Looking Back At the Commodore 64

An anonymous reader writes "It's the 30th anniversary of the Commodore 64 this week — news that has made more than a few gaming enthusiasts feel their age. This story looks back at some of the peculiarities that made the machine so special — a true mass-market computer well into the era where a computer in every home was a novelty idea, not a near reality."

Comments

It was the computer for us commoner kids

[elrous0]

It may be hard for kids today to believe, but there was a time when home computers were WAY out of the price range of anyone below the HIGH upper middle class. In the early 80's, I had a friend whose dad was a yuppie who actually had an Apple II. All the kids used to go over to his house and marvel at Zork and all the neat stuff it could do. But it was a $2000 computer, and that was in early-80's dollars too (that would be about $5000 today). As much as we marveled at it, we all knew that one of those amazing machines would never sit in our homes.

So when the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 came out right about that time, it was like a godsend to those of us whose parents worked for a living. $200 for a computer that could do almost as much as that fancy $2000 Apple?!? Suddenly computers and programming didn't just seem like something for the yuppie kids, it was within reach of all of us. And the Commodores even came with BASIC built in (my Apple-user friend had to load his from a disc).

And you could get free games by typing them in from magazines! You could learn to do you own graphics by learning peeks and pokes. It's because of my Commodore 64 that I first made the connection between programming and mathematics (wait, I can draw this line a lot easier using a simple equation!). It's how I learned the importance of an if...then conditional.

10 Print " It's where I learned that even us nobodies could one day grow up to be computer programmers."
20 Goto 10

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[drinkypoo]

I had to wait for the Amiga, by which time programming was somewhat deprecated. You didn't get a programming environment when you turned the computer on without media any more. I did have a C= 16 before that, but I had no storage device. Typical christmas present from my dad, at least it was a step up from a card with McDonald's gift certificates in it. What an idiot.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[elrous0]

The problem with the VIC-20 was that paltry 5k of memory. The Commodore 64 became dominant because of that 64k, which put it on par with the big boys (and for a fraction the cost).

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

I can't remember precisely and I'm too lazy to look it up, but of that 5K I think only about half was actually available-- my Sinclair had 2K, all of which was available & with a more powerful BASIC. That and the 16x32 screen. The 64 was a quantum leap over the 20.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[danlip]

The Apple IIe definitely had BASIC in ROM. I thought they all dd.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[elrous0]

When I got my VIC-20, it was down to $200 (seem to recall that my dad paid about $300 for my C-64 a couple of years later). But my memory could be wrong. My friend definitely claimed that his dad had spent $2000 on his Apple II. Not sure what the configuration was (he could have been bragging a bit).

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[elrous0]

I played lots of Zork on that machine! Making paper maps, etc. to defeat the awful "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

Oh, if I had a nickel for all the hours put into playing The Bards Tale series on that wonderful machine.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Zeromous]

This doesn't totally seem true. Amiga 1500 had a shell I could write code on out of the box. I wrote many an obscene program at the K-Mart when I was younger and the NES was busy.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[mgscheue]

The Apple IIe definitely had BASIC in ROM. I thought they all dd.

The original Apple II had Integer Basic in ROM but floating point basic (Applesoft) had to be loaded from tape or diskette unless you had the optional Applesoft plug-in ROM card. The II+ had Applesoft in ROM.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[tmarsh86]

Prices for the Commodore 64 came down pretty quickly, IIRC. There's no way I would have gotten my C64 for $595 and I got it Christmas of '82. Might have been a price drop and a sale to put it around $300 or so.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[eulernet]

I doubt that you bought a C64 in the eighties.

I'm from France.
Back in 1982, when I wanted to buy a computer, I checked all the prices, and the Commodore 64 was very expensive (5000 francs, which is $1000).
The TRS80 was even more expensive: 6000 francs, or $1200.
Atari and TI99/4A were expensive too.
At that time, I bought a TI58C, and it cost me 600 francs, or $120.

Two computers were available at a much lower price: ZX Spectrum and Oric, at 2000 francs, or $300. I bought an Oric, since the Spectrum was late, and american computers were outrageously expensive.
My next computer was an Atari 520 ST in 1986, and it cost me 7000 francs, or $1300.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Alan Shutko]

Well, if you turned on the Amiga without media, all you got was a screen saying to insert a disk. But if you did load workbench, you might have gotten a programming environment. Amiga's included Amiga Basic through Amiga OS 1.3, which was pretty equivalent to Mac Basic. I remember sharing programs with a friend who had a Mac. You're absolutely right that it was less discoverable than the C=64. You had to find it, it wasn't in your face.

As of Amiga OS 2.0, Amiga Basic went away. ARexx was there, which was great at tying programs together but not the same standalone programming environment. Eventually, AMOS took the mindshare away, but it was a separate product you needed to get.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[PhotoJim]

Actually, with enough RAM a VIC-20 is a pretty fun machine. There is a fellow in Montreal that makes 32K expanders for them that are pretty cheap so you can have a 37K VIC-20 and geek out to your heart's content. The simple architecture makes it relatively easy to program.

The C64 can do a lot more, but added a lot of complexity. The higher video resolution was definitely a plus, though.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[drinkypoo]

you should learn to be more appreciative. An Amiga was an expensive piece of hardware.

I didn't get the Amiga from my father, who was busy drinking up every cent he ever got. I got it from a friend of my mother's who was fairly wealthy due to some work with Bausch & Lomb. He probably would have been happy to buy me a much nicer computer than the $600 Amiga 500 for which I will be eternally grateful on all levels. Paired with a hand-me-down BSR "Phone Modem" 1200 it got me into the world of BBSing, which in turn led to the internet. It also got me into hardware; I externalized my keyboard, I installed a socket-based 68020 accelerator and suffered with it, I upgraded to a 1MB agnus. I eventually had A2000, A2500, A3000, still have an A1200 but I don't switch it on. I don't know what would have become of me had I not snuck into the scruz geek scene when I did, but I imagine I'd be even more poorly socialized than I am now. ;)

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[LWATCDR]

I got one of the first that came out. The one thing I really feel Commodore screwed up on was the 1541.
It was so slow.... Had the C64 had a faster floppy drive it might have done better with business users. Hey people ran businesses off of the Apple II.
I also had a program that gave it a software 80 column display. It wasn't easy to read but it worked well enough with my terminal program on some of the CP/M based BBS that wanted 80 columns.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

You made me go all misty eyed there, old man. I remember disassembling mine so I could spray paint the case... soldered in a pulse switch on GND+RESET line so I could do a hard-reset by hitting that special button (lockups were common if you enjoyed machine language programming...).

I remember sitting in school class pretending to read from a schoolbook all the while studying my copy of Commodore 64 Programmer's Guide (I still have it).

I remember walking about 30km (return) as a 16yo to fetch my copies of aforementioned volume and Inside The Commodore 64 (Milton Bathurst) from the post office.

I remember tinkering with undocumented assembly opcodes to see what they would do (gleaned from Compute! magazine, remember that one?)... and of course the countless months of my life I must have spent typing in machine code numbers for various apps/games/utils.

I remember being able to scroll the screen left by 1 pixel for the first time (think gaming). Moving sprites around (the usual bird-flapping animation).

I remember the wonderful toe-curling rush of dopamine when it finally dawned on me how indirect addressing worked in machine language.

I think PEEK and POKE are still the fastest words I can type on a keyboard, and I still can't forget that the safest area of memory starts at $C000 (4k worth) - otherwise known as 49152 for mere mortals. ...oh and 53281/0 for the bg/border colours, IIRC. My daily routine was: switch on, wait for boot to finish (~1-2s), poke 53281,0:poke 53280,0 followed by a clear screen ... or something like that. I liked a clean slate and a screen that looked bigger than what it was. I also always changed the font colour to green since the movies proved that green on black was the optimal colour... lol

w00t!

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[elrous0]

I certainly didn't buy one in France at those crazy prices.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Tsingi]

We were poor, so my first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81. It gave up the ghost (actually it was ruined in the rain when my wife put my things in the front yard when she divorced me!

My (ex) wife stabbed mine with a Philips screwdriver in a fit of rage. She took out an expensive calculator that way too, just before an exam.

I loved my ZX81. I wrote an assembler/disassembler in machine code (of course) It rewrote itself by flipping bits in subroutines as it ran.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[kimvette]

It's not like the Amiga didn't come with it. As a home computer, that was really innovative; business-class computers of the time booted from magnetic media, not ROM and so they were infinitely updatable. The 8-bit computers? Not so much.

So you had to boot up your kickstart and workbench floppy and then you could program in AmigaBASIC or install your assembler of choice if you wished to program in assembly. It was a whole lot better than the C=64, the 8-bit Ataris, and so on; the OS was upgradable, something you simply did not have in home computers of the time, and it is something we take for granted today. What we have today was unimaginable then. Just think - the iPhone or Android phone in your pocket has hundreds or even thousands of times more processing power, RAM, and storage than home computers or even mainframes or supercomputers of the 1980s, and even these modern wonders feature upgradable software. (now, as far as whether or not your smartphone manufacturer actually delivers software updates is a different matter).

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Antarius]

You're responding to a post about a Sinclair ZX-81 and complaining about 5Kb of memory?!

Us oldies with the ZX-81s only got 1Kb of the stuff!

(Sure, we could get 16Kb expansion packs for GBP300-ish in circa 1979 money, but they had a habit of spontaneously combusting if you looked at them funny)

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[greed]

Commodore wasn't above crippling the I/O on the C64 to avoid cutting in to the business market for the PET and CBM machines. (Those IEEE-488 parallel bus drives were FAST... most of them had two CPUs and 4-8K of RAM. The 1541 had only one CPU.)

There was a synchronous serial shifter on the C64's CIA chips (precursor to multi-IO chips). But there was something wrong with the hardware, so they had to bit-bang the serial I/O in software instead. Of course, it was their own hardware with the flaw: They'd bought MOS Technologies by then (which lives on as an EPA Superfund site, I believe).

Something similar was dumb on the Amiga. They finally had a true asynchronous UART for the RS-232 interface. But, the hardware handshake lines were done by software... which really fell apart above 19,200 bps.

If you limited yourself to the ROM KERNAL[sic] calls common to the PET, CBM and C64, you could actually write machine code that would run on all 3 series. BASIC code was, if you stuck with the C64 and PET 2001's 2.0 version, even easier to port.

So, one of the great things about Commodore was, we learned how to cope with mistakes....

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Antarius]

I've still got mine, all these years later. And it still works - even the membrane keys are intact.

I'll have to fire it up one day so that I can reminisce about driving cars through little blocks.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[DrgnDancer]

My parents got me a C=>64c with monitor and a disk drive for $300 in the mid-eighties from some guy who had upgraded (dunno what he got... the 128 and the first Amiga came out around then, maybe he got one of those). My mom was a bit worried about getting my Christmas present used, but it was way more than they could afford to get new so she took a chance. Needless to say it was the the best present EVAR! You could definitely get them for around $400 new (without peripherals of course), and it wouldn't shock me if they were down to $300 by 87-88. The 128 and the first couple generations of the Amiga were out by then. They were like $600 at release, but they were sold for years after their big brothers had "obseleted" them simply because they were so cheap and yet so effective.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Fulg]

I was about to call you out on the model number but instead I learned of a new, UK-only Amiga model. I did chuckle when reading that under the A1500 label is an A2000 label. :)

Sure, if the workbench was loaded, you could start a shell and write a script (with that awful built-in line editor, uuugh), but it wasn't the same as the instant-on of the C64.

