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

C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[Like2Byte]

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.

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[realmolo]

You're right, the C64 had a certain something that no other computer had. The Amiga had it too, but the Amiga was similar enough to modern computers that it hasn't aged as well. You know what I mean? The C64 feels like something from a different, simpler era. It's like driving a Model T. It's so different that it has it's own appeal.

The Amiga, as great as it was, just feels like a really low-rent version of a modern PC these days.

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[King_TJ]

I know exactly what you mean, but I wouldn't say "no PC will ever elicit the same emotions that a C64 did".

I remember that whole era quite fondly, but I never owned a C64. I was one of the ones in the TRS-80 camp (the Tandy "Color Computer 2" and later the "Color Computer 3", to be exact). I can assure you the Radio-Shack computer owners were just as fond of their machines as C64 owners were of theirs. For that matter, so were the Atari owners and the Apple //e owners.

Back then, you just "picked a side" and defended it. It was usually based on which computer you were lucky enough to receive as an Xmas gift, or which one you managed to save your money up for and buy on sale first. (There were a few fanatics of various CP/M based computers too -- but generally, people using them "graduated" to something in the Atari/Commodore/Tandy/Apple camp, because those systems had color graphics, more commercial game titles for them, and better sound capabilities.)

Of course, there were other "factions" too like the TI99/4A and even the Coleco Adam .... but I daresay these never achieved the market popularity of the other brands.

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!

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[Major Blud]

"Back then, you just picked a side and defended it."

Back then? I'm sorry, you must be new here.... ;-)

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[Bombula]

no PC will ever elicit the same emotions that a C64 did for the owners of them of the time.

I think you're right, for a combination of reasons:

1. The platform was fixed for many years, so it had a uniform, enduring identity like a console rather than an ephemeral one like a modern PC.

2. As a computer, the c64 platform had more power and flexibility than a mere game console, and that gave it an Alladin's Lamp quality of magic and mystery that can only come from being able to crawl under the hood and goof around with things.

3. It was the right thing at the right place at the right time, like Star Wars. The C64 wasn't the very first computer, but when launched it was probably the best. It had terrific graphics and sound for the price, and the games produced on it did tend to outshine those of its contemporaries.

4. Its power and versatility combined with its relatively low cost gave good bang for the buck, and therefore made it a widespread phenomena - unlike the Amiga and other technically superior systems of the era.

5. Lastly, it - more than any other computer at the time - gave us a glimpse of the future. Smart kids using C64s just knew that the future would be filled with affordable machines that could do everything quite well - games, graphics, sound, applications and more. The game consoles didn't do that, nor did the other computers in 1982 which had word processors and spreadsheet apps but scarcely had graphics or sound to speak of. The C64 had it all, and, even though we were little kids, millions of us instinctively knew that it was a portent of the future.

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[MBGMorden]

It's true; I think that, either due to my young age or the complete "newness" of the whole computing scene, the times back then had a truly "exciting" feel to them. I would go home from school and spend HOURS on BBS systems (though by the time I was using them I had replaced my C64 with a 486 20mhz and 2400BAUD modem :)). Dialing one, looking around to see what files they had, then moving to another. I'd play a few basic text games ("Legend of the Red Dragon" is one that sticks out quite a bit), and just tinker about. I made a point of getting a dirt simple terminal/comms program (S_Term is was called, I think) that had no built in transfer protocols, and then proceeded to setup external versions of Xmodem, Ymodem, Zmodem, Kermit, and HS/Link (some had special features, like for images being able to see the contents as it transfered across - a single decent resolution picture was a 10-15 minute download back then :)). One very cool bulletin board even setup email addresses for all it's users, since they apparently had an internet connection from somewhere. You couldn't browse the web, but it was neat having email access without the Internet.

Everything seemed like you had to get really involved to make it work right. There were these obscure little programs that were tremendously helpful, but there was no Internet (at least not available to me for any reasonable cost), so tracking down new programs was largely a matter of "BBS Surfing", looking for the new versions (or a version at all).

Heck, even prior to the BBS surfing, I remember buying shareware programs from mail order catalogs and paying "by the disk", which ranged from $1.99 to $3.99 per diskette.

These days, computers don't have that special feel. They do all sorts of stuff out of the box. Good for casual users, bad for tinkerers :). Oh well. I think that's why Linux still manages to hold my attention these now. It's about the closest thing left to the feeling of the "old days" :).

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[u-235-sentinel]

Don't forget the birth of online services. Like Quantum Link. I wonder what ever happened to them . .

They morphed into another well known online service called AOL. Seriously.

I was a moderator with Quantum Link and for every hour I was online helping people I received two hours of free online time. It was a cool gig. Then I was told they are switching to AOL and I was asked if I wanted to be a moderator and declined. It took a lot of time and I had other things to work on. Oh and the hours I saved couldn't be transfered to AOL for some bizzare reason. Oh well..

