I owe my entire identity to this little machine. First laid my eyes on it in 1983, then unexpectedly got it from my uncle in 1984. It immediately opened my eyes to this new world of computer technology and sucked me right in.
Between games and writing first code in Basic, something magical was happening. Over the years it defined how I think, and ultimately who I am. Thank you C64 and thanks to everyone who worked on it
Yes, thank you C64 and all the brilliant people that made it happen.
I also want to thank my mother for giving me a C64 for Christmas in 1983. My single mother worked 2 jobs most of my childhood (corporate gig by day, waitress in the evening); our family always struggled with money. I have no idea how she paid for the C64, plus the 1541 disk drive and 300-baud modem. I also didn't know the C64 would be so pivotal in my life - I was just some nerdy kid who loved to tinker with stuff, but Mom knew. So, thanks Mom; I owe you everything. Oh, and sorry for tying up the phone line all the time.
I have a similar story. Single mom, early/mid 1980s C64.
I recently found the framed receipt for this purchase. My mom still had it and framed it when she found it years ago, as it became clear that purchase led to my prosperity (until recently) as a software engineer. I found it in a box out in my garage, where it now sits next to my C64 (the original case, but not original motherboard).
The whole purchase - C64 + 1541 and a few other things, adjusted for inflation, would be around $1200, which is a lot for a single mother with 2 kids. It makes me appreciate her wisdom in seeing the importance of that purchase.
>Oh, and sorry for tying up the phone line all the time.
Also sorry for the $300 phone bill ($900 today), the month after I got my first 300 baud modem. Phone calls were way more expensive back then, calling across local counties cost more than numbers closer to me. And out of state charges were ridiculous. And file transfers were sloooow. I got into trading warez right away, so it got expensive. And then I became a phone phreak, but that's a separate story.
I never ran up a phone bill, but I did get the cops sent to my house.
I was into war dialing with my C64. Every night I would input the parameters, start the war dialer, go to sleep, then wake up the next morning hoping I got something. Well, one night, about an hour-or-so after I started the war dialer, there was a loud knock on the front door. I looked out the window and saw a cop car. I knew what was going on immediately. I somehow fucked up inputing the dialing prefix to the war dialer, setting it to’ 911’. Then I let the dialer do its thing; it called 911 around 1000 times. The cops were NOT happy. They were basically yelling at my mom. I tried to explain what was going on, but people didn’t know about computers or modems back then. The cops thought I was calling 911 and hanging up, over and over, like a prank.
One thing I remember is my Mom really wasn’t all that mad at me. She wasn’t happy, for sure, but I got the sense that she recognized that there was a lot worse trouble I could be getting myself into. I’m 100% certain that she would’ve been more upset if I ran up a $300 phone bill.
That's a pretty hilarious story of war dialing. I used to wardial every night too.
I had the FBI show up my house this one time... one of my warez/phreak acquaintances had started a world-wide conference call of phreaks originating from a PBX located somehow inside a very very top secret military facility. I just told them I didn't know anything about it, I didn't call anyone, I just picked up a phone and it was this chaotic party-line call, I just hung up after a while. I don't actually know who added me to that call, but I have my suspicions. My mom was really not happy about that.
My identity is tied to it's competitor, the TRS-80 CoCo, released in 1980. I didn't own it until a few years later. My friends had the Commodore 64 and I was jealous.
Your art reminded me that some of my earliest code produced animated flying rockets:
I worked all summer and was able to buy a TRS 80. I could not afford the cassette storage so I'd just type my programs in line by line to run them each time. They were pretty simple.
A snake like line drawer that crashed when it hit the screen edge, stuff like that. I was 12 or 13 and didn't have any mentors but I did know some BASIC from a school program. Really loved that machine.
I grew up with a CoCo 2 that I got for Christmas when I was 5. I remember the BASIC book it came with that had programs you could type in. Also, Demon Attack!
The reason I was breaking the curve in my Data Structures class was because I was thirsty for that knowledge from working in Basic on my C64. My parents paid the original $595 price and definitely the best decision they ever made for me.
I happened to be the oldest teen in a new subdivision, so I earned a bunch of babysitting money from parents who no longer had to drive 20 minutes to pick up and drop off a sitter for date night.
So I was able to pre-order the C64 before it was released, which earned me a "free" tape drive to actually store programs--the disk drive had to wait a bit. But my serial number was something in the 700s.
I programed it, even if I never became a programmer. But having early and strong intuitions about computers paid off for years to come, and set me up enjoy being an "early adoptor" of things to come, rough edges and all.
Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
This thread prompted me to go and find out what my first computer was -- I have vague memories of it.
Turns out, it was a Sega SC-3000H, back before Sega decided it was a console company. Also, interestingly, it was really only popular in NZ/Aus (I grew up in NZ).
I have very clear memories of spending hours copying BASIC code of games, line-by-line from the monthly Sega magazine into the BASIC editor, playing it for 15 minutes, then everything dissapearing when I restarted it.
I was always envious of my friend who had a C64, but that Sega was a great little machine.
Yep, it was a "pre-MSX" like a couple of other machines like the Spectravideo SV-328... My first computer was a Casio PB100 (with the 1.5KB extension, so much memory! :D ), then the Sony HB75 (an MSX).
My dad came home with a 2nd hand spectravideo sv-328 and it got me started as well. It had a book of basic programs that I could never really get working. A year or so later we got an Amiga 500 and I really learnt a lot about computers using that. I've been working a personal project that replaces the A500s 68k CPU with a FPGA.
Similarly for me. My dad bought a fully expanded TI-99/4A from a friend who was selling it to buy a C64. On the TI, I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played Parsec, BurgerTime, and others. Cartridges were super expensive in my home country.
A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had already announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU, and Compaq was already selling clones.
I adored that thing (coming from a ZX Speccy it felt like a proper computer), I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
> [...] I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
I probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it up once while making an ISA board to connect to some sensors. Replace quite a few caps on that weekend.
My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
To whom it may concern, I believe the year was 1987 or 1988. (I was around 9ish, I think.) My brothers and I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 amidst trash beside a country road. In the box, even the manual was in good shape.
This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written.
The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive.
I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.)
This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster.
Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels.
My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions.
No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth.
Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.