I used to do similar things at Radio Shack; there was a POKE you could use to toggle the internal relay on/off much faster than you should (the BASIC command to toggle the relay would wait a second or so before each state - the POKE obviously didn't). Put this in an infinite loop, walk away and watch the poor clerk run to the front of the store to reset the demo machine.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[mwvdlee]

I remember programming on my C64 the very first day I bought it. Within a few hours after initial bootup, we had a working higher/lower card game in basic, copied from some document and slowly expanding from there. If it weren't for basic coming pre-installed on the C64, I may have not learned programming at all, or atleast at a much slower pace.

All computers should come with a simple programming language by default. Something like AutoIt3 but with a basic IDE; simple syntax and easy access to what you can see on screen. Something you can use to solve simple everyday problems without too much learning. Just like my own experience on the C64, people will start looking at different languages when they run into the limitations of the "starter language". In my case, Simon's Basic then machine code then ASM (then onto different hardware).

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[LWATCDR]

The Pet was on the way out by 1982. The B Macine was interesting. I am kind of sorry I never got one on Close out from protecto back in the day. It might have been fun to run a BBS on.
My high school had Super Pet which where great machines. We also had 8050s I think interfaced with something called a muppet that allowed us to share the drives and printer. In a way it was like an early NAS. Those machines where so cool. I wish I had more time to play with them back in the day.
It was a real shame. In many ways Commodore could have done so much better than they did. Things where so interesting back then. We had Atari, Commodore, Apple, Tandy, TI,and many more all doing really wild things. First in 8 bit with the Atari 800/400, TRS-80s, PETs, Vic 20s, C64s, Cocos, Apple IIs and the BeeBeb . And then into the 16/32 bit world with Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, AppleIIgs,Tandy Model 16, Tandy 1000, and on and on.
Now we have Intel machines running Windows, Linux, BSD, or OS/X. At least the ARM stuff is kind of interesting.
Oh and I didn't mean to leave out Sir Clive and Acorn. Thanks Acorn for ARM :)

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[IceNinjaNine]

There is a fellow in Montreal that makes 32K expanders for them that are pretty cheap so you can have a 37K VIC-20 and geek out to your heart's content. The simple architecture makes it relatively easy to program.

If you want some Vic goodness, don't overlook the Mega-Cart.

Ram expanders, programming tools, games.. it's pretty fabulous.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[hairyfeet]

Don't forget that back then EVERYTHING was hackable and the companies would give you details on the entire system like you wouldn't believe! I remember writing to Commodore about my VIC and ended up with a manual that had every single opcode for the CPU, had all the pins listed for every single I/O on the board, the amount of detail they gave you was just unreal. I have a customer that had one of the old Commodore 128s back in the day and thanks to all the details they gave him on the graphics subsystem he was able to do a pretty sharp for the time animation routine for one of his customers which was one of the very first retailers of those big old home sat dishes.

Thanks to him knowing exactly how the C128 drew successive lines he was able to cook up this cool animation of how the dish tracked the sat, how the data streamed down from the sat to the dish and finally to the home, but according to him it was a little TOO slick because computer graphics were so rare at the time they ended up having to set his display to the side of the booth because people were piling up in front of the screen watching his animation to the point they couldn't conduct business!

So I'm really grateful for the time i spent at the VIC and thanks to it and the C64 there was such a wealth of software for it that it really exploded the computer and helped give birth to what we see today. Between Commodore starting the first price war and MSFT selling MS-DOS to anybody with a buck so that Compaq could take the faster 386 and clone the IBM 5150 (which is where we get the word PC from,as the buzzword back then was "IBM PC compatible") we went from computers being the toys of the rich to a truly mass market commodity that now gives us honestly insane levels of power for incredibly cheap. So happy anniversary Commodore!

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[hson]

3583 bytes free actually.
And as far as I can recall the Super Expander gave you 3k, not 3000 bytes.
Look at this VIC-20 demo. Try to do that on your paltry ZX81!

The VIC-20 had lots of stuff the ZX81 did not have. A proper keyboard, color graphics, disk drive(s), sound, a real video chip so the processor didn't have to draw the screen (that's why you can either run a program or have screen output. Welcome to the blinking screen!) The only good thing (IMO) about the ZX81 was the cheap, cheap price, otherwise it was a pretty awful machine.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[An ominous Cow art]

I used to do something similar with Apple ][ machines in stores, etc.

] CALL -151
300:A9 xx 20 ED FD AD 30 C0 4C 00 03
300G

That's a loop which clicks the speak while filling the screen with random characters. The xx was a zero page location with a random (or randomish) contents. I don't remember the exact location anymore, sigh.

I recall a couple of years back this came up on Slashdot before, and someone mentioned that apparently you could simply AD 30 C0 (LDA $C030) to both click the speaker and get a random byte, but I don't think I was aware of that, Back In The Day.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Zero__Kelvin]

"actually it was ruined in the rain when my wife put my things in the front yard when she divorced me!"

Let me guess .. she found out you had a Slashdot account.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[An ominous Cow art]

Apples were definitely a lot more expensive than Commodores and Ataris - $2000 sounds right. I had an Atari 800, but my Dad bought it for me. I think it was $500ish with the extra memory modules to max it out, and the tape drive. That was around 1982.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Zero__Kelvin]

" The Commodore 64 became dominant because of that 64k, which put it on par with the big boys (and for a fraction the cost)."

The C-64 was superior to the others due to a number of factors, including the polyphonic (SID sound chip) and the (VIC-II) Video Interface Controller and it's Sprite capability, more RAM than the others, and a lower cost. There were also numerous books available about the internals, including memory maps, which allowed the BASIC programmer to peek and poke his way to nerdvanic ecstasy.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Hamsterdan]

My first computer (well my dad's) was an Apple ][e clone (Microcom). Woz's Floating Point BASIC was available if you booted with the system disk IIRC. If you upped the RAM to 64k with the Language Card, it had Integer BASIC in ROM. My C64 had BASIC built in, but those floppies were god awfully s-l-o-w, in a really painful way.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Hamsterdan]

Ultima VI would have made me rich in my case. Still booting it up sometimes, even hooked up a second 1541 to minimize disk swapping :)

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[gothzilla]

I had a Timex Sinclair 1000 and it only had 512 bytes of ram.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[na1led]

Boy this brings back memories! My first computer was an Atari 800 with a tape recorder, but I later purchased a C64 from a friend. I had lots of friends with C64 and Atari computers, and that's when the Atari / Commodore Wars started. It was lots of fun back then, using my 300 Baud modem to connect to BBS, finding other people to swap software with, and joining the local Users Groups. I remember having subscriptions to Compute Magazine and spending the day at the library reading computer books. We were the pioneers of computer users back then. If you told people back then that computers would be in every home, and just about everywhere, theye'd say you are crazy!

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[na1led]

The biggest problem with the VIC-20 was "20 column display". Did they think people were too blind to type on the computer? Imagine the nightmares of wordprocessing on 20 columns!

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[hitmark]

Ugh, reminds me of how much i missed while toying around with the A500 as a kid. I did drool over AMOS ads and envisioned myself programming games on the thing. Never happened...

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[hazydave]

Good match... most of us on the Amiga team at Commodore weren't all that well socialized, either. We had a habit of throwing marketing people into any nearby body of water, and generally, raising hell. Fun times, good computers, good memories.

I was actually overseeing the last version of the Commodore 64, Rev E, though most of the cost-reduction work was done in Japan back then. They had nearly everything but the CSG (formerly MOS Technology) chips on a big gate array. The cost of a C64, boxed for retail, was supposedly as low as $35.00 near the end. Little wonder Commodore kept selling these long into the Amiga era.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[hairyfeet]

You're talking software and I'm talking hardware friend. back then they gave out full docs and specs for the chip in the floppy disc drive (which could then be hacked to speed up I/O) and with all the specs on every I/O on the board you could hack together all kinds of hardware from printers to modems with a soldering gun and a little time.

That is one thing people take for granted we just didn't have, and that is how easy the hardware today is to use. Today everything is plug and play and pretty much everything is USB while we had to deal with IRQ conflicts and one of a half a dozen different proprietary connections. Folks just don't realize how proprietary things were back then, there was no sharing of printers or frankly anything else without hacking and it was a royal PITA. I still remember the "fun" of playing "Which IRQ is making the PC shit itself?" and spending crazy amounts of time while now its "plug in USB, wait a minute while the driver loads, there is no step three' and away you go. Of course even now one can go overboard with it like my dad who has 18! ( not an exaggeration, he had 6 on the back and 4 on the front and then he had me add in a card and 2.5 USB internal so he got an extra 4 on the back and 4 in the front) USB ports because according to him "everything should be USB".

But you really forget how well we have it now until you see an article like TFA and remember what we were running. Your average $1 watch at Fred's has more CPU power than the VIC and C64 did and you could fit the entire contents of my first 6 HDDs completely into the RAM on my current system with plenty of room left over and my current machine cost less than the average IBM 5150 yet could run every single OS I had from 1982-2000 in VMs faster than they ran on the original hardware. The fact we get that kind of power so damned cheap just amazes the living hell out of me. If you would have told me when I got my first IBM PC compatible waaay back in the days of the 386SX that i would one day have multiple CPUs in a portable that would do high def video for less than the cost of my VIC and which would get 6 hours on a battery while weighing 3 pounds, or that I would come home to a machine with SIX CPUs and that both it and the portable would have 8Gb of RAM, while i was sitting there trying to make every byte count? I'd have asked you to lay off the dope as it was rotting your brain and yet now my kids play games on hand me downs that have Gbs of RAM and 800 stream GPUs? Its just incredible how far we've come folks, just incredible.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[edjs]

When introduced in 1982, the C64 was $595 in the US, compared to $1500 for the PC and Apple II, and $900 for the Atari 800 at that time. There was a price war and shakeout in 1983 while Commodore aggressively undercut the competition, starting the year dropping the C64 to $400, and $200 after the summer.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[CastrTroy]

Every Windows computer comes with VBScript. You may not like it, but it's a powerful language, and you can probably do a lot more with it than most people think. As far as IDE goes, there isn't one. But once you're adept at programming enough to require an IDE, there's plenty of free IDEs available for other languages. Also, you can just create javascript + html webpages and store them in .html files and do all your programming that way. Open them up right in internet explorer. With HTML 5 features, you could probably code up a pretty good app, without downloading any special software.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[LocalH]

Commodore didn't "cripple" IEC to protect their IEEE-488 business, as the whole point of IEC was to move away from the proprietary IEEE-488 connectors that were becoming hard to source (at least according to statements made by Jim Butterfield). Originally, IEC was to be nearly as fast as IEEE-488. As you mention, there was a hardware problem (albeit not in the C64, but in the VIC-20's 6522 VIA) that necessitated the replacement of the "fast" IEC code with code that transferred a bit at a time. The C64 got even slower because of the badlines - every 8 scanlines, the VIC-II would steal 40 cycles and cause you to miss bits (which came in about every 20 microseconds at 1540 speed). This means that a VIC-20 (or C64 with screen blanked) with 1540 drive (or 1541 drive switched into "1540 mode") provided the fastest stock IEC performance until the C128/1571 combination and true fast IEC.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[matthewd]

"On The Edge" explains the problem. The plan was to use the serial shifter in the CIA chip. But the lines from the CIA chip to the serial port that was in the final schematic was cut by the production layout guys in California, and hundreds of thousands of PCBs were already in production. So it had to be solved in software.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[LocalH]

Placebo effect. The 1541-II is exactly the same speed as the 1541, no matter which machine (or fastloader) is used with it. The 1541 series drives were actually slower than the drives both preceding them (1540) and succeeding them (1571), but only when one used a 1540 with a VIC-20, or a 1571 with a C128. (Or, one could also use a 1541/1571 with a VIC-20 and switch it into "1540 mode", which would speed it back up to normal VIC-20 IEC speeds).

