

Three Decades of the Commodore 64 - e1ven
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/08/three-decades-of-the-commodore-64/

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SwellJoe
My dad, a nerd himself (with a sweet reel-to-reel and turntable HiFi system, a
television and electronics shop, a CB hobby, and later a career as an
electrical and instrumentation engineer, to prove it), brought home a
Commodore 64 and a 1541 disk drive from K-Mart when I was 8 years old (1982 or
1983). An MPS 801 dot matrix printer came home a year or so later.

When I was 12, a friend loaned me a 300 baud modem, and a list of local BBSes,
while his C64 was broken. Instantly addicted. I was staying up all night and
napping through school. Upgraded to a 1200 baud modem at a computer swap meet
a couple months later. Bought Color 64 BBS software (which I still had the
original disk and manual for up until I moved into a motorhome 3 years ago; I
probably even still have it in the one box of books I saved), and wrote lots
of customized code and simple games for (several gambling games, where the
user gained download credits).

My entire career and most of the value I've created for the world can be
traced back to that first C64. I also started my first business, when I was
12, buying broken C64s at garage sales and flea markets and repairing them
using a symptom cheat sheet from The Grapevine Group that gave a list of
malfunctions and which chips were responsible for that behavior. My friends
always wondered how I seemed to have a lot more money than they did.

About four years ago, I bought a C64 on eBay. I still use it for making music
and other tinkering. It has a (currently broken) SD card reader for
practically infinite storage (it's possible to store pretty much all of the
software ever written for C64 on a single SD card), and a MSSIAH MIDI
cartridge. I bought 8 SID chips a while back, with plans to put a SID2SID in
the C64 for six channel stereo sound, as well as build a dedicated SID synth
box, among other projects, but haven't done it yet. There's something magical
about these old 8 bit machines, even today, for me. It's probably just
nostalgia...I'm getting old enough to have occasionally painful bouts of it.
But, I think there's also a lot of character and charm...my 8 year old nephew
has developed a love of old video game machines, and seems on the verge of
moving into old computers, too.

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tatsuke95
This was my first gaming system.

Outside of the hours and hours of fun it provided (which everyone can relate
to their first gaming system), I can blame it for introducing one thing:
Piracy.

Buying games never crossed my mind. You copied them from friends, and that was
normal and accepted. My parents didn't understand that it was, technically,
stealing. They actively promoted it. I had 5 or 6 friends who also had C64s,
and I don't remember anyone buying _any_ games...ever. One of my friend's
fathers had thousands of games, in dozens of "disk boxes", with every title
printed out in a 2 inch binder so you could locate it.

Pretty bad, in hindsight. And yet, the software industry survived. Who knew?

------
senko
Having gotten one of those, with a disk drive (when all my friends who had a
computer had the tape drives instead), and having only a few games at my
disposal as a consequence, is what led me to programming. Literally changed my
life.

