake on C64 https://kweepa.itch.io/quake64 https://kweepa.itch.io/quake64
- b112 2mo agoFor some reason I read that as Quack. Long live BFINN.
- technothrasher 2mo agoAnybody know what happened to the C64 serial number registry? Last I had checked it, which was a long while ago, I had the second oldest serial numbered machine on it (excluding prototypes). But I just went to look and the registry seems to be gone.
- rhubarbtse 2mo agoIt's at https://rittwage.com/c64pp/dpb9db.html?pg=registry https://rittwage.com/c64pp/dpb9db.html?pg=registry
- technothrasher 2mo agoThank you!! And I guess I'm still there at #2 :)
- MobileVet 2mo agoLOAD *.*,8,1
- dosisking 2mo ago?SYNTAX ERROR
- sedatk 2mo agolO"*",8,1
- weinzierl 2mo agoPOKE 53280, 0 POKE 53281, 0 POKE 1,0
- MobileVet 2mo agoIsn’t wild how our mind remembers these things? It has probably been 2+ decades since that command was in the front of my dome and yet, when I wanted it, it was there instantly
- nathell 2mo agoPOKE 1,0 would mess up the bank switching of addresses above $A000 and switch on the Datasette motor. Probably not what you wanted. I guess you meant POKE 646,1 (white text on black screen).
- 2mo ago
- noir_lord 2mo agoGrew up in that era, I always wanted a C64 (I had a Spectrum and as much as we'd argue about the relative merits on the playground, deep down us Speccy users knew the C64 was better). I still occasionally consider buying one but then I remember it'll just sit on a shelf collecting dust, better someone who actually uses it gets one.
- xvxvx 2mo agoMy experience was the same. Loved my Spectrum 128 but friends had the Commodore and its graphics were superior. Very expensive though. The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.
- Towaway69 2mo ago> The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated. You say it “magic”, it wasn’t “better” or “different” or “worse”, it was a kind of magic that happens when tech is new and folks experiment. I’m sure many will look back in 40 years and say the same about AI - we’re living through the magical age of AI. Just as we did when we got our C64’s back in the day ;) EDIT: Perhaps I should clarify what I meant. There are folks having their C64 moment with AI today. These folks are getting into computers via AI just as the grey beards amongst us did with the C64. I don’t think we should be begrudging them for their starting point. After all, those that started with punch cards don’t generally go around laughing at the C64 kids!
- noir_lord 2mo agoNot so sure that that is true. You have to consider the backdrop/time as well - back then there was no BigTech(TM), there wasn't social media/the pervasive backdrop of everything you do with tech been monetised or commoditised. Fundamentally you felt like when you bought a computer/OS/Software you were the customer not the product. Your Commodore 64/BBC Micro didn't do everything it could to gather all your data for targeted advertising, there was no algorithm trying to keep you angry so you'd buy more copies of Crash magazine. While there will be kids out there having a blast with AI, I suspect the whole experience is flavoured differently because of the world we built for those kids.
- asdefghyk 2mo agoI never had a Commododore , but I had several other computers starting from around 1979. From that era , from arount 1975 forward there where often SEVERAL NEW different computers released each year. That include SBC Single board computer that was sold as the board , often without a power eupply or case and S100 systems and DIY hobbyiest build systems I still have most of books and magazines from that era, most of my computers , got lost, I still have a few.
- dododore 2mo ago[dead]
- radicalbyte 2mo agoI'm loving my C64U. The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.
- b800h 2mo agoSame, got it last Christmas and it became the "family computer". At the moment I'm trying to beat Wizball on it. Great stuff!
- radicalbyte 2mo agoImpossible Mission for me; didn't realise that it's actually a good game. Very very good for the time too.
- the_af 2mo agoI love the game, but it was truly impossible back then (pirated, no manual, no idea what I had to do) and even today, with an emulator and every hint on the internet ;) I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have. Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!