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Lord no. This was in 1982

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[dosun88888]

The thing you had to load from a disk was a DOS so you could actually save your stuff to one. Unless there was a trick that I'm unaware of that allowed you to directly write a program to a disk without an explicit one.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Who could forget ZX Chess too? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Kamiza Ikioi]

I stayed up all night with my dad typing in a program called Moon Lander from a magazine.

Load "MOONLANDER",8,1

Joy!

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Tackhead]

] CALL -151
300:A9 xx 20 ED FD AD 30 C0 4C 00 03
300G

That's a loop which clicks the speak while filling the screen with random characters. The xx was a zero page location with a random (or randomish) contents. I don't remember the exact location anymore, sigh.

The frightening thing is that I can still read that without a disassembler.

$4E, low-byte of the 16-bit keyboard idle time stored in $4E and $4F, commonly used as a random number generator/seed.

I recall a couple of years back this came up on Slashdot before, and someone mentioned that apparently you could simply AD 30 C0 (LDA $C030) to both click the speaker and get a random byte, but I don't think I was aware of that, Back In The Day

Yes, $C030 toggled the speaker cone "in" or "out". (and I forget what, if anything, it returned.) Every sound that came out of that machine did so as the result of the program doing a busy-wait (or a very carefully-timed bit of computation, say, while writing a few bytes to graphics memory) while toggling the speaker cone in or out. Crazy, but awesome.

This being a C64 thread, I have to tip my had to the Apple programmers for doing what they did with what they had, but having a SID was awesome, without the crazy.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[mwvdlee]

I know VBScript and have used it for a number of minor things, but the problem with it is; it's not an easy language. Interacting with whatever's on screen requires effort. Similarly with JavaScript+HTML. Neither of these languages are for the absolute beginner who isn't really sure why they'd want to program, but would like to try it out for once instead of playing another round of Farmville.

Or, perhaps, make a simple tool to make playing Farmville easier. Being able to program 'click mouse every minute' is a nice way to start. The tool may only work on one specific computer, with a specific browser at a specific webpage scrolled to a precise position, and only when full-screen and if you're not touching the mouse or keyboard yourself after correctly positioning the mouse, until the screensaver kicks in, but more complicated stuff will follow eventually.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Bender_]

I once decapsulated one of the first versions of these gate array. To my surprise a large fraction of the die area was completely unused - it seemed that the chip was extremely I/O limited. No wonder it was possible to fit further devices into that gate array.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[wwbbs]

Yes but did the Commadore 64 have the Game Cartridge "THE COUNT by Scott Adams. 1981." Which for me made the entire purchase of the a Vic-20 an awesome event.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[onepoint]

I think I paid 894.00 for my C-64 ( tax included ). it was a lot out of my savings.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Belial6]

Bahhh! Who cares how many K of memory the device has. After typing the 10th page or so of code into the hexadecimal keypad because your Commodore KIM didn't have any external storage, the idea of counting your bytes by the THOUSANDS seems pretty unappealing.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Hatta]

But it was inferior due to a slow serial interface, making loading programs from disk take far longer than any competing computer. To this day, I play more games on my Apple II because they boot right up. My C128(in C64 mode) takes several minutes to launch a game, or I can use a fast loader and a mystical incantation to load it faster, but still slower than the Apple II.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[MarkGriz]

Our town had an electronics recycling collection a few months back.
Dropped off a few dead monitors, and saw a giant box with 3 or 4 c64's piled on top (1 still in the box)
Talk about misty eyed.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Just Some Guy]

I'm sure you've heard similar from others, but: you made my life better. I was a programming geek on my little C=64 before the Amiga ever came along, but it was the machine that opened my eyes to the possibilities. Your work shaped my attitudes, education, and career. Thanks for what you did for me - what you did for a lot of us.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[KatchooNJ]

Ah, yes! Those Scott Adams games were the best. I had all of them. Adventureland was the first game I ever played on my Vic-20, in fact.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[damnbunni]

If you can, play Ultima VI on a C-128 instead of a C-64; it uses the 128's extra memory for music, and supports the 1571's Burst Mode for waaaay faster loading.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[jgrahn]

Well, if you turned on the Amiga without media, all you got was a screen saying to insert a disk. But if you did load workbench, you might have gotten a programming environment. Amiga's included Amiga Basic through Amiga OS 1.3, which was pretty equivalent to Mac Basic. I remember sharing programs with a friend who had a Mac. You're absolutely right that it was less discoverable than the C=64. You had to find it, it wasn't in your face.

Right, using the Amiga the right way (at least before Workbench 2.0 and hard drives) meant creating your own boot floppies with the Workbench stuff discarded in favor of ARP and various other third-party utilities from the Fred Fish repository. I never used a C64, but I can imagine that a "factory defaults" Amiga would feel empty to a C64 user.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[jgrahn]

Dave, can I just say one thing? Nice work. Thank you.

Yes -- thank you for allowing me to tinker with a sane computer in the pre-Linux era. I've said it before and I'll say it again: most competent programmers I meet (in the embedded niche) turn out to have used an Amiga in their youth. I'm grateful for that, too.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Nethead]

I remember working at a small shop where I was the wonder kid because I could get at the 1.5 amp fuse INSIDE the transformer that was "protected" by the 2A fuse on the case. I think the only thing I ever saw wrong with with a C64 was in the power supply. For the C64's we would repair them by buying them from ToysRUs and returning them with the bad power supply, and we were a authorized Commodore shop. I also made nice cash re-aligning 1541 drives looking for the "cats eye" on my 'scope.

But I did love my SX64. Had that thing hacked to high hell. Burnt my own character ROM so I could tell 0,8,6 & G apart, Hacked the kernel ROM to set my colors on boot, and a few of Mike J. Henry's routines that I could call upon. Put a Wygant Scientific board (my design) that provided two 6522s and a phone interface with Teltone/SSI DTMF and call progress detectors, and a 6551 for real 1200 baud modem love.

Thanks for reminding me of my hippie days back in Portland, OR and all the fun I had back then with a bong, a stack of data books, free chip samples and a wire-wrap tool.

Now I'm 50, fat, buzz cut and route IP all day.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[QQBoss]

Don't forget moving the speed bump signs so the snow plows would scrape them off. And if anyone needed a good dunking, Commodore's entire marketing and management teams had to be first in line.

I miss the days of completely violating my job description to take the opportunity to come up and visit you guys, though I definitely don't miss what you used to think of was good Mexican food in those days :P.

Regards from China, Dave. I still have my 1M Agnus that you handed me in the lab, but the Amiga's couldn't make the trip with me.

Skipper Smith

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[drinkypoo]

Well, thanks for all your input, which really enriched my life. Yours is a name I will never forget.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[anubi]

I still have my old IMSAI 8080, but I had donated my C64 stuff to Goodwill during a move about 10 years ago.

I had ordered this thing from a firm in San Leandro, California, and when it arrived, it was a box full of bags of parts. When they said "kit", they meant "kit"! I soldered all the parts onto PCB's. I went whole hog and got the 21 slot version. S-100 bus. Memory at that time was 2102-1 1Kx1 Static ram. Each 4K of RAM required 1 S-100 card. There were dip switches on each memory card to address it. I also had 8K of 1702 EPROM. Took 100 volts to program these babies. They held 256 bytes each.

I still remember building the power supply to supply that voltage. I used a standard transformer isolator with rectifier, filter, and a gas regulator tube ( 0B2 I think ). It glowed purple when operating.

. Later, I acquired some of the latest technology and bought 32K of 2716.

Blank S-100 prototyping boards were readily available. So were the 7400 series of TTL chips. Even Radio Shack carried an impressive array of them. And wirewrap sockets. A genuine Gardner-Denver wirewrap gun was the thing to have, and the serious guy bought his wirewrap wire in at least 100 foot spools. You could get a rainbow of colors in 24 thru 30 gauge kynar. You quickly learned to get the good stuff - that cheap wire would drive you nuts...you couldn't strip it cleanly!

I had two 1K VideoRam cards in mine. Each gave me 16 lines of 64 characters, each would feed one NTSC RS-170 analog video monitor.

That was really high-tech back then. Those monitors were normally used by shop clerks snooping the cigarette rack and likker shelf.

The first UARTs were just coming out. Western Digital. I had one. It took 3 voltages sequenced up and down properly to keep from blowing the chip ( +5, -5, -12 ). It had something to do with keeping the silicon NMOS substrate biased properly. Messy. But it beat the boardful of TTL it replaced.

TTL ( transistor-transistor logic ) was the cat's meow back then. It replaced DTL ( diode-transistor logic ) and RTL (resistor-transistor logic) with significantly better noise immunity and fanout drive. By today's standards, it was quite a power hungry little beast. I can run a 20 MHz microcontroller today on the power needed by just one of those old 7400 quad NAND gate.

The biggest thing in the IMSAI is its power transformer. The power supply was rated 8V at 30 Amps. There were 7805 regulators, usually four of em, on each card to drop the 8V raw power to 5V clean power.

Forget software and operating systems. You wrote your own.

There were very few pre-made accessories. But thats what made this fun. I cannibalized a tape recorder ( Astrocom-Marlux 406 sold by Lafayette Radio ) because it had electromagnets to control the transport, and it was cheap. I wrote to the head directly with TTL tri-state logic with manchester code, and used a National Semiconductor preamp chip and a Signetics comparator to read the data back. It was a lot of fun getting that thing to work. I never got much over 12 Kb/sec at 7 1/2 IPS tape speed, but at least it was reliable and worked for many years. It was primitive, but it could load a file by filename by looking it up in a special file at the beginning of the tape. But it was a lot faster if I gave my program the starting block. Forget defrag. Once written to tape, it was MY job to make sure any file overwriting an existing file was of less or equal length!

It was fun playing with motors with the thing.

It was also possible to hook the computer up to a control system ( think gas turbine controller ) and fake out the controller to think there was actually a gas turbine being controlled. This allowed me to introduce "turbine malfunctions" to see how the controller would handle it without risk to some very expensive and dangerous mechanical apparatus.

The most precious program I had was my assembler. It and my rudimentary monitor/tape transport controller occupied my precious EPROM.

Those were the days.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[kmoser]

The Commodore PET was available well before the C-64. Sure, it listed for $795, but you could get a used one for around $500 at the time. And, it included a built-in monitor.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[drinkypoo]

Don't think so badly of your dad. Drinking my have been the only way for him to deal with your mom having male "friends" that were "friendly" enough to buy her kids $600 gifts.

