
Three decades of the Commodore 64 - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/08/three-decades-of-the-commodore-64/
======
aswanson
The commodore christmas...memories...was it 12/84 or 12/85...i forget. How
could a mass-market computing product explode like that when it booted up into
a BASIC interpreter? Could you imagine a product like that released today that
booted up into a python prompt? Like this: build_something >>

~~~
fr0styMatt2
Nostaliga trip!

My parents had bought me a Commodore 16 for Christmas, maybe 85 or 86. I
remember us hooking it up to the old Rank Arena telly that we had in our back
room and then not knowing what to do. I remember we put a tape in and pressed
PLAY but didn't type anything.

Only ended up having that machine for a few weeks from memory. We couldn't
find any software for it and couldn't really figure it out, so my parents
packed it up and took it back to the store where they exchanged it for a C64.

I'll never forget the next few days. The computer was set up in the living
room and it was amazing to everyone. We played Space Invaders and Frogger and
Arcadia and African Safari.... My mum and dad got into it, my uncles and aunts
got into it.

I'll never forget falling asleep snug in my bed, listening to the rest of the
family out in the living room laughing and having such an awesome time.

Then I found BASIC and "WOW I CAN MAKE THE COMPUTER DO WHAT I WANT!". The rest
is history :)

Nothing really quite matched that feeling, until the 'Christmas of the Wii'.
Sitting at my aunt's place, again with lots of the family around, watching my
normally grumpy grandfather get into Wii Sports.

Oh man, this made my day. I'm so lucky to have the life that I do :)

~~~
joergsauer
My dad bought me a Commodore 16 after I had been nagging him for months about
wanting my own computer. The little time I had been allowed to spend on my
dad's CP/M and DOS machines and on our neighbour's Apple II just was not
enough for me anymore.

I wanted a Commodore 64, of course, so when I got that grey instead of beige
box it was immediately clear to me that it was not "the real thing". In
retrospect, though, I am immensely grateful for my dad's choice. There being
almost no software for the C16, and in particular the complete lack of games,
meant that the only thing I could really do with it was to start programming
with the built-in BASIC. So, I learnt that... and it did not take long until
my dad stopped being the person I could ask about how to do things on a
computer...

First experiencing a computer as something you program instead of something
you use to run programs written by other people was one of the coolest things
that could have happened to me at that time.

Later, I got a Commodore 128. I did some interesting stuff on it, for example,
it is the only machine I ever really programmed in assembler. But to be
honest, most its uptime was spent in the C64 mode running games.

------
vparikh
I learned so much about programming on my C64 -- that one can buy it at a Toy
R Us for $300 back then was amazing. I learned assembly on it - in fact what
was really cool was that the 1541 disk drive had a full blow 6502 with 2k of
RAM. I remember when I used that as a second computer to help calculate the
Mandelbrot set! Multi-processer computing in 1985!

That machine was way ahead of its time in so many ways - pure genius.

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userbinator
The demoscene is still producing a rather large volume of C64 demos:

[http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+6...](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+64&page=1)

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orangepenguin
Possibly my favorite part of the entire post comes from the comments at the
bottom. Apparently some radio stations used to broadcast software--you'd just
record it onto a tape and then load it with your C64 (or other computer with a
tape drive)! What a fantastic world I missed out on by being born a decade
late!

~~~
andrewchambers
Yeah, now you are stuck with the crappy option of downloading code over the
internet.

~~~
rawTruthHurts
I don't think it's that crappy. Is it?

~~~
andrewchambers
Your sarcasm detector needs recalibration.

~~~
rawTruthHurts
Sorry, boy, it's yours ;)

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ajuc
My first computer.

I got it in 1992 (Eastern Europe was few years behind at the time). It was the
version with shorter, thicker case. I only knew Polish. There was no internetm
the manual was in German, and for a different version (video memory addresses
or sprite registers were different I think - I tried to type in these few
included programs with moving sprites hundreds times, and they did nothing -
never got it to work). Still I've learnt a lot about programming, by typing
the listed programs in and trying them out.