Funny enough, I'm only in my early 30s and grew up with the Commodore 64. It was the basement computer that I could do whatever I wanted to, whereas the Windows computer (initially 3.1 and got upgraded all the way to 98) computer upstairs had to be shared and had more supervision. So I enjoyed writing a lot of code and trying things. I managed to have quite a collection of software and accessories just by asking around who still had stuff in the late 90s and early 00s in their basement for an 80s computer, and more did than you would expect.
That's amazing. I often thought that if I had kids, this is how I'd introduce computers to them. Give them a great C64 setup, the whole manual and when they can do something impressive, then they get a more powerful computer - an Amiga, lol.
Some of my fave C64 memories as a kid: listening to cassette tapes with stuff stored on them, punching in COMPUTE! listings with MLX, discovering 6510 and learning the Merlin assembler, long runs in Moon Patrol, making sprites with Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, trying to understand how GEOS could possibly work, wearing out the spiral binding of the Programmer’s Reference Guide.
I still think that I'm young, but I currently reminisce about doing real work without an always-on internet connection (and using saved-to-disk HTML documentation, physical books, etc.), and I am looking forward to reminiscing about writing thousands of lines of code, debugging tricky issues, etcetera with my own fingers and brain instead of outsourcing to an LLM.
my first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!
a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country.
Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity.
People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.
Color? Luxury! To experience color, we had to use transparent glass panes painted with stripes of blue, green, and yellow for sky trees and ground respectively! And they didn't make them in the right size for my tv!!
Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
That very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)
Who are you, and why are you writing my biography? Your journey was nearly identical to mine. I truly, sincerely feel like we went through a golden age, where amazing things were starting to become possible but you hard to work hard enough to get them that you couldn't help but learn something new along the way.
Same here. It clearly wasn't Unix, but it was a whole lot closer to Unix than MS-DOS was. All the basic concepts were there, and when I eventually migrated into a Linux environment it all felt familiar.
Yeah, if I were 10 now I'm not sure where I'd end up in terms of life/career, but it wouldn't look anything like my actual path, even adjusting for the obvious technological differences.
I'm fairly certain that computers to a 10 year old me in 2026 would be far less interesting than they were to actual 10 year old me in 1983.
The relative mystery they had around them then (assuming you weren't the kid of a turing award winner or some such, my parents were just normie folks) and seeking out the rare bits of written documentation held in a tiny dark corner at libraries, in tattered old used books, etc was like learning ancient, arcane magic knowledge and that was a lot of the allure for me.
Having instant access to most of the world's knowledge to answer any question you might have is objectively powerful, but just not nearly as fun as half-blindly intuiting your way through the dark weeds until deep understanding eventually just falls into place.
At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.
A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so.
Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive...
We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.
Yeah, I was lucky enough to miss the "Datasette" days.
I had the luxury of a disk drive, and even eventually had an Epyx Fast Load cartridge to speed (some) things up even further! Practically zooming for the time!
Yeah the bug in the hardware for the disk drive was a bummer. It was supposed to be 4-5 times faster but due to the hardware bug it shipped with a slow workaround. Its kind of amazing that you allow it to ship like that.
Back when writing 500 lines of code by simply typing it line by line from the "handover" booklet the C64 shipped with. Then running it and it magically made a frog-game appear where you hit "space" and the tongue of the frog needs to catch a fly. Then forgot to save on the 5,25'' disk and everything was gone. Good times :)
I had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.
The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.
It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.
I was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard.
Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way.
But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.
I've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book.
The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.
If they don't want to print and ship a manual, offer a PDF online for curious people to download. Problem solved.
Or, do what my car from 2014 did: The manual came on a USB stick.
The problem isn't distribution, it's laziness and greed. Documentation takes time and money. It's seen as a cost by people who don't understand the benefits.
I think a proper manual for a modern computer at the same detail level as the Commodore one would be much bigger than a car manual! It's not as much printing costs, but developing that documentation would cost a lot. I think that would make sense for big venders like Dell, Apple etc, but I wonder if anyone would actually read it. It's too much information...
And, of course, with the Speccy you had the Microdrive - an affordable middle ground between tape recorder and a disk drive. I still remember the excitement of not having to record/rewind/play (to verify). Good old times...
They had high market shares in countries with much smaller populations than the US, so in terms of number of countries (particularly in Europe and South America), it dominated in far more of them than the C64 did.
I had a ZX Spectrum, and at some point my dad got me a C128.
I was taken aback by how poor its BASIC was in C64 mode, but on the other hand, adding sprites that moved freely across the screen without being bound to the 32x24 character grid felt like magic to me.
So strange to stumble upon this blast from the 80s in a small town in the middle of Portugal. But I think this reinforces the fact that the Spectrum was to Europe what the C64 was to North America.
> Commodore expected both the VIC-20 and C-64 to have a shelf life of around 3 years. They were about right in the case of the VIC-20, but the C-64 kept selling about 700,000 units a year through the end of the decade and was still hanging on in 1993. It wasn’t selling well in 1993, mind you, and Commodore didn’t want to be making them by then. But there was still demand for them, and Commodore in 1993 wasn’t in a position to say no to a sale.
This reminds me of the Apple II family. It is well-known that even in 1984, Steve Jobs considered it irrelevant - despite the fact that it alone was providing the revenue that kept Apple solvent. The Lisa and the Mac had both landed with a thud in terms of adoption and sales, mainly due to being very, very expensive (and I'm sure in part because they only supported monochrome displays, until Mac II in 1987, which only got less affordable -- $10,000 in today's money). The Apple II series on the other hand, kept being sold -- schools and consumers couldn't get enough of them - demand that lasted until the last Platinum IIe (1993) and IIgs (1994) rolled off the assembly lines.
The Amiga seems to have been a similar story - Commodore trying to get people to adopt an unquestionably better PC well before the point in the cycle where it was as affordable as the previous PC they were selling.
It seems like there's a lesson here. Trying to drag the public to your "better" new product only works when (A) it solves a real problem for them, and (B) they can clearly see that it's worth the price you're asking.