...which didn't happen until after my mom divorced my dad for cheating on her. My dad is a piece of shit who not too long ago got drunk and drove over to my house to threaten myself and my lady. I share this information with the world because there's others out there in similar situations. It's seriously frightening when you think you might get into a fight with your drunk ex-marine father... someone is going to get hurt in a conflict like that, and probably very badly.

Anyone out there not sure if they want kids, don't fucking have them. If you're not committed then fuck off.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[AssholeMcGee]

The very first computer I had was an Amiga 500, (I said this before) gaming consoles only now are catching up the the Amiga, Windows bs was not the first system to have multi media, Amiga was the first. You cannot compare any computer to the commodore, or its Predecessor (Amiga) to anything today... This is why Bill Gates and his crap company are jokers.. It is a shame that the Amiga could not find programmers to keep other 3rd party hardware (printers, ect, ect,.) up to date.. One of the greatest computer companies had failed to gain support in numbers as well as investors... The company lives on, but is being abused by other companies only interested in there innovation.. Damn Shame!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[pnutjam]

She caught him reading about the the new Civ game coming out.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Belial6]

I don't know your mom, your dad, or your situation for real, but I do know that when you tell a story about how your dad was always drunk, and a male friend of your mother's gave her kid a $600 gift, it makes your dad sound like someone who was living with a whore. Like I said, I don't know your mom, dad or situation beyond your words here, but if your mother wasn't screwing around on your dad, you might want to consider how you describe them.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[Spugglefink]

It may be hard for kids today to believe, but there was a time when home computers were WAY out of the price range of anyone below the HIGH upper middle class.

How depressing. I apparently grew up in the HIGH upper middle class.

On the one hand, it's depressing to reflect on how I've struggled my whole life to earn as much in real dollars as Dad did in 1980, without ever quite achieving it. On the other, it's depressing to look at what Dad made then vs. now, and realize that while the fact that he makes less in real dollars today is sad, the fact that he makes 90% less after adjusting for inflation is just downright deflating.

What kind of pep talk am I supposed to give our kids, exactly? Hey kids, we had a pretty good life when I was your age, but your life sucks. Don't worry though, it's going to suck even worse for your children! In a few more generations, this family will be back to making dirt soup the way our ancestors did! Maybe we can move to China one day, and become part of a rich and prosperous society again.

Re:It was the computer for us commoner kids

[drinkypoo]

Only someone who was chronologically challenged would gather that from what I said. I am not responsible for what you [fail to] understand [or wish to insinuate in a manner common to all trolls of your ilk] but only for what I say. As you can see from the other comments, it's very much the other way around, but I guess if you're not very good with the English language, you could come to a completely idiotic conclusion.

First hands-on exposure...

[vikingpower]

...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[tgd]

...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?

Probably millions, or tens of millions. It wasn't mine -- I had used a few others, particularly the older Atari systems that predated the C64, but in the mid 80's, the C64 was a VERY common computer for school computer labs. *That* is where most people at that time would've gotten their first experience with a computer.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[oodaloop]

Seconded. We had a single C64 in our third grade class room in 1984, and it was an amazing experience. We got classes on using BASIC, and had to write programs for it for homework (meaning, write it out with pencil and paper, then type it in the next day one student at a time into the one computer). We used C64s in school for several more years. In 7th grade, we had a computer lab and every student had one. Good times, good times.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[vikingpower]

Yes, indeed: at school, through our math teacher, gawd have his soul

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[Nursie]

Yup, my Dad brought one home in the early 80s, can't have been long after launch. It's one of my ealiest memories. We had Frogger and "Sprite-Man" a pacman ripoff.

Thus started my long, slow descent to a life of software engineering.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[inviolet]

...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?

Yep, it launched my entire career. C64 handed down from my brother, wrote my first horrible games... then a Tandy 1000TL (XT286 clone from Radio Shack) handed down from my father, ran my first BBS... then Pascal in High School CS, and you know the rest. Wow. I wish I could shake the hands of the C64's designers.

I still have mine, it's in the attic now, but it still works.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[Defenestrar]

Many schools had the Apple ][ series (particularly the e) because of the special pricing Apple gave schools. (And school teachers). That academic program (with it's vendor / software / learning curve buy in) is probably what kept them floating through a few different phases in their history. There were a number of years, to my childhood perspective, that the only time you had an apple was if you worked with the schools or did graphics (gs and early to mid macs).

Did the Commodore ever have a similar program, I don't remember running across it, although I think I remember a few of those in some of the labs, but not anywhere near as many as the Apples? I bet the non x86 market would have shaped up differently if the Commodore was pushed harder into the schools.

I don't ever remember an Atari at school, I mostly remember them for the games I played at a friends house like Defender of the Crown, Bard's Tale (although that was multi-platform), and some sort of skim across the snow and shoot things game - Arctic Fox maybe?

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[tgd]

No idea if Commodore had that sort of a program -- at those prices, it hardly mattered.

Our school had a typing/computer lab with C64s, and a hand-ful of Apple II's on carts that classrooms could use.

Always struck me as stupid to do typing classes on a Commodore 64 -- the keyboard was just stupidly high off the table.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[gfxguy]

I started with an Atari 400 with the membrane keyboard. My best friend at the time made the choice to get an Atari, and after looking at pluses and minuses, I decided to get one, too. We both upgraded to 16k. We both ultimately bought a "real" keyboard you install.

By the time I went to college I had a 130xe... my first one had a memory problem, and I remember standing on line to return it at Crazy Eddie's in NY. The woman in front of me was having problems with her C64 and asked me "don't you think it would have been worth it to pay a few extra dollars for the better computer?" I asked her what she thought was better, and she said "well, this has 64k of memory; how much does yours have?" 128k. "Oh...."

Don't get me wrong; I liked both, they were different but very comparable, and I programmed on the C64s at school (better than most kids who actually owned one). I was never a fan-boy about it. I learned on PETs and had a lot of friends with Vic 20 and ultimately C64... it was all good. Good times.... good times.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[Canazza]

Definitely mine. Word up to the Flimbo's Quest posse.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[malkavian]

Commodore PET in 1978.. It belonged to a friend's dad.. I was completely taken with it, and so wished I could have something like that..
I had to wait 3 years for the release of the ZX81 before I persuaded my folks to buy a computer for me (and that was a used one). From there it was a VIC20 a few years after (sans cassette player, so I had no way to save what I wrote, so I ended up writing the games I wanted to play every time I wanted to play them!). Then came the BBC model B about a year afterwards (and that changed life! 32k ram,100k 5 1/4" floppy disk and ADC/DAC ports! Wow that really rocked my world back then). I still remember my folks being hesitant about buying it as they thought computing would be a 5 minute fad with me. So far, it's been nearly a 30 year fad since that point.
Since the '90s, it's all been PCs.. I do still miss the days of the diversity of home computers (Sinclair spectrums, Dragon 32, Memotech MTX, C64, Amiga, Atari, Oric and so on!).

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[Tim4444]

I had the same track. A 400 then a 130xe. After years of the 400 keyboard I was actually excited to learn how to type properly on a 'real' keyboard. My saving grace was that we had a copy of Action! so I learned to program in a relatively structured language instead of Basic. It sounds like I was a few years behind you (my systems were second hand) meaning that I was still young when we finally got a 386. To me it actually seemed like a step backwards - until we got a cdrom and a sound card at least.

I heard a lot of good things about the C64 but I never had access to one (in its prime) unfortunately.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[lwriemen]

We had a bunch of Commodore Pets at our school. We had a math teacher that started a programming class using those in the 1980-82 time frame.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[nurb432]

Not me. My first expirence was a home designed and built 8008 by a friends father. After being floored with it playing 'adventure', in about 6 months i had learned enough about electronics to build my own 8080 from scratch.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[gfxguy]

Cool... I bought Action! around my last year of High School and brought my computer with me to college; I programmed in Pascal there, but could essentially work the logic out in Action! before sitting at one of those abysmal terminals they had in the labs.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[peppepz]

...to a computer, EVER, was through the Commodore 64 for me. I suppose this is true for many thousands of us ?

The C64 is probably the reason I became a geek. I'm still not exactly sure if that was a blessing or a curse ;) .

The first memories about the C64 that I remember off the top of my head: the smell of cooked plastic it made when it reached temperature, the "FOUND #@#$%&$" message it would spit out if I tried to load a program after having brought the tape a bit too forward, the machine-gun noise that the floppy drive made when it encountered a damaged sector, before starting to blink beyond the flow of time (it usually happened when you had reached the last level of a multi-load game, and it had taken you half a day and an unrepeatable dose of luck to get there).

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[damnbunni]

The C-64's keyboard was about the same height as an electronic typewriter's - and far lower than most manual typewriters.

Commodore didn't really have an educational pricing program I'm aware of, but they were so much cheaper than Apple they didn't need one. They did have an ad campaign of 'Commodore puts more students on computers for less money', showing a long line of kids waiting to use a couple of Apples.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[matthewd]

Our high school had a small computer lab (a small room between classrooms probably originally meant as a teacher office/work area) with 4-5 C64s and an Apple II, IIRC. A couple of times I remember it made a great place for students to meet up and exchange pirated software.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[Schnapple]

Since the '90s, it's all been PCs.. I do still miss the days of the diversity of home computers (Sinclair spectrums, Dragon 32, Memotech MTX, C64, Amiga, Atari, Oric and so on!).

The diversity you pine for is currently around in the form of the mobile phone hardware/platform wars.

Re:First hands-on exposure...

[BitterOak]

Commodore PET in 1978.. It belonged to a friend's dad.. I was completely taken with it, and so wished I could have something like that..

Same here. My dad was a teacher and he took an 8 week computer course during which time he was able to take the computer home with him. It was an 8K PET Model 2001, which a cassette drive built right in, beside the too small keyboard. One of my happiest memories from childhood was playing Adventure on that computer. It was awful when he had to bring it back.

A few years later the schools in our district bought PET 4032 computers, and my dad was able to bring one home on the odd weekend. I remember how thrilling it was when he first brought home a disk drive and I could fit all the games I had on about a dozen tapes onto two floppy disks. And it was amazing how much faster they loaded.

When we finally bought a C64, I was blown away by the graphics and sound and its gaming capability in general (I never went back to my Atari 2600), but I also remember being disappointed in how slow the disk drive was compared to the PET.

But the C64 did give me many years of joy.

nostalgia

[alphatel]

This made me feel so good I had to run downstairs and cut a notch into a single-sided floppy to make it a DS DD. And damn those disk-notchers. A pen knife is the tool of the true hardware hacker!

Re:nostalgia

[elrous0]

Disc notcher? Save your money, Mr. Fancy Pants. Just use a hole punch.

Re:nostalgia

[Torinir]

Nail clippers, with the attached file. The multitool of choice.

Re:nostalgia

[na1led]

I remember using a knife or scissors to make my notches, look like a huge gaping hole on the side. I had to use duct tape to write protect them.

Re:nostalgia

[pluther]

Pen knife?

This was back in the days when a three-hole-punch was required equipment for every student. That's what most of us used.

A very hackable machine, I loved it.