On saturdays my neighbor cut wood with electric saw, and loading games from
tape didn't worked. I've had to wake up and load a game before he started, or
the whole day was "wasted" :)

Also the power supplier heated up so much, that after +- 8 hours it stopped
working. My uncle was an electrician, and he fixed that power supply a dozen
times or so.

There was this blackbox cartridge, that allowed faster loading of games from
the tape, had some programming tools (which I didn't understand at the time),
and realtime multichannel piano (you could play chords no problem).

It's funny, that no piano on PC (or android) I've ever used was as responsive
as that C-64 program.

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paublyrne
It's actually almost 30 years to the day since the launch of Commodore Amiga.

~~~
function_seven
And mirroring aswansons's comment[1] above:

One of my best memories was Christmas 1985, waking up to my dad fiddling with
the A1000 in the living room. He learned enough from the ComputerLand salesman
to type `dpaint` at the `AmigaDOS>` prompt and launch the coolest thing[2] I'd
ever seen.

That computer was my only machine from 1985 through 1997, when I finally got a
secondhand 486DX2-66 to replace it. It wasn't until well into the 2000s that I
had a computer that could do the things I could do with that Amiga.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga_1000DP.jpg)

~~~
vardump
I still remember my reaction to Windows 95.

"So finally Amiga-like long file names and plug and play like with Amiga Zorro
bus. But why it doesn't still let me to rename volumes as something else than
single drive letters C, D, E... etc.?"

My 1995 self would have been so disappointed to hear Windows is still stuck to
drive letters in 2015.

~~~
nitrogen
I've been using Linux as my primary desktop nearly continuously since 1999,
and I'm typing this in Linux right now, but for what it's worth, you can now
mount volumes in Windows as a path on another volume.

~~~
vardump
The difference might seem subtle, but on Amiga you could refer to volumes as
"Volume name": like WorkDisk:. Then whenever anything referred to say
WorkDisk:dir/file, the system would request you to provide this volume,
"WorkDisk".

So mounting a filesystem to a directory is not same. When directories are
mounted, you _need to provide volume first_ and then you can refer to it. You
could name some USB stick as "Important Files": and whenever you copy or save
anything to drive "Important Files": the system would ask you to provide this
named volume.

~~~
nitrogen
Nice. That's way better than DOS's old "Insert disk for drive B:" message or
whatever it was to fake having two floppy drives.

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kelvin0
The Tao for me was: Timex Sinclair, Vic-20, C-128 and Amiga 500. What a
journey it has been, typing in game programs from Compute's Gazette:
[https://archive.org/details/compute-
gazette](https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette)

~~~
gerry_shaw
Oh my that cover brings back childhood memories. It seeded my desire to
program computers that is still with me 30 years later. (C64 for years till I
saved enough for a used A1000).

------
brudgers
Scott Hanselman interviews his father:

[http://www.hanselminutes.com/98/scott-interviews-his-
dad](http://www.hanselminutes.com/98/scott-interviews-his-dad)

It's worth a listen just for the story of how Hanselman got his first
computer, a C64,

------
vardump
Well, this seems fitting here:
[http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53](http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53)

"The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3"

------
fegu
The biggest newspaper in Norway honours the 64 in their own way. Curl vg.no
and look at the server header :)

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PhasmaFelis
The C64's SID sound chip was ages ahead of anything else on the market when it
was released, and it was nearly a decade before the IBM PC produced anything
comparable with decent software support. As far as I know, the C64 was the
first platform ever to produce dedicated game-music composers.

Here's a sample of what it could do, by the legendary Martin Galway:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf29ShkoAiA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf29ShkoAiA)

And here's a netradio station that exclusively plays remixes of C64 game music
(!): [https://www.slayradio.org/](https://www.slayradio.org/) (listening links
on the left)

~~~
talideon
I think the Wizball theme is an even better example of Martin Galway's work:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFYzjU-C3mA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFYzjU-C3mA)

Takes a while to get going, but it's sublime.

~~~
vardump
True classic. Also other tunes in Wizball are great.

Here's a great tune from another game. Rob Hubbard - Nemesis the Warlock.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzfOXkZrY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzfOXkZrY0)

------
fred256
(2012)