In the late 80s and early 90s, a lot of people didn't see anything relevant to them that the Mac or Amiga (or the IBM PC) could do that a C64, Apple II, or Atari 8-bit computer couldn't do. Or at least, not nearly enough to spend 10 grand (in today's money). Eventually, relevant capabilities (I'd argue that multimedia CD-ROM software and then, the 'modern-day Internet' were those catalysts) and price both got things back into that sweet spot that "flagship" PCs had been divorced from since 1987.
Being behind Iron Curtain I sold (well, my parents, I was too young) my Atari 65 XE + tape reader (which I received as a gift in 1988) and got C64 (the original ovalish one) with 1541 in 1990, it was bundled together with a set of hundreds (pirated of course, that was the reality back then) of 5 1/4" discs with various software and games. It was like receiving internet in a package.
Entering incantations like: "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part).
Or playing with assembly with LDA, STA (or same for X and Y) was fun.
> "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part).
Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address).
Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot.
But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
Oh sure, but that was a hack. The rest of the market (even in 1982) had already moved on, c.f. the ROM on the 1978 Disk II card that could load and run a boot sector automatically. Having an "operator" was a design paradigm, and my point was that it was already antiquated even then.
I got my C64 (actually C64C) when I was 7, switched to a PC five years later just as I mastered BASIC and was starting to learn assembly.
To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.
Grew up in that era, I always wanted a C64 (I had a Spectrum and as much as we'd argue about the relative merits on the playground, deep down us Speccy users knew the C64 was better).
I still occasionally consider buying one but then I remember it'll just sit on a shelf collecting dust, better someone who actually uses it gets one.
> The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.
You say it “magic”, it wasn’t “better” or “different” or “worse”, it was a kind of magic that happens when tech is new and folks experiment.
I’m sure many will look back in 40 years and say the same about AI - we’re living through the magical age of AI.
Just as we did when we got our C64’s back in the day ;)
EDIT:
Perhaps I should clarify what I meant. There are folks having their C64 moment with AI today. These folks are getting into computers via AI just as the grey beards amongst us did with the C64.
I don’t think we should be begrudging them for their starting point. After all, those that started with punch cards don’t generally go around laughing at the C64 kids!
You have to consider the backdrop/time as well - back then there was no BigTech(TM), there wasn't social media/the pervasive backdrop of everything you do with tech been monetised or commoditised.
Fundamentally you felt like when you bought a computer/OS/Software you were the customer not the product.
Your Commodore 64/BBC Micro didn't do everything it could to gather all your data for targeted advertising, there was no algorithm trying to keep you angry so you'd buy more copies of Crash magazine.
While there will be kids out there having a blast with AI, I suspect the whole experience is flavoured differently because of the world we built for those kids.
I’ve installed my AI on my local hardware (that I own!) and play around with it there. So there is less of the “I’m the product” feeling for me.
Of course, I’m not using fable or the latest top of the line AI but neither was that the case with the C64. After all, it wasn’t exactly a mainframe!
But certainly, today’s renter’s economy discourages tinkering with devices since these are either not owned or intended to be resold when newer devices come out, so shouldn’t be altered.
I get what you mean but I think it's fundamentally different.
The folks back then had more control over the (limited) capabilities of the hardware, and in order not to just blindly type code from a magazine (which we all did) you had to develop a good understanding.
The folks with AI today have much better capabilities with (for most, anyway) much lesser understanding of what's going on.
Both are magic, but one is tinkering with spells, the other is figuring out how to ask a (slightly drunk) wizard to cast spells for you.
I used a saying that describes how common it is for individiuals to attribute their experience as something completely different from all that came before or after. Sorry for referencing something that clearly has no bearing here at all. Carry on.
I understand the saying, I'm arguing it cannot be used as a blanket dismissal instead of actually addressing the point. My comment did elaborate a bit after the sentence you quoted.
It's as irritating as those comments like "they said the same about calculators"... well, maybe AI is not like calculators? Or sex, for that matter.
Hey now! The C64 might have been technically better with sprites, etc, but the Spectrum was way more quirky and British.
Something about the scrappy underdog making awesome games despite the attribute clash, and having the terrible keyboard really set the vibe. Plus the Z80 processor was way more interesting than the 6502, and really set the speccy-folks up for the move to intel in later years.
Back in the day I don't think many would have switched from the Spectrum to the Commodore.
I'll always love the speccy because if it hadn't have existed I wouldn't have had a computer til the early 90's, family couldn't/wouldn't have spent C64 money on what was effectively a toy for noir_lord.
So in that respect it holds a special place in that my entire life/career changed the day I plugged it in.
On the other hand, I'd absolutely have traded it for a C64 if offered that trade even back then.
My first computer was an IBM 5150 clone that my grandparents setup in our living room. That was my gateway into computers. I was fortunate to find out about the C64 years later and jump into basic programming.
I still have an original C64 on my shelf beside me. Think I'm going to hook it up and play some games in honor of its 44th birthday.
I credit the C64 for setting down the computing path - fondly recall hours spent using BASIC and making my own games. Managed to stick with it when my mates were all getting Amigas but then finally convinced my parents to fork out (some serious £ back then) on a PC...but it all started with the humble C64, fantastic machine.
I started with the VIC-20, and I'm now 62. After years of resisting the draw to turn my hobby into a career, I started working as a software developer almost 30 years ago. I feared that I might lose the joy, but (for the most part) it's still there.
I got bit by the bug in a Commodore Vic-20 with a whopping 5K of RAM. I was 14, and a younger friend's parents had bought him this computer. My family had not the money for such "luxuries" back then. My friend knew not what to do with it - he was too young. We were not as precocious back then. ;)
He asked me to help, so I dove into the owner's manual and jumped to the games you could type in - and subsequently lose when powered off - the cassette recorder came later.
I've been doing the same thing for 46 years now. Creating, marveling, and sometimes wanting to defenestrate the machines. :)
It looks a lot like a C64 breadbin, with an actual working keyboard, but inside there's an ARM and of course it outputs to HDMI and has USB ports for pendrives.
It's a good middle ground between "just an emulator on your laptop" and "a real C64 with all the inconveniences".
Anybody know what happened to the C64 serial number registry? Last I had checked it, which was a long while ago, I had the second oldest serial numbered machine on it (excluding prototypes). But I just went to look and the registry seems to be gone.
When it released, it cost $595 (back then, not in today's money), considering the price dropped to just $229 the following year, that was not a good buy when it came out.