- ionwake 2mo agofantastic machine. ... however (say what you will but chuckie egg wasnt on the commodore)
- mkovach 2mo agoAhh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers. I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them. Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000. I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them. That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
- the_af 2mo agoThe 8 Bit Guy has a pretty good video about the Tandy 1000, a great machine.
- mkovach 2mo agoI probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it up once while making an ISA board to connect to some sensors. Replace quite a few caps on that weekend. My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
- LeBit 2mo agoI loved playing Rampage and Thexder on the Tandy of my friend!
- martypitt 2mo agoThis thread prompted me to go and find out what my first computer was -- I have vague memories of it. Turns out, it was a Sega SC-3000H, back before Sega decided it was a console company. Also, interestingly, it was really only popular in NZ/Aus (I grew up in NZ). I have very clear memories of spending hours copying BASIC code of games, line-by-line from the monthly Sega magazine into the BASIC editor, playing it for 15 minutes, then everything dissapearing when I restarted it. I was always envious of my friend who had a C64, but that Sega was a great little machine.
- wateralien 2mo agoI had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.
- gxd 2mo agoThe Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64. It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers. Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)
- le-mark 2mo agoI was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
- reaperducer 2mo agodeep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard. Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way. But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.
- gxd 2mo agoI've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book. The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.
- wateralien 2mo agoGreetings, fellow old people.
- boltzmann-brain 2mo agomy first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!
- reaperducer 2mo agoa modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity. People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.
- IAmBroom 2mo agoDade Murphy, is that you? Did you and Angelina Jolie really get it on?
- boltzmann-brain 2mo agoi don't kiss and tell!
- boltzmann-brain 2mo agoa character LCD was an upgrade. try tiny 14" b&w tv!
- reaperducer 2mo ago14"? Luxury! My C-64 was hooked up to a nine-inch Panasonic. Though it was color, so I guess you still win.
- monkeydust 2mo agoI credit the C64 for setting down the computing path - fondly recall hours spent using BASIC and making my own games. Managed to stick with it when my mates were all getting Amigas but then finally convinced my parents to fork out (some serious £ back then) on a PC...but it all started with the humble C64, fantastic machine.
- krzyk 2mo agoBeing behind Iron Curtain I sold (well, my parents, I was too young) my Atari 65 XE + tape reader (which I received as a gift in 1988) and got C64 (the original ovalish one) with 1541 in 1990, it was bundled together with a set of hundreds (pirated of course, that was the reality back then) of 5 1/4" discs with various software and games. It was like receiving internet in a package. Entering incantations like: "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part). Or playing with assembly with LDA, STA (or same for X and Y) was fun.
- ajross 2mo ago> "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part). Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address). Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot. But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
- mgkimsal 2mo agoOr you got the epyx fast load cartridge and could hit 'run/stop-restore' keys together to automatically type LOAD "*",8,1 and ENTER
- ajross 2mo agoOh sure, but that was a hack. The rest of the market (even in 1982) had already moved on, c.f. the ROM on the 1978 Disk II card that could load and run a boot sector automatically. Having an "operator" was a design paradigm, and my point was that it was already antiquated even then.
- Sharlin 2mo agoOh, it’s been 24 years already?! How time flies…
- le-mark 2mo agoI may be alone in this but I really grew to despise the C64. It represented frustration and failure to me. The basic was so limited, it did not provide access to the otherwise excellent video and sound hardware. Information pre internet was hard to come by, and I never discovered the assembler pathway. I wanted to do cool stuff with it but a kid in rural US had zero access to resources. My biggest success was piecing together how to switch out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
- Fr0styMatt88 2mo agoOh damn that BASIC :) I remember as a kid going to the library and devouring all the microcomputer books and trying to enter their BASIC programs, only to find the C64 severely lacking. Everyone else's BASIC was better! I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did. I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid. It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid. I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.