[JaredOfEuropa]

I loved the C64 because of its hackable nature. Unlike my dads Digital Group and TRS80, the C64 was very accessible from both software and hardware perspective, and easy to mess with for a highschooler like I was back then. I built tape copiers,font cartridges and light control modules for the thing, and later on I started modifying the machine itself. I picked up the C64 Reference Guide early on, it had a fold-out schematic of the complete machine in the back. How cool is that?

Part of the charm was that it was not all that hard to know and understand the complete machine, yet with some outside-the-box tricks it could be made to do amazing stuff.

Re:A very hackable machine, I loved it.

[camperdave]

Part of the charm was that it was not all that hard to know and understand the complete machine, yet with some outside-the-box tricks it could be made to do amazing stuff.

Ditto with the Atari machines of the era. I remember reading through an annotated listing of the ROM/OS of the Atari. Today's computers with their quad cores, multi-stream hyper threading, caches upon caches, GPUs, various north and south bridge chipsets, etc, you have almost no hope of understanding what's really going on inside your machine.

Re:A very hackable machine, I loved it.

[jones_supa]

True for software too. In the old days, one passionate man could write a hit game, now it requires a big team to create something top-notch. Today each of us have to just specialize on some smaller part of the ensemble.

Re:A very hackable machine, I loved it.

[na1led]

I did a lot of Basic programming on my Atari 800. It was simple and easy to make it do what you wanted without writing a million lines of code. POKE 710,0 - Make the screen turn black. How many lines of code does it take a moderm PC do this?

SYS 49152

[sTERNKERN]

Still owning one... one day I showed it to my 4 and 6 year old sons. I expected some loud "Boo!"s as they do play games on my PC but they enjoyed it a lot :) I guess the C64 has a charm that does not fade with time.

Oh the Memories

[muppetman462]

Man, the C64...does it bring back the memories. Load "*", 8 I got one when I was 6th grade, and I would spend hours messing around with it. Then in middle school, we started getting them set up on a network. It was really awesome! I also had a modem for it, where I would have to dial a number on the phone, the put the hand set on it to communicate. Nothing like getting on the boards at 16k.

Re:Oh the Memories

[Dexter Herbivore]

I always used Load "*",8,1. First used a token ring (I think?) network on a C64, although my first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 1kb with the 16kb expansion cartridge. Oh, the memories.

Lets hear it

[will_die]

For the FASTLOAD Cartridge!!!!!

Re:Lets hear it

[Empiric]

Ah yes... what was it... six times faster than the baroque firmware of the 1541 drive?

I still remember as one of my first exposures to programming, going through the Assembly for the particularly lovely serial data transfer routine... since the 1541 and C64 happened to have the same CPU running at the same clock speed, the code bypassed using the clock line for timing at all, and blasted the data across using both the data line -and- the clock line simultaneously. Over the several hundred lines of Assembly for the transfer, the clock cycles per instruction were calculated -precisely- to ensure that the data was on the lines within, IIRC, a 4 clock-cycle window, so given the maximum number of cycles the C64 CPU and the 1541 CPU could be "out of sync" during the transfer, the data was assured to be there from the 1541 side when the C64 pulled the bits off.

It is the closest thing I've seen to -perfectly optimal- code in my 30-ish years of development since. Actually, as far as I can tell, this was in fact perfectly optimal given the hardware characteristics of the C64 and 1541.

As I'm thinking about it now... I think this was actually code from FCopy/4-Minute-Backup, but Fastload was comparable, and as I recall didn't require blanking the screen to turn off all interrupts during the data transfer at a slight speed penalty...

Ah, memories.

Re:Lets hear it

[Waffle Iron]

Commodore put together probably the only system in history where the floppy drive had as much horsepower than the main computer, but they somehow managed to make the thing as slow as a cassette tape. I can't figure out what they were thinking.

Surely it would have been faster and cheaper to control the floppy through a stripped-down controller chip connected to I/O signals from the main CPU the way the PC did it.

Re:Lets hear it

[Empiric]

I actually picked up a book back then giving a disassembly of the 1541 code with some line-level commentary--though, apparently, even the author of this book which was -only about- the 1541 internals couldn't figure out what the code was doing for page after page after page in some cases.

It was really horrific spaghetti code. I don't know what they were thinking either--unless it was some kind of "security through obscurity" notion that their IP would be protected by making the firmware 95% gratuitous nonsense functionality-wise, or, possibly, they actually wrote the firmware in a poorly-chosen high-level language and compiled it.

Re:Lets hear it

[hson]

Yes! Although today many of us use JiffyDOS instead. Compatible with more software than most other speeders. And plenty fast too. :)

Re:Lets hear it

[BitterOak]

For the FASTLOAD Cartridge!!!!!

The most serious design flaw of the C64 was the fact that you needed one of those! The PETs didn't have that problem. I always attributed the slower disk speed of the C64 to the fact that it was connected via a serial port vs. the parallel IEEE-488 interface on the PET. But the existence of the Fastload cartridge and software that did the same thing revealed that basically, the designers of the C64 serial bus simply screwed up. The C64 was a good machine, but it would have been an EXCELLENT machine if it didn't suffer from that one design flaw.

C64

[wildstoo]

The C64 was my 2nd computer (first was an Acorn Electron) and it's still my favourite computer of all time.

I still have a C128 with several disk drives, cartridges and other peripherals. I've even got a couple of flashable carts and an SD-card based reader with an ethernet port, so I guess I'd be classed as a Commodore enthusiast :P

Commodore were amazing. They should have remained on top, but a confluence of a factors drove them from the market.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone with fond memories of Commodore machines.

Re:C64

[DrgnDancer]

Updated second edition. The one in the GP is out of print and rather expensive. May have to grab this.

Re:C64

[RicktheBrick]

Person 1 has a commodore 64 and a game cartridge. Person 2 has a the fastest pc with a ssd and 8 Gbytes of very fast ram memory and a game on the ssd. Now they both turn them on at the same time. Which one will be playing his game first? The answer is the commodore 64 and it won't even be close. So after 30 years the commodore 64 is still the most kid friendly computer. The commodore 64 will still introduce you to basic programming something most modern computer will not. I found a commodore 64 with disk drive in the trash. I gave my commodore 64 and 128 away but I still have the commodore 64 that I found. I started out programming a computer that had a whopping 16k bytes of memory. I once worked on a program that consisted of two boxes of 80 column IBM cards. It would not work until I found the two cards that somehow were interchanged.

Re:C64

[Bitmanhome]

A better test would be: "Person 1 has a Commodore 64 and a game on eight floppies." Much better match.

Obigatory troll for UK readers

[itsdapead]

(Sneaks up to the C64 in Dixons)

10 PRINT "THE BBC MODEL B IS BETTER!"
20 GOTO 10:REM ** FOR STARTERS, BBC BASIC COULD DO THIS AS A REPEAT/UNTIL FALSE LOOP **

Oh, the biting wit of the 1980s teenager...

Re:Obigatory troll for UK readers

[TheRaven64]

It was better, but it was also more expensive. I bought an old MTX-512 (now there's a rare 8-bit machine) second hand a few years ago, and it came with a load of magazines from that era. The C-64 was significantly cheaper than even the BBC Model A. And you needed a BBC Master to have as much RAM as the C64. The BBC had a (much!) better dialect of BASIC, better graphics, better sound, and far better I/O, but did not have a better price. Unless you were a school in the '80s, then the government would pay something like 50% of the cost of a computer that met a strict set of requirements (including a programming environment with support for structured programming) that the BBC met and the C64 didn't.

Re:Obigatory troll for UK readers

[sqldr]

better sound

It wasn't even close. 1 noise and 3 tone generators. The SID was fully programmable and had filters and all sorts of goodness, while the BBC just beeped.

Re:Obigatory troll for UK readers

[sqldr]

Incidentally, if you do want your BBC to sound as good as a C64, you could always get it on a board:

http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/BeebSID/

I guess the I/O did win.

Re:Commodore Vic-20

[wildstoo]

The VIC chip (as opposed to the VIC-II in the C64) was far less flexible and capable. Also, the SID chip far exceeded the abilities of the sound synthesis capabilities of the VIC.

It's fair to say that both machines had a similar heritage, and similar design philosophy, but to say that the C64 is just a Vic-20 with a memory expansion isn't fair to the engineers and designers at Commodore. The VIC-II and the SID were a substantial leap forward, while maintaining the price-point that made the C64 so popular.

Strange bug...

[mseeger]

My C64 (Serial #600) has a very strage bug: If you started a line at the end of the screen, entered more than 80 chars and backspaced into the previous line, it executed a "run" and the program would be non-interruptible. Used this to prevent my brother from stopping my programs and using the C64 for himself.

Re:Strange bug...

[MonsterTrimble]

It's a feature!

Sorry, I couldn't resist!

Re:Strange bug...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, that was a bug - once it locked up when typing, the way out was to type "#" (shift-3 I believe), then it would tell you to PRESS PLAY ON TAPE (you need a datasette for this of course), then press RUN-STOP to stop the tape. Then you're okay.

I Spendt Hours Looking for the "Punter Protocol"

[MikeyC01]

The C-64 was my second computer (the VIC-20 being the first) and my first experience with the on-line world (and a modem that used the sound output from the computer to generate touch tones). Not knowing what I was doing I remember spending hours looking for something with the Punter Protocol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punter_(protocol) ) so I could partake in downloading of software...

The C-64 was later replaced with a C-128 (and a 3.5" floppy drive *gasp*) which turned into my first attempt at running a BBS.

Ah the memories

load"*",8,1

[lennier1]

I probably owe my career to one of those.

I was 4 years old

[netsavior]

My dad's friends couldn't believe he was letting his CHILDREN touch a COMPUTER, he would tell them "this is the future, these are life skills now". I learned to load programs before I could write by hand. My older brother and I typed in a game from a magazine. The rest is history, I have been a hacker ever since, it's how I make my living and how I pass the time.

I was very fortunate to be born at a time when computers were suddenly affordable.

An important machine in history

[tekrat]

The number or programmers who cut their teeth on the C=64 is huge. The number of people who did hardware hacks is enormous.

But what's most impressive about the Commodore 64 is the number of people who continue to use it, or pieces of it to this day. The SID chip is still used by electronic musicians, and the number of people who either emulate the machine on other hardware or create new hardware to expand it's original capabilities is simply astounding.

While the exact number of C=64's sold is debatable (some say 33 million, others about 21 million), it's clearly the "Model T" (or Volkswagen Beetle) of computers, having sold MORE than any other single "PC" model, ever.

