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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.'"
The C64 was my third computer. I loved that thing. I was 9 when I got a CPM/Pet and was programming it within 6 months. Later I moved on to the venerable Vic-20. Then I got the PC that changed my life - the C64. The article got it right - no PC will ever elicit the same emotions that a C64 did for the owners of them of the time.
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The C64 has what many console lovers would dream of:
:-/
It is an open platform. You can write your own games, and give them away to your friends. Remember the listings in C64 magazines? You can't do that with consoles like the Playstation, which is HARDWIRED so only "authorized" games can be booted on it. Nice move, really
When I was 8 my first computer was an Atari 800XL. I grew up on that computer and I really loved computers...until I entered the corporate IT environment. Now I hate computers and the last thing I want to do is go home and use one if I don't have to. To me they are a tool, not a toy. I use them to get work done, do research and lookup information. Yes, I look at the occasional YouTube video or whatnot, but my "love of computers" is certainly no longer strong.
He still loves his C64 years after being liberated from the Taliban.
Sadly, my father still uses his original C64 to do his business books for tax time once a year....
:)
One of these years I have to set him up with an emulator rather than watch him suffer, swapping disks back and forth.
The computer that will never die....
The Commodore was a dependable old faithful friend. Your first true love. It had your kids. It supported you through tough times. But then came the time when you needed to upgrade to a trophy wife/super gaming rig. It saw it coming. You wanted ultra raw performance, and it just couldn't deliver it anymore. Still it thinks about you in quiet dignity, though reminiscing about love lost.
I got a catholic block.
I had several nerd parties where we hooked up the C=64 to the TV and fired up SIDPlayer. There were a lot of cool game tracks and techno mixes, but we really loved the pop songs with lyrics that we would sing along with (badly). "I bless the ray--yains down in Af--ri--ca . . . " "The Band" would play in the corner of the screen while graphical depiction of the music scrolled by. Good times.
Music Construction Set on C=64 got me interested in writing music of my own (also badly).
I am not a crackpot.
Because its the 25th anniversary (did you bother to read the article before complaining>) and some people care about such things. Normal humans have these things called emotions. I know an ubermensch like yourself can stand us and our reflections on the past.
>Nostalgia is of limited interest, almost by definition.
Thanks for the heads-up. I think I originally read that in a fortune cookie. Except when I read it I said "Nostalgia is of limited interest, almost by definition. IN BED!" Its more fun that way. Wait, an ubermencsh like yourself cant stand fun things. I forgot.
Pseudo Code:
10 Randomize timer
20 x=Random Number
20 Poke x
30 Print x
40 Goto 20
You can't do this on today's machines or your hard drive may fail and your OS not boot up. With a C64, its the equivalent of giving your computer drugs and watching it trip. Once I had the screen in 4 sections with some scrolling up and some scrolling down.
God spoke to me.
Welcome back our former computer overlords!
Granted. Although I started on the Atari 800XL, not the Commodore (they were too expensive when I was growing up back in Chile), I'm sure the feeling is the same...
What I consider more relevant about those days is that as kids we had to be "creators" instead of "users" as it happens today. The most fascinating idea about the computer was that you could "tell it" what to do, and it would just do it. The potential was endless, but you HAD to learn some form of programming language. The more control you wanted to have, the lower in the stack you had to go. I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502 (with only 1 accumulator and 2 registers)...
It is hard to find the same in today's environment. You don't see a lot of 12-year-olds programming the computer any more. We have created a whole generation of "users" and I don't see an easy way to change that...
I had a c64 as my first computer - with the carts it took. I still remember playing various Carmen Sandiago games on it.
Then I got an Amiga 1000; this is the computer that changed my life. 16-bit sound, great graphics, and an OS that loaded from 2 floppies (DS/DD) into 512k of RAM. If you take off the cover, you can see in the mold where all the people that went into building the 1000 had their signatures etched on the underside. All those cinemaware games: defender of the crown, SDI, Rocket Ranger, Lords of the Rising Sun, the 3 stooges. Those were games. Brilliant games. It has always seemed to me that something was lost between now and then. All the games today feel the same, where those older titles each were unique unto themselves.