- le-mark 2mo ago> Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again I have as well; to conquer that feeling of failure at last.
- the_af 2mo agoI despised the limitations of the included BASIC but loved my C64. I also had a pirated Pascal and learned a bit with it (not much). It wasn't a good platform for programming, but it still made me fall in love with computers. Getting my first PC XT clone with GW BASIC felt liberating, suddenly I could write graphical games with ease! But to this day I still love my C64, wherever it is now.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- gioandthemachin 2mo agoRecently moved into our new house, which was left abandoned for many years before we bought it. Much to my surprise, among all the rubbish, I found a working Commodore 64 in there. Mostly working anyway. With a Commando tape still in its case. I couldn't believe my luck!
- pg1 2mo agoI started coding on c64 when I was 10. I'm close to 50 now and still code but it was much more fun 40 years ago.
- gramie 2mo agoI started with the VIC-20, and I'm now 62. After years of resisting the draw to turn my hobby into a career, I started working as a software developer almost 30 years ago. I feared that I might lose the joy, but (for the most part) it's still there.
- donmb 2mo agoBack when writing 500 lines of code by simply typing it line by line from the "handover" booklet the C64 shipped with. Then running it and it magically made a frog-game appear where you hit "space" and the tongue of the frog needs to catch a fly. Then forgot to save on the 5,25'' disk and everything was gone. Good times :)
- Cockbrand 1mo agoWow, that frog game - I haven't thought about this in a loooong time! Didn't it also come with the demo disk for the 1541?
- nathell 2mo agoI got my C64 (actually C64C) when I was 7, switched to a PC five years later just as I mastered BASIC and was starting to learn assembly. To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines. Happy birthday, C64!
- dmd 2mo agoLiterally everything you said is also true about me! and my name is also Daniel!
- iw2rmb 2mo agoFeels like yesterday.
- neogodless 2mo agoTo whom it may concern, I believe the year was 1987 or 1988. (I was around 9ish, I think.) My brothers and I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 amidst trash beside a country road. In the box, even the manual was in good shape. This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written. The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive. I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.) This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
- tyingq 2mo agoAh, that was the first one I owned. The little 1520 4 color pen plotter you could get was incredible. Printed on receipt paper. It was also eventually my bridge to the BBS world via the 300 baud vicmodem.
- gridder 2mo agoI was taught on how to use my new C64C since I was 5. My favorite games were Boulder Dash and Gridder (hence my hn handle). Good times
- muyuu 2mo agochanged my life
- msabalau 2mo agoI happened to be the oldest teen in a new subdivision, so I earned a bunch of babysitting money from parents who no longer had to drive 20 minutes to pick up and drop off a sitter for date night. So I was able to pre-order the C64 before it was released, which earned me a "free" tape drive to actually store programs--the disk drive had to wait a bit. But my serial number was something in the 700s. I programed it, even if I never became a programmer. But having early and strong intuitions about computers paid off for years to come, and set me up enjoy being an "early adoptor" of things to come, rough edges and all.
- freediver 2mo agoI owe my entire identity to this little machine. First laid my eyes on it in 1983, then unexpectedly got it from my uncle in 1984. It immediately opened my eyes to this new world of computer technology and sucked me right in. Between games and writing first code in Basic, something magical was happening. Over the years it defined how I think, and ultimately who I am. Thank you C64 and thanks to everyone who worked on it ****** ****** ********** ********** ************* ************* ***************************** ***************************** ***************************** *************************** *********************** ******************* *************** *********** ******* *** *
- codazoda 2mo agoMy identity is tied to it's competitor, the TRS-80 CoCo, released in 1980. I didn't own it until a few years later. My friends had the Commodore 64 and I was jealous. Your art reminded me that some of my earliest code produced animated flying rockets: * * * * * * * * U * * S * * A * * * * * * * * ** * ** ********* * *** *** * *
- itsboring 2mo agoI grew up with a CoCo 2 that I got for Christmas when I was 5. I remember the BASIC book it came with that had programs you could type in. Also, Demon Attack!