Not unusual in that era though, home computers were evolving ridiculously fast.
There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.
It's even a bit crazier than that: the Commodore Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, a bit less than three years after the C64, in july 1985.
A friend of mine, whose father was an art teacher, had an Amiga 1000 at home. Mind blown (I'm super lucky for later on another friend had an early SGI Indy at home for his stepfather was president of SGI Benelux). So I got to see and salivate on those mythic machines early on.
Of course I was stuck on the C64 until the Amiga 500, way more affordable, came out.
Still have my C128 and it was still working last time I cleaned it/tried it (when I was locked inside during Covid) and a few floppy disks were still reading fine (so I took a NOS --new old stock-- pack of 5"1/4 floppies and made a copy of Fast Hack'em and a copy of the Commando game): pure time capsule.
Fetched two C64s too: I know the PSU is tricky on the C64 and I don't know if those work or not. I've got floppy disk readers too.
But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
Feel that way every time I see a YT video on a "retro" computer I would have been able to play while having a beer legally (18 in the UK so 1998), it's then a shock to realise that was nearly 30 years ago.
> Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same.
So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
> And the games. So many games...
Still a gamer, there are three constants in my life, programming, reading and video games (roughly in that order).
> So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
That's the thing right? I love the missus (only met her at 38 y/o but it's been 15 years of love) and our daughter she's now 11 y/o. And it's perfect.
I just wish life would play in slow-mo. The same life, but in slow-mo.
> But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
It was an incredible time to live through as a young kid. There was a Cambrian explosion of computer designs - new systems coming out every month, each outdoing the previous ones. I remember rushing to the store each month to buy and devour the latest computer magazines. Felt like a time of endless possibilities. Only downside was I couldn't afford any of it except for a ZX81 (which was great in its own way).
My grandfather worked for Sperry and we had circuit boards from Univacs in our basement when I was young. Then I bought an Atari 400 and B&W TV for the display when I was 11. Looking back it was pretty neat getting to see what came before, down in my basement. I don't think I ever had a tape drive for the Atari. I met some kids that had C64s (and modems) and that lured me over to the C64. The documentation for the C64 was so much better than anything I had for the Atari. I had BASIC for the Atari, but that was it. The C64 manual I had included assembly language programming, and the full schematics for the computer, so I was really able to learn everything about the system and explore all of it. It was so much fun.
And as a teen- going from making a MASH game using graphics characters on a trash-80 to color characters on a vic and getting my own PC for the first time, C64, and discovering sprites..
What's crazy is that the much more advanced Amiga custom chips were manufactured at the same 5 micron feature size as the C64 chips. That's why the Amiga needed two custom chips for video (Agnus and Denise) instead of the one in C64 (VIC-II).
It was a good buy for folks who got in early to build software/games for it. Friend of family was building games in 1982/1983 and had some early clones of games out (pacman, centipede, frogger clones, etc) and... while there were a lot of early publishers, it was fairly cheap to do in the early days, and they made more than enough to justify the $595 price (multiple units, IIRC).
It's one of the more popular retro-computers, but cheap to get into, there are a lot of them around: it's still always cheaper than its original sticker price! I think I paid more for the replacement power supply (the original ones haven't aged well, and have been known to fry them).
We ordered one of the first batch in Canada. $$$. They gave us a Vic20 loaner until it arrived. We didn't time it well but the family had a history of that. In fact, my accountant dad bought a Wang mainframe for a small fortune right before everyone was switching to ibm clone desktops.
In praise of "obsolete" technology: I got my C64 for Christmas 1987, when there were already much more powerful machines available, but the C64 was the only one my parents could afford. Unexpectedly to me, they stretched their budget to get me the disk drive as well.
I used it up into the 90's. There was enough to do and learn with this machine to satisfy a young mind forever, but there was still that nagging inferiority complex that came from not having the latest and greatest.
Despite the fact that genuine hardware improvements have slowed down and software is stuck in the mud, it's easier than ever to get infected by the FOMO that drives the endless churn. But now, a little older and hopefully wiser, I perceive how pointless all that is. When it comes to how I use technology on my own time, I try to mindfully use only what sparks my own joy of learning and creating, and disregard everything else.
My first computer was a Microbee, a Z80-based Australian computer made by Applied Technology. I loved that thing to death, and thank my Mum and Dad for buying it for me, and getting me started in a field that I loved.
My school had a VIC-20, later an Apple II, and an enterprising teacher brought in a Commodore PET.
Later on, my friends had ZX Spectrums, Amstrad CPCs (not sure of the model), and lots and lots of C64s. A few Tandy 1000s and Cocos. I was always envious of the great games that they had.
I'm what you'd probably call a "90s kid" but I lived in a rural area. Around 1994, while the kids in more 'normal' places were using Mac LC-IIs with color screens, and I'm assuming others were using Windows 3.1, I was reading the manual cover to cover to learn how to use MS-DOS on a Tandy 1000 and teaching myself Applesoft Basic on a Franklin ACE (Apple II clone). I'm actually really grateful that thanks to lack of money I basically had a "Gen-X" computer childhood, allowing me to learn the command line, and, I think, to understand how computers worked better than those whose first computer experiences were Macs or Windows.
I only did a very little Basic on it, my mom used GEos (writer)? to write up her masters degree thesis. In fact, I think it and a bunch of floppies are still up in our Attic ... i really doubt it still works if I were to plug it in someplace :D I don't think we had the first generation c64. I enjoyed alot of the video games, I would go to our local Target store and buy games on floppies, especially when they were on sale for like $4.99....
Edit: sorry I said Target, I think I ment Gemco (which is now the building the Target is in) :D
Ah - endless hours visiting my friend as a 10-year old and playing "Speed Racer".
(Let me tell you, we were NOT going for the "heavenly points"...)
Years later, my first actual home PC was a "hand-me-down" VIC-20 with a giant box of unlabeled tapes which someone had painstakingly hand-typed from the back of magazines... (BYTE !)... my favorite game of all of those was AMOK.
Went missing during a move, then nothing until a 386... (my computing needs until then had to be met in school labs - Tandy's PETs and ICONs)
I had a C16 as my first computer followed by a C128. But for the latter the majority of time was spent in C64 mode. So I basically had a C64 in a nicer casing. Lovely times
> [...] a C128. But for the latter the majority of time was spent in C64 mode.