Commodore 64

[Siggy200]

Purchased a Commodore 64 and the tape drive at Sears. Learned some about Basic programing but never enough to encourage me to lean other programing languages. Overall experience was great, Eventually I sent for a interface device that would connect the Commodore 64 to my ham radio and decode Radio Teletype over the air called ACT?. I thought for that time the program that came with the interface the graphics were excellent. I believe the RTTY program had a 'cross-hair' tuning indicator, much like a oscilloscope used on RTTY Terminal Units that used vacuum tubes: http://www.qsl.net/n4xy/Images/Electronics/Ham_Radio/RTTY/rtty_electrocom-402_fsk_tu.jpg

Re:Commodore 64

[Siggy200]

Purchased a Commodore 64 and the tape drive at Sears. Learned some about Basic programing but never enough to encourage me to learn other programing languages. Overall experience was great, Eventually I sent for a interface device that would connect the Commodore 64 to my ham radio and decode Radio Teletype over the air called ACT?. I thought for that time the program that came with the interface the graphics were excellent. I believe the RTTY program had a 'cross-hair' tuning indicator, much like a oscilloscope used on RTTY Terminal Units that used vacuum tubes: http://www.qsl.net/n4xy/Images/Electronics/Ham_Radio/RTTY/rtty_electrocom-402_fsk_tu.jpg

I believe the Radio Teletype interface device for the Commodore 64 was a Microlog AIR-1: http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/3343/photo11t.jpg Image courtesy of antiquekid3 posted on The Vintage Computer Forums December 8th, 2009, 05:47 PM

An important eye-opening machine

[GrahamCox]

I was 20 when the C64 came on the scene, and was an apprentice electronics engineer, mostly in the analogue/RF field. Digital logic was something I understood, but microprocessors, as such, were not. I bought a C64 because I'd used a PET and thought BASIC would be something worth learning, with half a mind on a game idea I had. BASIC soon proved useless, so I turned to an assembler cartridge (bought rather expensively at the time) called MIKRO64. This unlocked the full available power of the machine, but more importantly, it made me understand how a microprocessor actually worked. Back then, the whole architecture was easily understood down to the last register, plus the 64 came with full schematics! This proved to be a most important eye-opener because in the industry I worked in, within a few years, nearly all designs had moved to having a processor at their heart, and programming replaced the old-school logic and analogue design I'd come up with. Without the 64, chances are I would not have been able to keep up in electronics, and eventually go into programming as a career.

Commodore 64 is still far from dead

[JoeCommodore]

And the Commodore 64 community is still far from dead.

There are several hardware projects in active development on the C64 - including a few forms of solid state and HD mass storage (IDE64, SD2IEC, 1541 Ultimate, MMC64, EasyFlash), Internet connectivity (The Final Ethernet/Retro Replay), Commodore in the cloud (commodoreserver.com), hardware accelerators/enhancements (Turbo Chameleon 64).

Besides many of the mas storage mediums being cross-platform usable, there are a few conversion methods to get files to/from the C64 (ZoomFloppy, x1541 cables and utilities, and commodore server are two notable ones)

Programming continues on the 64, including stock c64 demos (the demo coder are still amazing us with what they can crank out of a 1Mgz 64), GEOS related productivity, music, and most notably games. For the game users there are now popular 4 player adapters that games have been developed and a couple involving Playstation controls (the guitar heroish Shredz64 comes to mind)

If developers want the luxury of a modern computer there are cross assemblers (i.e. xa 6502) and now also a textBASIC conversion utility: C64List

Regional commodore gatherings are not uncommon in North America (Commodore Vegas Expo, C4 Commodore Expo, Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention, TPUG World of Commodore Expo) as well as Europe and other parts around the globe (someone comment with a list of those) which includes those cool demo scene parties

Re:Commodore 64 is still far from dead

[MonsterTrimble]

the guitar heroish Shredz64 comes to mind

My first thought: What sadist thought that would be a good idea?!? My second: What does it look like? Answer to both: http://www.toniwestbrook.com/archives/category/development-logs/shredz64

3.5k was available for RAM in the Vic-20

[KatchooNJ]

Yes, it was marketed as having 5k, but only 3.5k was actually available as RAM, since the other 1.5k was used for video processing. I still own a Vic-20 and it didn't take long for me to get the 16k expansion cartridge to make the thing far more usable. Eventually, I got a C64, which was an awesome step-up. I still own that one, as well! :-D

Re:3.5k was available for RAM in the Vic-20

[berniemne]

I envy you. I sold all of my C64 stuffs. Tapes, floppies everything. I needed all the money I could get to buy my new shiny XT lol.

Re:3.5k was available for RAM in the Vic-20

[metalgamer84]

Speaking of little RAM, this reminds me of my Mattel Aquarius that I still have. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel_Aquarius

4K of RAM and Microsoft BASIC. Good times.

Re:3.5k was available for RAM in the Vic-20

[na1led]

I too made the mistake in selling all my Commodore equipment. Boy I had everything too, C64 , C128 , 1541 and 1571 drives, modems, monitors, hundreds of disks. Wish I had it all back.

Re:3.5k was available for RAM in the Vic-20

[ganjadude]

Its funny this article came out now, I had just this past week been redoing my computer room and unpacked all my C64 stuff. Set it up and its still in working condition. I have a 64 and a 128D, tape cart readers, a modem, 5 1/4 drives original monitor,expansion slots, books and magazines that take an entire 5 foot dresser and 19 banker boxes full of software. Some I had growing up, most I got from my school in 2001 (wound have been a junior at the time, I remember taking the CCNA that year.) they were going to throw it all way, 2 trips with the jeep and its been mine ever since.

Re:3.5k was available for RAM in the Vic-20

[Lorens]

c64 emulators work really well. Just the other day I finished the first game I ever got. It was too difficult, but with snapshots I finally managed to see and hear the final show!

Re:3.5k was available for RAM in the Vic-20

[amiga3D]

I've still got my C64 I bought at the exchange at Keesler AFB in Mississippi. I took that thing all over the world along with the 1541 disk drive that I got with it for $199 each. I bet I turned it off and on dozens of times a day for 6 years when in 89 I bought an Amiga to take it's place. I took it out of the closet in 2000 to find an old recipe for my wife that she had placed on disk years earlier. After printing the recipe I left the computer out and my son came in from school and said "The C64! Leave that out." He played with it for several weeks remembering all the games he had played as a little fellow. The charm never goes away. Something about those quirky little things just endeared them to people.

Dealers Made The Difference

[echusarcana]

As many here have correctly pointed out, the C64 was a very accessible computer which could be a little challenging to program (all those chip bitwise register operations were dreadful) at least you could do cool things with it. And you could probably get instructions from a magazine on how to do it. And your school probably had several of them if your parents couldn't afford one. It continued the tradition of the Commodore PET - a fun little computer which was a great teaching tool.

Apple at this time was pursuing the business market - something they could no hope to compete in - and was nowhere. Almost no one I knew had one and they were vastly overpriced. The great myth of Apple is that they somehow pioneered the computer. They were trivial at the time.

Commodore had a great dealer network in every small town. It was the 1-on-1 customer service at this time that was important in making the difference. With the purchase of a machine you also got somewhere to ask questions, buy accessories and magazines, and most importantly somewhere to network with other users.

Re:Dealers Made The Difference

[sshirley]

I TOTALLY agree with that! I think it was really the time period because this dealer phenomenon wasn't limited to Commodore machines. I had an Atari 800XL and I LOVED going to my local dealer. God bless my parents because the dealer was just far enough away where they had to drive me there. :-) But It was great for demos of new products, buying Atari specific magazines, and yes, meeting other enthusiasts. These dealers also sponsored local user groups. That's a thing that has continued to today and it's a great thing.

VIC tricks

[art6217]

C64 had a quite large "border" or margin around the 320x200 frame, to avoid nonlinear distortion at CRT's edges and probably to make the resolution more manageable for a 64k machine. The programmers discovered a trick, though, of disabling the border -- when VIC was drawing the 25th text line, the mode was changed to 24 lines for a while, and a similar trick was performed with the number of columns. This made VIC never "see" the begin of either the "vertical" or the "side" border. And -- sprites everywhere, including the border! Add raster tracing for putting sprites just where a pixel is drawn on a CRT, and you have tens of sprites instead of the "factory" eight ones.

A very grokkable machine, I loved it.

[tverbeek]

One of the things I loved about the C64 (even more so in retrospect) is the fact that entire address space of it (including the ROM OS) was mapped and documented. The background color of the display could be read from this byte in RAM. The character set was bitmapped in that address space. You could generate a sound by poking values to these addresses. You could grok the whole damn machine, which is simply impossible for any human dealing with a 2012 desktop (or even pocket) computer.

Re:A very grokkable machine, I loved it.

[Darth Snowshoe]

Amen to that! And I remember I lived in mortal fear of someday poking the fatal address that could do (allegedly) actual damage to your C64 - it's amazing to me now that I no longer remember what that address is.

God bless (and a big thanks) to the people who made and programmed the C64. I surely would have chosen a different path without it.

Interactive video game in one "line"

[RichMan]

0 poke 32788+p,65; p=p+peek(151)*2-1; print tab(rnd()*37),"###"; if (peek(32788+p)==32) goto

((Not sure of exact syntax and rnd() operation, it fit in the character limit using the short forms of the commands.

p starts at zero of course. clear the screen. scroll to the bottom. RUN

An "A" is your space ship. Starts in the middle of the top of the screen. It moves left or right depending on if shift is pressed or not. Update of P based on shift detected with the peek.
A block "###" is put in a random location at the bottom of the screen and screen scrolled. so it looks like the "###" are appearing at the bottom and flying up.
The game ends if your A would hit a ###. Use the shift key to avoid them as they fly up from the bottom.

Commodore 128

[geoffrobinson]

I was given the Commodore 128. Just missed out on all the ability to reminisce.

Still Very Active User Community

[Leif_Bloomquist]

There is is still a very active user community centered around the Commodore 64 (and to a lesser extent, the VIC-20 and other Commodore machines). There are active user groups, vendors, new hardware and software under development, you name it. Yes, in 2012.

Check out this link for a partial list of what's out there!

Modern C64X Giveaway

[dammy]

Modern Commodore C64X (dual core D525 with nVidia ION2) contest until March 31st: http://www.commodore-amiga.org/en/forum/34-site-news/11318-commodore-amgaorgs-first-great-giveaway

Re:Modern C64X Giveaway

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

Modern Commodore C64X (dual core D525 with nVidia ION2) contest until March 31st: http://www.commodore-amiga.org/en/forum/34-site-news/11318-commodore-amgaorgs-first-great-giveaway

It would be great if one could actually REGISTER to post on that site and enter the contest. Firefox/Chrome/IE8 all say that "Session expired or cookies not enabled" when trying to register. This happens even after all security measures in the browser are removed and IE8 is dumbed down to minimal security.

Re:Modern C64X Giveaway

[dammy]

Site was just moved to a new server yesterday. Admin has been notified, thanks for noting the issue.

Re:Modern C64X Giveaway

[The Archon V2.0]

Nice, but I think a lot of us could build a Mini-ITX-sized *nix box if we wanted one that bad. Other than the nostalgic shape (and being a prize for a contest) I don't see it as being any different than something the hardware sorts here slap together on weekends.

Re:Modern C64X Giveaway

[nurb432]

That isn't a modern commodore. its "yet another PC". its just in a 'unique' case.

*yawn*

I miss my C64!

[TheJodster]

This was my most prized possession. When I asked for a C64 for Christmas, I never thought I would actually get it. $200 does not grow on trees! Then the presents were placed under the tree and one of them was the size and shape of a boxed C64! Could it be? What was in that box? Christmas morning was one of the happiest days of my life. It was torture waiting for Christmas that year. It was just the C64... no tape or disk drive. I could care less. I had a stack of Compute! magazines ready to go. I typed in my own games out of the magazine. I would leave it turned on for days to enjoy the program because once I turned it off, it was gone.