- beachy 2mo agoThe Trash 80 was the first computer I could afford. A great little machine and Z80 assembly has a certain simple elegance.
- codazoda 2mo agoI never tried ASM on it. Interestingly, the TRS-80 CoCo did not have a Z80, it had a 6809E @ 0.895 / 1.79 MHz. Mine had been upgraded to 64KB of RAM.
- beej71 2mo agoThe C64 was a tremendously hackable machine—you had so much control. And, IIRC, the clock was something like 900Khz but that still allowed (with the help of VIC and SID) all kinds of incredible effects in assembly. I'm grateful my parents bought us one.
- ulfw 2mo agoI had a C16 as my first computer followed by a C128. But for the latter the majority of time was spent in C64 mode. So I basically had a C64 in a nicer casing. Lovely times
- spankibalt 2mo ago> [...] a C128. But for the latter the majority of time was spent in C64 mode. Did you make use of CP/M applications? I often wonder how well that worked back in the day; one of my best friends had a Commodore 128, but used it exclusively as a 64 as well for his pal across the street owned a Brotkasten (breadbin).
- ulfw 1mo agoNo never. Booted it up. Didn't know what to do with it. Had zero software for it. Let it go. That was pre-internet obviously and no one I knew ever used CPM
- rasz 1mo agoC128 was pretty much a scam. The computer itself was a trash can of disjointed parts put together from failed projects leftovers, and then Commodore decided to market it as an upgraded C64.
- HumblyTossed 2mo agoGot mine in 85. Still have it in it's (now tattered) box in the garage. It's non-functioning, but can't seem to let go.
- nader 2mo agosuper cool!
- tenken 2mo agoWe had one when i was growing up. I only did a very little Basic on it, my mom used GEos (writer)? to write up her masters degree thesis. In fact, I think it and a bunch of floppies are still up in our Attic ... i really doubt it still works if I were to plug it in someplace :D I don't think we had the first generation c64. I enjoyed alot of the video games, I would go to our local Target store and buy games on floppies, especially when they were on sale for like $4.99.... Edit: sorry I said Target, I think I ment Gemco (which is now the building the Target is in) :D
- jjkaczor 2mo agoAh - endless hours visiting my friend as a 10-year old and playing "Speed Racer". (Let me tell you, we were NOT going for the "heavenly points"...) Years later, my first actual home PC was a "hand-me-down" VIC-20 with a giant box of unlabeled tapes which someone had painstakingly hand-typed from the back of magazines... (BYTE !)... my favorite game of all of those was AMOK. Went missing during a move, then nothing until a 386... (my computing needs until then had to be met in school labs - Tandy's PETs and ICONs)
- jasperry 2mo agoIn praise of "obsolete" technology: I got my C64 for Christmas 1987, when there were already much more powerful machines available, but the C64 was the only one my parents could afford. Unexpectedly to me, they stretched their budget to get me the disk drive as well. I used it up into the 90's. There was enough to do and learn with this machine to satisfy a young mind forever, but there was still that nagging inferiority complex that came from not having the latest and greatest. Despite the fact that genuine hardware improvements have slowed down and software is stuck in the mud, it's easier than ever to get infected by the FOMO that drives the endless churn. But now, a little older and hopefully wiser, I perceive how pointless all that is. When it comes to how I use technology on my own time, I try to mindfully use only what sparks my own joy of learning and creating, and disregard everything else.
- isUserAMonkey 2mo agoFond memories too and like other folks put me on my software dev career path and being a life long gamer. My friend had the breadbox one and i had the slimmer profile model. We spent countless weekends coming back from computer store with boxes of blank floppy disks and using a box cutter to put a notch to make them double sided.