Did you make use of CP/M applications? I often wonder how well that worked back in the day; one of my best friends had a Commodore 128, but used it exclusively as a 64 as well for his pal across the street owned a Brotkasten (breadbin).
No never. Booted it up. Didn't know what to do with it. Had zero software for it. Let it go.
That was pre-internet obviously and no one I knew ever used CPM
I never had a Commododore , but I had several other computers starting from around 1979.
From that era , from arount 1975 forward there where often SEVERAL NEW different computers released each year.
That include SBC Single board computer that was sold as the board , often without a power eupply or case
and S100 systems
and DIY hobbyiest build systems
I still have most of books and magazines from that era, most of my computers , got lost, I still have a few.
POKE 1,0 would mess up the bank switching of addresses above $A000 and switch on the Datasette motor. Probably not what you wanted. I guess you meant POKE 646,1 (white text on black screen).
Isn’t wild how our mind remembers these things? It has probably been 2+ decades since that command was in the front of my dome and yet, when I wanted it, it was there instantly
Fond memories too and like other folks put me on my software dev career path and being a life long gamer.
My friend had the breadbox one and i had the slimmer profile model. We spent countless weekends coming back from computer store with boxes of blank floppy disks and using a box cutter to put a notch to make them double sided.
The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.
I love the game, but it was truly impossible back then (pirated, no manual, no idea what I had to do) and even today, with an emulator and every hint on the internet ;)
I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have.
Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!
Recently moved into our new house, which was left abandoned for many years before we bought it. Much to my surprise, among all the rubbish, I found a working Commodore 64 in there. Mostly working anyway. With a Commando tape still in its case. I couldn't believe my luck!
The C64 was a tremendously hackable machine—you had so much control. And, IIRC, the clock was something like 900Khz but that still allowed (with the help of VIC and SID) all kinds of incredible effects in assembly. I'm grateful my parents bought us one.
Ah, that was the first one I owned. The little 1520 4 color pen plotter you could get was incredible. Printed on receipt paper. It was also eventually my bridge to the BBS world via the 300 baud vicmodem.
I may be alone in this but I really grew to despise the C64. It represented frustration and failure to me. The basic was so limited, it did not provide access to the otherwise excellent video and sound hardware. Information pre internet was hard to come by, and I never discovered the assembler pathway. I wanted to do cool stuff with it but a kid in rural US had zero access to resources.
My biggest success was piecing together how to switch out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
Oh damn that BASIC :) I remember as a kid going to the library and devouring all the microcomputer books and trying to enter their BASIC programs, only to find the C64 severely lacking. Everyone else's BASIC was better!
I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did.
I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid.
It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid.
I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.
> Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again
I have as well; to conquer that feeling of failure at last.
I was in nearly the same boat, not quite rural, but close enough that I was one of a couple of "computer kids" in the whole school. I got my hands on the "Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide"[0] and it was literally life-changing. It simultaneously demystified computers for me ("oh, this is how it knows where to draw my sprite, and here's how to go from a hand-drawn picture to a pixel grid to a list of hex values") and made them more magical ("I can create an entire universe with my brain and hands").
Yeah, the BASIC sucked. I'm glad it sucked just enough to make me want to learn more on my own.
My C64 came with a Super Snapshot. It had a button on the cartridge that would freeze the running program and provide options like editing the memory, modify machine code, persist current state to disk, etc.
I would type programs in BASIC and then examine the machine code that it got compiled to. I learned a lot more than I would have without the cartridge.
Young me is envious. I downloaded or typed in, I forget which, some monitor program[0] that I used a lot, but loading it was far more manual than what you described and was basically impossible to load while another machine code (i.e. non-BASIC) program was running.
I still learned so much from typing short programs into it. I talked my parents into buying me an assembler so that I could make changes without re-typing a whole program.
I agree completely, it was a tragedy that Commodore shipped with that one.
Even though I still have lots of original home / computer hardware including multiple versions of the C64 (working or still to be fixed..) I just ordered the Cyberpunk 2077 ornate "Commodore 77" so as to be able to play with it and potentially port over and adapt BBC basic adjacent basic like MMbasic (or make my own focused attempt at it).
It's a semi open FPGA platform and latest one here is still not MiSTer grade on many fronts but should give enough freedom at least to have my own bespoke ROM replacement come up on init.
The goal would exactly be that of eventually getting rid of the builtin basic for recreational biking of the mind with our young padawan...
I also own a MiSTer and the community's well done BBC core already largely gets us to where I want us to be but the platform chiefly lacks the SID as well as the nature of a dedicated device.
Booting into "C64 BBC basic" is a must; I hope to book some time for this project next year at the very latest.
The User's Guide had a single bitmap mode example, but POKEs needed for hardware sprites and sound were adequately covered. Joystick polling in BASIC is a fool's errand however.
I recall joystick PEEKs being fine as long as you used port 2. Port 1 was muxed with the keyboard port and would type characters (2's and left arrows from what I remember).
I despised the limitations of the included BASIC but loved my C64. I also had a pirated Pascal and learned a bit with it (not much). It wasn't a good platform for programming, but it still made me fall in love with computers.
Getting my first PC XT clone with GW BASIC felt liberating, suddenly I could write graphical games with ease! But to this day I still love my C64, wherever it is now.
My dad bought our first C64 from a co-worker and it came with hundreds of disks, mostly pirated and other "scene" stuff.
I don't know if I'll ever get around to "ripping" those disks to sort through and possibly find anything worthy of sending to the Internet Archive. And this is also assuming they still have anything readable on them.
I owe my entire identity to this little machine. First laid my eyes on it in 1983, then unexpectedly got it from my uncle in 1984. It immediately opened my eyes to this new world of computer technology and sucked me right in.
Between games and writing first code in Basic, something magical was happening. Over the years it defined how I think, and ultimately who I am. Thank you C64 and thanks to everyone who worked on it
Yes, thank you C64 and all the brilliant people that made it happen.
