Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
For the FASTLOAD Cartridge!!!!!
Disc notcher? Save your money, Mr. Fancy Pants. Just use a hole punch.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
(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...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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.
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.
I probably owe my career to one of those.
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.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
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
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
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.
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.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding...
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!).
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/
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
Couldn't live without the "Fast Load Cartridge", what a difference it made in loading times. I wonder how many Epix sold?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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.
Like an STB, game console, yotube able tv or web browser. Load and save programs to pastebin or similar.
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.