- in12parsecs 2mo agoI got bit by the bug in a Commodore Vic-20 with a whopping 5K of RAM. I was 14, and a younger friend's parents had bought him this computer. My family had not the money for such "luxuries" back then. My friend knew not what to do with it - he was too young. We were not as precocious back then. ;) He asked me to help, so I dove into the owner's manual and jumped to the games you could type in - and subsequently lose when powered off - the cassette recorder came later. I've been doing the same thing for 46 years now. Creating, marveling, and sometimes wanting to defenestrate the machines. :)
- flopsamjetsam 2mo agoMy first computer was a Microbee, a Z80-based Australian computer made by Applied Technology. I loved that thing to death, and thank my Mum and Dad for buying it for me, and getting me started in a field that I loved. My school had a VIC-20, later an Apple II, and an enterprising teacher brought in a Commodore PET. Later on, my friends had ZX Spectrums, Amstrad CPCs (not sure of the model), and lots and lots of C64s. A few Tandy 1000s and Cocos. I was always envious of the great games that they had.
- xp84 2mo agoI'm what you'd probably call a "90s kid" but I lived in a rural area. Around 1994, while the kids in more 'normal' places were using Mac LC-IIs with color screens, and I'm assuming others were using Windows 3.1, I was reading the manual cover to cover to learn how to use MS-DOS on a Tandy 1000 and teaching myself Applesoft Basic on a Franklin ACE (Apple II clone). I'm actually really grateful that thanks to lack of money I basically had a "Gen-X" computer childhood, allowing me to learn the command line, and, I think, to understand how computers worked better than those whose first computer experiences were Macs or Windows.
- xp84 2mo ago> Commodore expected both the VIC-20 and C-64 to have a shelf life of around 3 years. They were about right in the case of the VIC-20, but the C-64 kept selling about 700,000 units a year through the end of the decade and was still hanging on in 1993. It wasn’t selling well in 1993, mind you, and Commodore didn’t want to be making them by then. But there was still demand for them, and Commodore in 1993 wasn’t in a position to say no to a sale. This reminds me of the Apple II family. It is well-known that even in 1984, Steve Jobs considered it irrelevant - despite the fact that it alone was providing the revenue that kept Apple solvent. The Lisa and the Mac had both landed with a thud in terms of adoption and sales, mainly due to being very, very expensive (and I'm sure in part because they only supported monochrome displays, until Mac II in 1987, which only got less affordable -- $10,000 in today's money). The Apple II series on the other hand, kept being sold -- schools and consumers couldn't get enough of them - demand that lasted until the last Platinum IIe (1993) and IIgs (1994) rolled off the assembly lines. The Amiga seems to have been a similar story - Commodore trying to get people to adopt an unquestionably better PC well before the point in the cycle where it was as affordable as the previous PC they were selling. It seems like there's a lesson here. Trying to drag the public to your "better" new product only works when (A) it solves a real problem for them, and (B) they can clearly see that it's worth the price you're asking. In the late 80s and early 90s, a lot of people didn't see anything relevant to them that the Mac or Amiga (or the IBM PC) could do that a C64, Apple II, or Atari 8-bit computer couldn't do. Or at least, not nearly enough to spend 10 grand (in today's money). Eventually, relevant capabilities (I'd argue that multimedia CD-ROM software and then, the 'modern-day Internet' were those catalysts) and price both got things back into that sweet spot that "flagship" PCs had been divorced from since 1987.
- HoldOnAMinute 2mo agoThe Commodore 64 was FUN. Making it do things, discovering its secrets. Three pieces of software that are mind-boggling on that hardware: 1. GEOS and the whole suite (GeoWrite, etc) 2. The Last Ninja video game 3. Echelon video game
- joerambo 2mo agoMy first computer was an IBM 5150 clone that my grandparents setup in our living room. That was my gateway into computers. I was fortunate to find out about the C64 years later and jump into basic programming. I still have an original C64 on my shelf beside me. Think I'm going to hook it up and play some games in honor of its 44th birthday.