I also want to thank my mother for giving me a C64 for Christmas in 1983. My single mother worked 2 jobs most of my childhood (corporate gig by day, waitress in the evening); our family always struggled with money. I have no idea how she paid for the C64, plus the 1541 disk drive and 300-baud modem. I also didn't know the C64 would be so pivotal in my life - I was just some nerdy kid who loved to tinker with stuff, but Mom knew. So, thanks Mom; I owe you everything. Oh, and sorry for tying up the phone line all the time.
I have a similar story. Single mom, early/mid 1980s C64.
I recently found the framed receipt for this purchase. My mom still had it and framed it when she found it years ago, as it became clear that purchase led to my prosperity (until recently) as a software engineer. I found it in a box out in my garage, where it now sits next to my C64 (the original case, but not original motherboard).
The whole purchase - C64 + 1541 and a few other things, adjusted for inflation, would be around $1200, which is a lot for a single mother with 2 kids. It makes me appreciate her wisdom in seeing the importance of that purchase.
>Oh, and sorry for tying up the phone line all the time.
Also sorry for the $300 phone bill ($900 today), the month after I got my first 300 baud modem. Phone calls were way more expensive back then, calling across local counties cost more than numbers closer to me. And out of state charges were ridiculous. And file transfers were sloooow. I got into trading warez right away, so it got expensive. And then I became a phone phreak, but that's a separate story.
I never ran up a phone bill, but I did get the cops sent to my house.
I was into war dialing with my C64. Every night I would input the parameters, start the war dialer, go to sleep, then wake up the next morning hoping I got something. Well, one night, about an hour-or-so after I started the war dialer, there was a loud knock on the front door. I looked out the window and saw a cop car. I knew what was going on immediately. I somehow fucked up inputing the dialing prefix to the war dialer, setting it to’ 911’. Then I let the dialer do its thing; it called 911 around 1000 times. The cops were NOT happy. They were basically yelling at my mom. I tried to explain what was going on, but people didn’t know about computers or modems back then. The cops thought I was calling 911 and hanging up, over and over, like a prank.
One thing I remember is my Mom really wasn’t all that mad at me. She wasn’t happy, for sure, but I got the sense that she recognized that there was a lot worse trouble I could be getting myself into. I’m 100% certain that she would’ve been more upset if I ran up a $300 phone bill.
That's a pretty hilarious story of war dialing. I used to wardial every night too.
I had the FBI show up my house this one time... one of my warez/phreak acquaintances had started a world-wide conference call of phreaks originating from a PBX located somehow inside a very very top secret military facility. I just told them I didn't know anything about it, I didn't call anyone, I just picked up a phone and it was this chaotic party-line call, I just hung up after a while. I don't actually know who added me to that call, but I have my suspicions. My mom was really not happy about that.
My identity is tied to it's competitor, the TRS-80 CoCo, released in 1980. I didn't own it until a few years later. My friends had the Commodore 64 and I was jealous.
Your art reminded me that some of my earliest code produced animated flying rockets:
The Trash 80 was the first computer I could afford. A great little machine and Z80 assembly has a certain simple elegance.
I worked all summer and was able to buy a TRS 80. I could not afford the cassette storage so I'd just type my programs in line by line to run them each time. They were pretty simple.
A snake like line drawer that crashed when it hit the screen edge, stuff like that. I was 12 or 13 and didn't have any mentors but I did know some BASIC from a school program. Really loved that machine.
I never tried ASM on it. Interestingly, the TRS-80 CoCo did not have a Z80, it had a 6809E @ 0.895 / 1.79 MHz. Mine had been upgraded to 64KB of RAM.
I grew up with a CoCo 2 that I got for Christmas when I was 5. I remember the BASIC book it came with that had programs you could type in. Also, Demon Attack!
The original reference and user guides were so welcoming that they literally shaped my future.
The reason I was breaking the curve in my Data Structures class was because I was thirsty for that knowledge from working in Basic on my C64. My parents paid the original $595 price and definitely the best decision they ever made for me.
I happened to be the oldest teen in a new subdivision, so I earned a bunch of babysitting money from parents who no longer had to drive 20 minutes to pick up and drop off a sitter for date night.
So I was able to pre-order the C64 before it was released, which earned me a "free" tape drive to actually store programs--the disk drive had to wait a bit. But my serial number was something in the 700s.
I programed it, even if I never became a programmer. But having early and strong intuitions about computers paid off for years to come, and set me up enjoy being an "early adoptor" of things to come, rough edges and all.
Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
This thread prompted me to go and find out what my first computer was -- I have vague memories of it.
Turns out, it was a Sega SC-3000H, back before Sega decided it was a console company. Also, interestingly, it was really only popular in NZ/Aus (I grew up in NZ).
I have very clear memories of spending hours copying BASIC code of games, line-by-line from the monthly Sega magazine into the BASIC editor, playing it for 15 minutes, then everything dissapearing when I restarted it.
I was always envious of my friend who had a C64, but that Sega was a great little machine.
Yep, it was a "pre-MSX" like a couple of other machines like the Spectravideo SV-328... My first computer was a Casio PB100 (with the 1.5KB extension, so much memory! :D ), then the Sony HB75 (an MSX).
Hello fellow MSXian! I got started with Spectravideo SV-728 (and all those fantastic Konami games that it had)
My dad came home with a 2nd hand spectravideo sv-328 and it got me started as well. It had a book of basic programs that I could never really get working. A year or so later we got an Amiga 500 and I really learnt a lot about computers using that. I've been working a personal project that replaces the A500s 68k CPU with a FPGA.
Similarly for me. My dad bought a fully expanded TI-99/4A from a friend who was selling it to buy a C64. On the TI, I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played Parsec, BurgerTime, and others. Cartridges were super expensive in my home country.
A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had already announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU, and Compaq was already selling clones.
My first PC was an XT Clone I suspect around the same time, One of these https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/15452/Olivetti-PC1-P...
I adored that thing (coming from a ZX Speccy it felt like a proper computer), I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe77esw9-nU (PC1 booting into a game) - that instantly takes me back more than 30 years.
EDIT: I forgot, one came up on Adrien's Digital Basement a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou-_sHTxwc4
> [...] I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
One can build a really close approximation with 86box; in fact, you can build an original 5150.
I loved playing Rampage and Thexder on the Tandy of my friend!
The 8 Bit Guy has a pretty good video about the Tandy 1000, a great machine.
I probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it up once while making an ISA board to connect to some sensors. Replace quite a few caps on that weekend.
My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
To whom it may concern, I believe the year was 1987 or 1988. (I was around 9ish, I think.) My brothers and I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 amidst trash beside a country road. In the box, even the manual was in good shape.
This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written.
The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive.
I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.)
This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
Greetings, fellow old people.
> Greetings, fellow old people.
Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster.
Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels.
My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions.
No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth.
Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.
Funny enough, I'm only in my early 30s and grew up with the Commodore 64. It was the basement computer that I could do whatever I wanted to, whereas the Windows computer (initially 3.1 and got upgraded all the way to 98) computer upstairs had to be shared and had more supervision. So I enjoyed writing a lot of code and trying things. I managed to have quite a collection of software and accessories just by asking around who still had stuff in the late 90s and early 00s in their basement for an 80s computer, and more did than you would expect.
That's amazing. I often thought that if I had kids, this is how I'd introduce computers to them. Give them a great C64 setup, the whole manual and when they can do something impressive, then they get a more powerful computer - an Amiga, lol.
Did you ever get into the "demo scene"?
Some of my fave C64 memories as a kid: listening to cassette tapes with stuff stored on them, punching in COMPUTE! listings with MLX, discovering 6510 and learning the Merlin assembler, long runs in Moon Patrol, making sprites with Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, trying to understand how GEOS could possibly work, wearing out the spiral binding of the Programmer’s Reference Guide.
We are not old. We've just typed more words than Stephen King and probably written scarier stories in a single sprint.
I wonder what today’s youngster hackers will reminisce over in 44 years.
I still think that I'm young, but I currently reminisce about doing real work without an always-on internet connection (and using saved-to-disk HTML documentation, physical books, etc.), and I am looking forward to reminiscing about writing thousands of lines of code, debugging tricky issues, etcetera with my own fingers and brain instead of outsourcing to an LLM.
That they still had some sort of control
ouch
This is a great question
Talking predominantly to humans on a web forum.
my first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!
a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country.
Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity.
People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-inch monitor isn't OLED. We would hack mainframes on the other side of the planet with a 40x7 character unlit LCD, and no internet.
a character LCD was an upgrade. try tiny 14" b&w tv!
14"? Luxury!
My C-64 was hooked up to a nine-inch Panasonic.
Though it was color, so I guess you still win.
Color? Luxury! To experience color, we had to use transparent glass panes painted with stripes of blue, green, and yellow for sky trees and ground respectively! And they didn't make them in the right size for my tv!!
Dade Murphy, is that you?
Did you and Angelina Jolie really get it on?
i don't kiss and tell!
Yeah I had one of those as a kid and spent many happy hours learning about it and of course playing games.
Sup
Hello hello Age is just a number lol
Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
Long, strange trip.
That very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)
Who are you, and why are you writing my biography? Your journey was nearly identical to mine. I truly, sincerely feel like we went through a golden age, where amazing things were starting to become possible but you hard to work hard enough to get them that you couldn't help but learn something new along the way.
I was going to post something similar. I think the Amiga's CLI helped me ease into unix/Linux which is how I got my first programming job.
Same here. It clearly wasn't Unix, but it was a whole lot closer to Unix than MS-DOS was. All the basic concepts were there, and when I eventually migrated into a Linux environment it all felt familiar.
Yeah, if I were 10 now I'm not sure where I'd end up in terms of life/career, but it wouldn't look anything like my actual path, even adjusting for the obvious technological differences.
I'm fairly certain that computers to a 10 year old me in 2026 would be far less interesting than they were to actual 10 year old me in 1983.
The relative mystery they had around them then (assuming you weren't the kid of a turing award winner or some such, my parents were just normie folks) and seeking out the rare bits of written documentation held in a tiny dark corner at libraries, in tattered old used books, etc was like learning ancient, arcane magic knowledge and that was a lot of the allure for me.
Having instant access to most of the world's knowledge to answer any question you might have is objectively powerful, but just not nearly as fun as half-blindly intuiting your way through the dark weeds until deep understanding eventually just falls into place.
May your trip continue!
At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.
Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.
> Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck.
A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so.
Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive...
We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.
Yeah, I was lucky enough to miss the "Datasette" days.
I had the luxury of a disk drive, and even eventually had an Epyx Fast Load cartridge to speed (some) things up even further! Practically zooming for the time!
The C64 disk drive would still have left you with plenty of reading time.
Yeah the bug in the hardware for the disk drive was a bummer. It was supposed to be 4-5 times faster but due to the hardware bug it shipped with a slow workaround. Its kind of amazing that you allow it to ship like that.
Back when writing 500 lines of code by simply typing it line by line from the "handover" booklet the C64 shipped with. Then running it and it magically made a frog-game appear where you hit "space" and the tongue of the frog needs to catch a fly. Then forgot to save on the 5,25'' disk and everything was gone. Good times :)
Wow, that frog game - I haven't thought about this in a loooong time! Didn't it also come with the demo disk for the 1541?
I had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.
The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.
It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.
Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)
I was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge
It came with a very detailed book. And Commodore sold another even-more-detailed-yet-still-cheap book that was so complete that it even included a big fold-out schematic diagram of the motherboard.
Would I have preferred to be able to do DRAW CIRCLE 0, 1, 23 instead of a long series of POKEs? Sure, because I was a kid and wanted to do things the easy way.
But those POKEs taught you about bits vs. bytes, and how computer memory worked, and how bitmaps worked, and about raster, and optimizing for speed, and ML interrupts, and math, and concepts like XOR, and all the important parts of the computer.
I've wondered about whether modern computers should come with the comprehensive manuals of the era. The Raspberry Pi 400 attempted to do it. But the problem isn't as much that companies don't want to ship these big manuals, but it's that 1) Nobody would read them because of the Internet and, most importantly, 2) you can't create comprehensive documentation of a modern computer in a reasonably sized book.
The biggest change from the good old days is that one could truly hope to fully understand a machine. The C64 was a bit harder, but not impossible. But the Speccy was simple enough that a near-100% understanding was achievable. This feeling of full control is what we lost.
If they don't want to print and ship a manual, offer a PDF online for curious people to download. Problem solved.