I once typed in a program for three days to see it generate a three dimensional donut on my TV. It took the program hours to calculate and display that donut. When I finally got a tape drive I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I didn't have to type in my game every time I wanted to play. I could save it and then mangle the code figuring out how to adjust the programming to create my own game without fear of screwing up the code so badly it wouldn't run anymore.

I feel sorry for people who didn't get the opportunity to enjoy the early computers. Things were so simple and fun back then. Now when a kid gets a computer there is so much information to absorb in order to become an expert that one doesn't even know where to start. Back then, you just needed the Commodore 64 Reference book purchased from your local book store and everything you could ever want to know was at your fingertips.

Re:I miss my C64!

[JohnnyLocust]

I once typed in a program for three days to see it generate a three dimensional donut on my TV. It took the program hours to calculate and display that donut.

I remember that one: COMPUTE! ISSUE 48 / MAY 1984 / PAGE 58 http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue48/3d_plotting.php

I'm guessing many know already but...

[RanceJustice]

I didn't have a C64 as a kid, moving straight from the whole Apple series and Atari, to 486 DX66 (a monster of gaming power at its inception). However, for those with C64 memories, Commodore isn't dead - check out http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx - you can actually buy a perfect replica C64 keyboard/chassis in which to build a modern PC, or you can buy a prefab one with either Intel Atom or Sandy-Bridge based kit (personally, I'm a little underwhelmed by the hardware chosen in both the prefabs, you can probably do better yourself). Commodore has gone even further by creating a new Linux distribution "Commodore OS Vision" which gives a full featured Linux system (based on Mint) and has all the old Commodore software built in and accessible as well, free to download for anyone (which will spur Linux adoption as well). So if you want to create a retro gaming system, a unique HTPC, or just want to dive into the old C64 software your remember, give it a look! Cool that they're introducing fun, user-controlled computing to a new generation and making a fleshed out Linux distribution that pays homage to the old ways while showing how far we've come.

My Nostalgia and Gateway Drug

[tungstencoil]

I cut my teeth on a Commodore PET that was donated to my school as part of a grant program. Most kids (and teachers) ran away, and I couldn't keep my hands off it. I actually had my mother drop me off at school early in order to get a couple of hours on it each morning. At night, I would hand-write out more program code.

By the time the VIC-20 and C64 rolled around I was hooked. We were poor and couldn't afford them, but a teacher at school brought his C64 in. From there, I saved (and saved... and saved) and eventually got into the Atari line for the better (to me) graphics and gaming potential. I lusted after the Apple ][ but certainly couldn't afford that.

Ahhhh, memories of direct memory manipulation, no look-asides, no threads. Back in my day....

Those were the days...

[teeloo]

I was in high school at the time and did all my essays on the C64. Boy did it make things so much easier than using a typewriter (or pen and paper for that matter!). The only problem was that you couldn't type more than about 10 pages at a time before it ran out of memory. Most of my assignments ended up being done in parts...

Re:I wish the Atari 800 got more love.

[sshirley]

Agreed! Myself I had an 800XL. Atari had a great line of computers. I personally think it beat the C64, but both were of a great time period.

Re:I wish the Atari 800 got more love.

[tungstencoil]

I'm with you as well.

Quick bookmarks

[Stavr0]

http://www.cc65.org/ Free compiler for 65xx CPU targets
http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net/ Multi-platform emulation of all Commodore 8bit computers

Libraries and repositories
  http://www.gb64.com/index.php
  http://www.lemon64.com/

FD drive

[Jimpqfly]

"The 1541 disk drive helped speed load times up a significant amount"

I think this floppy drive was even slower than the tape drive....

Seconded

[maroberts]

Nail clippers, with the attached file. The multitool of choice.

Indeed; I still use them as wire strippers and cutters....

Re:Seconded

[sqldr]

Nail clippers, with the attached file. The multitool of choice.

Indeed; I still use them as wire strippers and cutters....

But, being slashdot, not as nail clippers, right? :-)

Re:Seconded

[maroberts]

Nail clippers, with the attached file. The multitool of choice.

Indeed; I still use them as wire strippers and cutters....

But, being slashdot, not as nail clippers, right? :-)

No but the file is useful for keeping my teeth pointy..... :-)

The main peculiarity was bang/buck

[Sloppy]

There were beefier computers (who didn't want a Lisa?) and cheaper computers (who did want a TS-1000?), but especially in 1983 as the price fell from around $600 to under $200, it got into the sweet spot. That got the machines into people's hands, and the best computer is the one you have.

Would you like to buy a cute furry trumble?

[itsdapead]

And you needed a BBC Master to have as much RAM as the C64.

That's probably why those lucky C64 users got "The Blue Danube" docking computer music and cute furry trumbles when they eventually got Elite... Not fair.

this

[Anonymous Coward]

load "*",8,1

Depends on where you lived

[nurb432]

I found a large part of which 8bit machine you cut your teeth on was more about where you lived and what your friends had, than anything else. And of course what age you were when they came out.

When you boil it down, even tho we all fought like cats and dogs 'ours was better', most of the machines of the same generation were pretty similar and ultimately it didn't matter if you had a Commodore, or an Atari, Apple, TRS-80 or a host of others.

Re:Commodore Vic-20

[IceNinjaNine]

The VIC chip (as opposed to the VIC-II in the C64) was far less flexible and capable. Also, the SID chip far exceeded the abilities of the sound synthesis capabilities of the VIC.>

Agreed on these points.. but damned I wish they'd have put 40 column video on the Vic... I think they had a prototype Vic-I variant that never made it into production to do this. Programming in 22 columns was a bastard. :) Then again, having played with front panel switches on old DEC machines I guess it was still a luxury.

Jim Butterfield, Karl Hildon, Brad Templeton

[lerxstz]

I owe it all to those guys, especially Butterfield (RIP). That guy was like a hero to us back then.

A C64, Jim Butterfield's memory maps, Brad Templeton's PAL assembler and The Transactor Anthology (thanks too Karl J.H. Hildon). Man, what computing fun! I spent thousands of hours on C64's (and the PET too). I think I have that PET green phosphor glow permanently burned into my brain.

Jim Butterfield was a major force for that platform. Without his detailed hardware and ROM breakdowns of the machine, I don't think it would have reached the audience it did.

Brings back lots of memories

[dculp]

Wow, 30 years! It is hard for me to believe it has been that long, the C64 and the C64 community was a HUGE part of my youth. I first got in to computing in the very late 70's or extremely early 80's. I learned BASIC before I even had computer and began writing text based BASIC games in a notebook before I received my first computer. I begged my parents for a computer for Christmas and in 1982 I received a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a with no storage device. I spent many hours typing in programs and not turning the machine off so my work was not wasted. Eventually I got a tape drive but the TI kicked the bucket about 8 months after I got it.

I desperately wanted a C64 with a 1541 disk drive but back then the whole package was close to $1000.00 and my parents couldn’t afford it. My dad suggested I get a job and made a deal with me; if I could earn 1/2 of the money he would front the other 1/2. I was 13-14 so job options were limited, we lived in an exceptionally large trailer park near the army base my dad was stationed at and they had LOTS of vacant lots with overgrown grass. They agreed to pay me $3.00 a yard to keep them mowed. I worked my tail off and by the end of the summer I had made more than enough money and was able to get the C64 and 1541 along with a printer, joysticks and a few games.

I LOVED that C64 and quickly fell into the C64 scene in whatever area we were in. I went to copy parties, we spent uncountable hours in my room playing C64 games and programming. Not long after I got my C64 I discovered BBS's and spent an enormous amount of hours calling BBS's to download the latest C64 games and programs and play the latest BBS games.

However, my first love was always programming. Although I collected a large number of C64 games, I spent most of my time exploring the machine. Delving in to it, learning everything it could do. I had the C64 programmer’s reference and lots of magazines and other materials and devoured them. Coding was my creative outlet, I was not a great writer, I couldn’t draw, but coding was how I explored my creative side and it absolutely lit me up, it fired something deep within me. I LOVED hitting problems and spending every waking hour trying to solve that problem and once you did, it was the greatest feeling.

Around 1985 I decided to code my own BBS software and spent a few years working on it and eventually got my own BBS up and running on dual 4040 CBM drives around 1988 or 89 in Norman, OK.

The C64 was special (along with many of the old 8-bit machines) in that you HAD to know something about the machine to operate it, and when you booted it up, it booted into a development environment, begging you to write your own programs. Todays machines don’t have that same appeal.

One thing that bothers me is that the C64 is largely ignored in the retelling of the history of the PC. The C64 absolutely demolished the sales of the Apple ][ and every other 8 bit machine of that era. Commodore beat Apple to market with their PET machine. The Apple ][ was not as big of a hit has most documentaries want you to believe. The C64 may have been more important in that era than the Apple ][ ever was but most retellings of that era leave the C64 out completely.

I am a teacher today (middle school science) and I look around and I don’t see kids excited about programming because most don’t realize you can. The machines that are on the market today come with no development environment, in addition, the complexities of coding in an object-oriented GUI world turn many kids away. There are easier options available, but you have to go out and actively search for them and as a young kid you might not find them.

I run a robotics club and teach kids as young as 6th grade C and they LOVE it. I started an interactive fiction club and taught kids TADS and they ATE IT UP!!! You would think in todays world of high definition 3D graphics kids would be bored to tears with a text adventure game but the

Re:Brings back lots of memories

[na1led]

That was the day when Users controlled the computers, now it's the computers controlling us, and the generation today have become brain dead because of it.

Re:Brings back lots of memories

[2DGamer]

Excellent story. Very similar to mine. I first got hooked on computers because of seeing the early arcade games that first came out in hotel lobbies (Asteroids, Galaga and Pac-Man in particular). When I first saw these I wanted to imitate what I saw, and soon learned that it was possible in the home PC scene. I remember agonizing over which to save my money for: A Trash80, Apple II or a C64. The C64 won hands down based on price and features, and I didn't even know very much about it. I even remember feeling a little proud when my parents saw the Commodore commercial about the young man who was trying to get a job based on how many space aliens he shot down, and how he should have gotten a C64.

This was about 1982, and I am a coder today because of the doors this computer opened in my mind. I too had to mow lawns to earn enough to buy a used C64 for $180 from another kid that was moving. I used it exclusively with a $80 black and white TV but I didn't care that I didn't have color (I didn't know what I was missing actually). I also discovered later the 3rd voice was blown out from my SID chip, but I still loved it. One of my greatest regrets is selling it to “upgrade” to an Amiga 500, which never had the same charm. I just could not own it and understand it the same way I could my C64.

Re:Brings back lots of memories

[tdknox]

Have you looked at techBASIC from Byteworks? It's a great, easy to use BASIC that runs directly on the iPhone and iPad to let you write programs on it.

Re:Commodore Vic-20

[nurb432]

A lot like the people that started with an Atari 400 when the 800 came out.

Re:I wish the Atari 800 got more love.

[nurb432]

Atari had a marketing problem. This is partiality what doomed them in the end. ( that and when the 'brothers' took over and ran it into the ground ).

For the most part if you weren't in the Atari 'community' you never heard of the machines. I heard "what they make computers?" far too often.

