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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.)

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.

[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!

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...

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.

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".