Those were the days.

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[jeremyp]

You are an early victim of clockspeeditis. The Z80 had twice the clock speed but the instructions generally took at least twice as many clock cycles to execute.

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:Still working?

[bzipitidoo]

Hear, hear. The C64 was pretty good except for those horribly slow disk drives. Who could possibly love that?

One shareware emulator used that to nag you to pay. Don't pay, and you'd get faithful emulation of the disk drive speed. Pay up to get faster emulated disks.

Re:Still working?

[Andrewkov]

The C64 was pretty good except for those horribly slow disk drives. Who could possibly love that?

If you had spent a couple of years using a C64 with a tape drive first, you would have loved the disk drives, believe me.

Re:Still working?

[Dr. Evil]

I had a PC XT with CGA when all my friends had C=64 systems. The XT was horrible for games, CGA + PC speaker really sucked.

The C=64 did so much more for games on so much less, it was incredible.

... but when it came to any real work, it was shocking how much I took for granted. I did not envy people swapping floppies while editing documents, submitting assignments with 7pin printouts with nines instead of the letter "g". Spending heaps of cash to replace power supplies or drives in the middle of the night. Just having an RS232 port, a reliable power supply, reliable floppy drive, an OS which was miles above the basic interpreter.

It wasn't until I patched together a 286 with EGA and a sound card that games started to beat out the C=64. The C=64 still had more creative titles though :-)

Commodore 64: An open platform

[Spy der Mann]

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 :-/

No love or computer addiction here

[mamono]

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.

Junis from Afghanistan agrees.

[Anonymous Coward]

He still loves his C64 years after being liberated from the Taliban.

Still in use

[antarctican]

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....

Re:Nostalgia

[gad_zuki!]

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.

The most atrocious program ever.

[CrazyJim1]

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.

Re:The most atrocious program ever.

[smellsofbikes]

Yeah, I did something similar, only on a modern machine, coz I'm not very bright. I was trying to get the modem configured on my first debian machine. It worked on the windows partition, after all, but I just couldn't find where it was located... so I typed something like:
for x in /dev; do echo $x; echo "ATDT5000" >> /dev/$x; done

I figured I could *hear* the modem when it got to the right dev.

The modem was at /dev/ttyS1. Unfortunately, there were some other things it found before that, most notably /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdb1... boy did it take me a long time to fix that.

Re:The most atrocious program ever.

[Just Some Guy]

I miss the fun hacks such as possibly the world's goofiest self-modifying code. Say that memory location 0x10 contained the number of keypresses in the keyboard input buffer, and those actual values were stored in 0x11 and up.

10 CLS
20 PRINT "20 GOTO 150"
30 PRINT
40 PRINT "RUN"
50 PRINT
60 POKE 16, 7
70 POKE 17, [value of "up arrow" key]
80 POKE 18, [value of "up arrow" key]
90 POKE 19, [value of "up arrow" key]
100 POKE 20, [value of "up arrow" key]
110 POKE 21, [value of "up arrow" key]
120 POKE 22, [value of "enter" key]
130 POKE 23, [value of "enter" key]
140 STOP
150 PRINT "HOW DID I GET HERE?"

Here's what it did:

1. 10 cleared the screen.
2. 20-50 just printed those statements, which look a lot like BASIC statements. After hitting line 150 later, the contents of the screen look like:

   20 GOTO 150
   
   RUN
   
   STOP
   [cursor here]

3. 60 says "the user pressed seven keys since the last time you checked"
4. 70-130 emulate the user navigating to the top of the screen.
5. 140 stops program execution. Now the computer is in "interactive command line mode" and interprets all of those key presses we buffered.
6. The "up arrow" keys move the cursor up to the top of the screen.
7. The first "enter" causes the BASIC interpreter to say "hey, new contents of line 20! replace what's already there with this." Then it prints "OK" and moves the cursor down again: to the first character of the "RUN" line.
8. The second "enter" causes the "RUN" line to be executed, which again clears the screen and executes the new line 20, which skips to the final PRINT statement.

You kids and your fancy hashtables and databases and eval statements. Well, we wrote our own half-assed eval statements and we liked it that way. Get off my lawn!

I, for one...

[Debello]

Welcome back our former computer overlords!

Re:C=64 Music

[ShieldW0lf]

Am I the only one that thinks PEEKing and POKEing are kind of dirty abstraction labels for a programming language written for kids?

I used to think that was funny as hell when I was one myself...

I understand the feeling

[Natales]

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...

Amiga

[teknopurge]

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...

Looking back on those old systems

[Targon]

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".

Veteran of the Computer Wars

[deathy_epl ccs]

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!