I also connected to my first BBS on that 1000 with its 1200-baud modem. I still remember being to tell through the speaker what speed I would end up getting when the connection finished. The local store that sold amiga's was the Slipped Disk. Being an 8-yr old kid going through their cases of Public Domain software for hours on end. They also had auctions - real-live auctions every few months where the store would be packed with people bidding on all sorts of peripherals. Joysticks, steering wheels, light guns, various versions of Deluxe Paint and the oh-so-cool Video Toaster.
I can't help but think my reflections on the Amiga are nostalgia because I'm getting older, while a part of me wants to believe that things were really better back then, and that we lost something along the way...
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The early models had a two prong 9VAC power supply. The "box" outside the computer was simply a metal case with a transformer that stepped down the voltage from the wall outlet.
The solid state components, including the rectifier, was inside the VIC-20 case, mounted onto a heatsink metal plate which was (of all places) on the top edge of the expansion slot. This meant that expansion cartridges tend to get hot from the mounting plate. And if you reached inside the expansion slot when it didn't have a cartridge installed, it nearly burnt your skin. The connector is shown here
One thing that many people do not understand these days is why those old systems are still remembered so fondly. People scratch their heads and just don't understand it. As one of the people who got started on computers with machines like the TRS-80 model 1, Commodore PET(4016 and 4032), I like to think I have a bit of insight about what it was about those early days that makes many look back fondly on the games of the era.
If you look back, you see a lot of text based games, or ugly graphics by the standards of today, so it's no wonder that people do not understand. One thing that was true of most of the games back then, they all were NEW, and many really pushed the abilities of the computers of the time. Story, and fun were key, and while many were pretty bad, there was no shortage of good ideas that were different.
The differences are really what stand out in the minds of us "old timers". Think about it, you had a grand total of 16 colors that could be displayed at one time on a C-64, and yet, good games could be written that were not only fun, but had a story that stuck with us. Even into the early days of the PC, there were some really great games in those early days. The original Kings Quest with those really ugly 16 color graphics is an example of that same innovative spirit that makes those early days seem so wonderful. It wasn't the C-64 that was so great, it was the spirit of the game developers that made things seem to amazing.
Trying to say it was the computer just doesn't fit, because the old Apple 2 series had it, in the same way the Amiga had it. It was a love for experimentation and creation, and it seems that these things that made those old games so amazing is all but dead. How much innovation is out there in the game industry these days? New features or abilities added to older games with new graphics will NEVER seem as amazing as the "old days".
I was an Apple kid myself, but recently I was touring a company that makes high end guitars that's run by a guy who's got a hackerly technical bent, and they've got CNC machines that they rigged up back in the early '80s with C64s that are still running on those same C64s.
That was the most awesome testament I've seen to what computing used to be, I'm not sure I'd even trust a modern microcontroller to run reliably for 25 years in an industrial environment.
When I got my C64, it came with a 300 page manual with detailed documentation on e.g. how to program the built-in sound and graphic chips. Which values you had to write to which registers and so on. I learned how to program assembler by reading this thing, at age 11.
Of course there was also tons of undocumented stuff that you could only learn by doing. Some years ago I found out (using an emulator) that I still remembered carefully crafted tables of timing values to trick the VIC into showing nice animated color bars without flickering.
When I bought my first Intel PC, there was a piece of paper which basically mentioned how to turn the thing on. Took me years to figure out how to do file i/o and draw some pixels in VGA mode.
My main box was the TI-99/4A. We stayed TI-99 people *way* longer than was reasonable (until I could afford junker DOS PCs from my own money some time around '93.) My father was kicking out desktop publishing (of a sort) and doing finances on the old beast until '95 or so.
Fascinating community. I'd suggest that the Atari and TI communities were even more like the Open Source world. Commodores and Apple ][s were being made, and commercial software for them was developed through the early 1990s. Lots of Apple ][ people kept using Appleworks and Oregon Trail and Print Shop (and the culture of copying those programs, along with the escalation copy-protection and cracks lingers today). The TI was abandoned much earlier (1983), and the commercial world dried up soon thereafter. But, there were thousands of shareware programs still being written, distributed through floppies and user groups. Very few people ever expected to make a penny writing TI software, but they wrote a lot anyway.
You see me now, a veteran,
Of the old computer wars.
I've been waiting on this load so long,
But my sound chip's better than yours.
And my raster tricks are nifty,
But I sure could use more RAM
The demoscene will last forever...
I've got so much more that there's left to play!