Commodore 64 Still Beloved After All These Years

techsoldaten writes "CNN is running a story about the Commodore 64 and how people are still devoted to it after all these years. "Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.'"

Comments

Still working?

[damburger]

I got through 2 C64s, and both of them were plagued with reliability problems - in terms of build quality, my Acorn Electron was far superior. I first had the traditional brown one, then the Amiga-style model they released when my first one broke. Both models had an annoying tendency to blow an internal fuse, and I remember it was a funny glass one I had trouble finding in shops, and both broke down beyond the scope of simple repairs after a couple of years. Don't even get me started on the power packs.

So if my experience is anything to go by, you'ld have to be a real enthusiast and pretty handy with a soldering gun to have one still working after all this time.

Re:Still working?

[callmetheraven]

Mine has a reliability issue: heat. After a while, the video output becomes plagued with "waves" that travel vertically up the screen. The machine has zero airflow, and a heat sink inside the machine is inadequate (discovered this by trial and error as a curious 15 year old.) So put a long screw and a nut through the hole in the heat sink, left the cover ajar, and let the screw protrude out the side to dissipate heat. Worked for me...

Had to think of a way to keep the C64 running for a long session of Telengard (loaded from a cassette drive.)

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[Alioth]

For us in Rightpondia, it was the Sinclair Spectrum http://www.worldofspectrum.org/. Less than half the price of a Commodore 64, and with a faster processor, and smaller form factor, we got to feel smug despite the rubber keyboard :-)

Also, the BBC Microcomputer. Twice as fast as the C64, and about the same price when it came out, and with a disc system that was actually worth a damn. The Beeb was fast, expandable (it could take sideways ROMs and RAMs), was easily upgradable to being networked (our school had a LAN in 1985 of BBC Microcomputers using Econet).

The nice thing about the 8 bit days were there were lots of different, interesting architectures. It wasn't just a homogenous, boring, Wintel hegemony. So even though us Sinclair fans think the C64 is rubbish, it's still good it existed!