Still easy to maintain/repair the C-64 and its ilk

[Anonymous Coward]

As a previous poster noted, there is still a BIG worldwide user community for the Commodore 64, along with the PET, VIC-20, 128, SX-64, Plus 4, and Amiga lines. In fact, I'm told there will be a Commodore 8-bit maintenance/repair clinic at this year's Vintage Computer Festival East (May 5-6, New Jersey) with the clinic led by ex-Commodore engineer Bil Herd who designed the 128. The event's web site is just being built but details should be online in the next few days; meanwhile they've got a Facebook page. Also noteworthy: a few years ago the keynote speaker was Chuck Peddle, who designed the MOST 6502 chip! That's on YouTube in four parts. It starts around 16 minutes into part 1.

Fast Load Cartridge

[na1led]

Couldn't live without the "Fast Load Cartridge", what a difference it made in loading times. I wonder how many Epix sold?

Good times, indeed. Especially the instant boot.

[scottbomb]

My family's first computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000. I then began to lust after the Apple IIe at school. A friend of mine turned me on to the Commodore 64 and I never looked back. Truely an awesome machine. I still own one today with (2) 1541 drives and a 1702 monitor along with a box of real floppies. And it all STILL WORKS (even the floppies!). I built an interface (easy instructions online) to connect a 1541 to an modern PC which allows one to actually download real C=64 software on the internet and then put it on a floppy. Incredible!

While modern computers are much more powerful, I often wonder why we have to wait for them to boot. Why don't the mobo makers just put an EEPROM on the board and OS makers give us an OS we can load into the EEPROM? Instant boot up (like my C=64) would then be possible. All HD space and memory would be free for apps and data. Upgrades would require a simple re-load (like a BIOS flash) of the EEPROM. Yet here we are, still loading our OS like we did in the DOS days.

Basic

[heson]

I want a easily accessible interpreter in every "computer" with a screen and a keyboard.

Like an STB, game console, yotube able tv or web browser. Load and save programs to pastebin or similar.

Re:Basic

[BeforeCoffee]

Clubcompy.com has an easily accessible interpreter for all as a main goal. I'd add that it's BASIC-like language and virtualized graphics engine makes it pretty easy to write fun games.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of clubcompy.com.)

Re:1541 Code

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1541 was essentially an extra C64 without the SID and video chips. Epyx sold a lot of FASTLOAD cartridges because somewhere in the bowels of the 1541 firmware, some joker messed up the CRC checksum code -- this caused the stock 1541 to think every sector was bad, re-reading each sector six times before finally accepting it. Speed-wise, a stock 1541 was barely faster than the tape drive but it was a lot more reliable -- and random access.

Re:LOAD *,8,1

[scottbomb]

? SYNTAX ERROR

LOAD"*",8,1

Fixed that for ya. :D

M.U.L.E.

[Lashat]

One of the best games in my childhood and experienced on the C64.

Re:Good times, indeed. Especially the instant boot

[LocalH]

Go get an SSD. Probably the closest thing that's available to what you want.

Second Computer...

[mlauzon]

The C64 was the second computer I ever used in my life, the first was of course the CVic-20, with it oh so glorious tape drive. I own a working C64, currently, I only own one game for it, will eventually have to approach the PET Computer Club of Toronto to buy some C64 games as well as a better controller.

Re:Second Computer...

[petteyg359]

First computer for me. I've still got it in the closet, along with a 1651-II and a 1541 (which needs a replacement chip), three tape drives, a 40-column color TV monitor, and a ton of disks and cartridges I need to back up and submit to the archive.

My first computer and sneaking

[CayceeDee]

The Commodore 64 was the first computer I ever had. I convinced my mother and grandmother I just had to have a computer. I got to pick it out at K-mart and they took it home and wrapped it up. I, of course, couldn't wait. I offered to clean the living room. While all the stuff was loaded into the bedroom I opened the box, unpacked the computer, put bricks in the box, sealed it up and put it back under the tree. I kept it in my room and took it out after everyone was asleep. I repeated the living room cleaning routine and reversed the process. I was so excited to be able to finally play with my computer on Christmas Day. I was amazingly good for someone who had never actually used a computer.

Re:I wish the Atari 800 got more love.

[sunspot42]

The 800 was also much better-built than anything Commodore ever produced. The inside of that thing was a big hunk of stamped steel. We used to joke that in case of nuclear war we'd just climb inside of a friend's 800.

Of course the cost of producing it kept the price high. The suits at Warner Communications tried to replace it with the less expensive to manufacture Atari 1200, but they didn't lower the price as much as they should have, bungled the video output and had a couple of compatibility issues which killed its sales in the market just as the Commodore 64 came out. Terrible timing.

By the time they got the cheaper, smaller, more compatible Atari 800XL into the stores it was too late - Commodore's 64 was already the best-selling computer and Jack Tramiel had used that volume as a weapon in his price war with TI, Atari, Tandy and Coleco. He forced TI out of the market entirely, nearly bankrupted Coleco (granted, all the hardware issues with their Adam didn't help), halted Tandy's growth and left Atari an also-ran in a market it had pioneered.

If he hadn't been forced out of Commodore and ended up at Atari, that probably would have been the end of their 8-bit systems. Fortunately, Tramiel was able to bring financial discipline to Atari, slash the cost of production of the 800XL and 1050 drives, and launched a successful revival of the system in 1984 at a price point comparable to the C64's, making Atari the only US company to successfully challenge Commodore on their own turf with similar hardware.

Bought Atari enough time to complete and launch the ST series, although in hindsight they would almost certainly have been better off focusing their efforts on a next-gen console, instead. They never really had the resources to compete effectively with Apple, let alone Wintel, but they could have conceivably strangled Nintendo in the cradle and retained their dominant position in console gaming.

Re:Good times, indeed. Especially the instant boot

[Hatta]

Sure, the C64 booted instantly. But if you wanted to do anything with it, you had to wait 5 minutes for the 1541 to read the disk.

"Cheap" ZX81 brought computing to UK masses

[Dogtanian]

The only good thing (IMO) about the ZX81 was the cheap, cheap price, otherwise it was a pretty awful machine.

The Vic-20 would have looked a poor second choice too if you had the money and inclination to splash out significantly more on an Atari 800. So yeah, the ZX81's selling feature undoubtedly *was* its "cheap, cheap price", but that doesn't make it the trashy, worthless machine the phrase implies.

In fact, the ZX80 was the first computer under £100 in the UK, and the ZX81 was significantly cheaper still, bringing computing to the masses here. It had its limitations- those were undeniable- but it still fulfilled the basic essentials of a hobbyist home computer. (Though I wouldn't ever claim it was a great choice for arcade games or business computing!)

The likes of the Vic 20 was never that cheap here.

I don't know if you're American, but I do note that Americans seem to slag off the ZX81 and TS-1000 (the US version) a lot. I'm *guessing* this dislike is for a number of reasons:-
(a) The TS-1000 came out properly over a *year* later(!) there- around the time we were getting the ZX Spectrum- and things had moved on fast,
(b) Americans had more disposable income- and could probably stretch to the Vic- so possibly the TS-1000's low price wasn't the difference between "having a computer" and "not having a computer"
(c) Commodore's Jack Tramiel seemed to be more aggressive in pushing prices down on the US market (*) so I assume the Vic 20 was probably cheaper over there; being US-made probably helped
(d) AFAIK there was a US shortage of the 16K RAM-packs that made the ZX81 far more capable, and they weren't that cheap either

(*) I'm basing this on what I've heard about the C64. I get the impression that it was a "cheap" machine on the US market in the way it never quite was in the UK- I do know that Jack Tramiel was ruthlessly aggressive in his pricing over there (to the point that Commodore's eventual victory in the market may have been pyrrhic). However, it was always enough more expensive than the ZX Spectrum in the UK that the latter was the best-selling machine here, even though it wasn't technically as good.

The VIC-20 had lots of stuff the ZX81 did not have. A proper keyboard, color graphics, disk drive(s)

Disk drive interface, yes, but the drives themselves sure as heck weren't standard. In fact, Wikipedia says they cost more than the computer itself, and I can believe that- even "cheap" drives were expensive back then. That's why cassette-based storage was so "popular" (cough!) at the time.

I doubt anyone buying a ZX81 could have afforded even the Vic's disk drives.

FWIW, I remember reading an old magazine article mentioning a disk drive system for the ZX81. IIRC it was ludicrously expensive in relation to the machine itself, but it *was* possible(!)

a real video chip so the processor didn't have to draw the screen (that's why you can either run a program or have screen output.

You're thinking of the ZX80. The ZX81 was capable of running a program and displaying the output without the screen flicker, albeit at a slower speed. (You could revert to flickery "FAST" mode if you wanted to).

I don't want this post to come across as an attempt to say that the ZX81 wasn't a very simplistic and somewhat limited machine. It was. However, it was a usable machine that fulfilled the essentials, and that "cheap, cheap price" opened up computing to a whole new audience. Even the disliked flat keyboard served its part in keeping the price down. About the only thing that wasn't forgivable in that context was the notorious "RAM pack wobble", which was just bad design (apparently Sinclair reused the ZX80 ram pack case that was moulded to fit the older machine).

Re:"Cheap" ZX81 brought computing to UK masses

[Dogtanian]

Oh, and I almost forgot. One other thing- the ZX81 had 32 columns. Try getting *that* on a Vic-20! ;-)

SID music chip

[mestar]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Asy6Cpbtwfs

SID Music starts at 0:17.

Commodore Pet

[Boawk]

Ah, the joy of programming on the Commodore Pet in 9th grade. I remember feeling so high on my programming skills when I wrote a game which required almost all of the Pet's 8K memory. On a similar subject, a friend who didn't possess "the art" required to be an intuitive programmer, worked on a game of his own. As with most games now as then, there is a delay while the game loads up, does preliminary calculations, etc. To add this "feature" to his game, at startup he added a large, empty loop.

Re:I wish the Atari 800 got more love.

[peppepz]

8 kb instead of 64 kb, and a pokey instead of the SID? It's comparable, and the comparison is definitely unfavourable for the Atari.

Me too

[Paul Fernhout]

I've loved reading these posts. I started as a teenager with a KIM-1 my Dad and I bought and built the power supply for by hand. Then I sold that to buy a Commodore PET through a local school teacher, Jack Woelfel, who sold them and I did some work for. I wrote software in BASIC for that for education called PetTeach (really, Peteach, but hard to understand that), and a Purchase Order organizer for our school district, and Conways' game of life, part of that in assembler. I also wrote some AI stuff with triples that became my Pointrel system eventually on other platforms -- so still working on it :-). Then I bought a VIC-20 (I wrote a video game for that called Intruder Scramble in Assembler which earned a bunch of money for a summer's work on my own). And then I bought a C64 (I missed my chance to be rich porting that video game to the C64 but I had started at a college and was distracted).

Great times. I still have a VIC and a C64 somewhere packed away and hope they still run to show my kid sometime. (I think old capacitors can go bad...)

I agree the great thing about them was they were understandable all the way down.

I especially liked the HESForth cartridges that let you have a (for the time) high-level language right on the system that was still really fast, and you could easily restart the system and still keep what you had in memory. That was a great way to learn more about programming interactively. I just with I had been able to deliver code back then in Forth (but you needed the cartridge for that system).

GEOS

[Gibgezr]

Can't believe I still remember this... Load "*",8,1 My first introduction to a graphical GUI was GEOS: http://toastytech.com/guis/c64g.html