Or, do what my car from 2014 did: The manual came on a USB stick.
The problem isn't distribution, it's laziness and greed. Documentation takes time and money. It's seen as a cost by people who don't understand the benefits.
I think a proper manual for a modern computer at the same detail level as the Commodore one would be much bigger than a car manual! It's not as much printing costs, but developing that documentation would cost a lot. I think that would make sense for big venders like Dell, Apple etc, but I wonder if anyone would actually read it. It's too much information...
And, of course, with the Speccy you had the Microdrive - an affordable middle ground between tape recorder and a disk drive. I still remember the excitement of not having to record/rewind/play (to verify). Good old times...
Fewer Spectrum's of all models combined appears to have been sold than the C64 alone, so it dominated very few places.
They had high market shares in countries with much smaller populations than the US, so in terms of number of countries (particularly in Europe and South America), it dominated in far more of them than the C64 did.
Not only this.
I had a ZX Spectrum, and at some point my dad got me a C128.
I was taken aback by how poor its BASIC was in C64 mode, but on the other hand, adding sprites that moved freely across the screen without being bound to the 32x24 character grid felt like magic to me.
Commodore 64 in 1982 cost US$595 ($2,059 today).
ZX Spectrum in 1982 cost $200 ($692 today) for 16 KB model and had a 48K model for 40% more.
It was the difference between affordable and unaffordable for many people.
The launch price for the 64 was $600, but by June 1983 it had dropped to $300 and was often on sale for less (I paid $250).
I visited this ZX Spectrum museum in this summer: https://loadzx.com/en/
So strange to stumble upon this blast from the 80s in a small town in the middle of Portugal. But I think this reinforces the fact that the Spectrum was to Europe what the C64 was to North America.
Anyway, wonderful memories in there!
The Speccy was very popular in Spain (and I'd assume Portugal too). As well as -probably not coincidence- in South American countries.
Arab countries & Europe's Eastern block each have their own computing histories that's very different from the usual US-centric tale.
>there was no hacking around allowed
You fool! That was to encourage latent hackers to emerge into the world.
> Commodore expected both the VIC-20 and C-64 to have a shelf life of around 3 years. They were about right in the case of the VIC-20, but the C-64 kept selling about 700,000 units a year through the end of the decade and was still hanging on in 1993. It wasn’t selling well in 1993, mind you, and Commodore didn’t want to be making them by then. But there was still demand for them, and Commodore in 1993 wasn’t in a position to say no to a sale.
This reminds me of the Apple II family. It is well-known that even in 1984, Steve Jobs considered it irrelevant - despite the fact that it alone was providing the revenue that kept Apple solvent. The Lisa and the Mac had both landed with a thud in terms of adoption and sales, mainly due to being very, very expensive (and I'm sure in part because they only supported monochrome displays, until Mac II in 1987, which only got less affordable -- $10,000 in today's money). The Apple II series on the other hand, kept being sold -- schools and consumers couldn't get enough of them - demand that lasted until the last Platinum IIe (1993) and IIgs (1994) rolled off the assembly lines.
The Amiga seems to have been a similar story - Commodore trying to get people to adopt an unquestionably better PC well before the point in the cycle where it was as affordable as the previous PC they were selling.
It seems like there's a lesson here. Trying to drag the public to your "better" new product only works when (A) it solves a real problem for them, and (B) they can clearly see that it's worth the price you're asking.
In the late 80s and early 90s, a lot of people didn't see anything relevant to them that the Mac or Amiga (or the IBM PC) could do that a C64, Apple II, or Atari 8-bit computer couldn't do. Or at least, not nearly enough to spend 10 grand (in today's money). Eventually, relevant capabilities (I'd argue that multimedia CD-ROM software and then, the 'modern-day Internet' were those catalysts) and price both got things back into that sweet spot that "flagship" PCs had been divorced from since 1987.
Being behind Iron Curtain I sold (well, my parents, I was too young) my Atari 65 XE + tape reader (which I received as a gift in 1988) and got C64 (the original ovalish one) with 1541 in 1990, it was bundled together with a set of hundreds (pirated of course, that was the reality back then) of 5 1/4" discs with various software and games. It was like receiving internet in a package.
Entering incantations like: "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part). Or playing with assembly with LDA, STA (or same for X and Y) was fun.
> "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part).
Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address).
Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot.
But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
Or you got the epyx fast load cartridge and could hit 'run/stop-restore' keys together to automatically type LOAD "*",8,1 and ENTER
Oh sure, but that was a hack. The rest of the market (even in 1982) had already moved on, c.f. the ROM on the 1978 Disk II card that could load and run a boot sector automatically. Having an "operator" was a design paradigm, and my point was that it was already antiquated even then.
Somewhat relevant
DOOM on C64 with variable height floor/ceilings
https://kweepa.itch.io/doom64
And my favorite, Quake on C64
https://kweepa.itch.io/quake64
For some reason I read that as Quack. Long live BFINN.
I got my C64 (actually C64C) when I was 7, switched to a PC five years later just as I mastered BASIC and was starting to learn assembly.
To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.
Happy birthday, C64!
Literally everything you said is also true about me! and my name is also Daniel!
Grew up in that era, I always wanted a C64 (I had a Spectrum and as much as we'd argue about the relative merits on the playground, deep down us Speccy users knew the C64 was better).
I still occasionally consider buying one but then I remember it'll just sit on a shelf collecting dust, better someone who actually uses it gets one.
My experience was the same. Loved my Spectrum 128 but friends had the Commodore and its graphics were superior. Very expensive though.
The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.
> The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.
You say it “magic”, it wasn’t “better” or “different” or “worse”, it was a kind of magic that happens when tech is new and folks experiment.
I’m sure many will look back in 40 years and say the same about AI - we’re living through the magical age of AI.
Just as we did when we got our C64’s back in the day ;)
EDIT:
Perhaps I should clarify what I meant. There are folks having their C64 moment with AI today. These folks are getting into computers via AI just as the grey beards amongst us did with the C64.
I don’t think we should be begrudging them for their starting point. After all, those that started with punch cards don’t generally go around laughing at the C64 kids!
Not so sure that that is true.
You have to consider the backdrop/time as well - back then there was no BigTech(TM), there wasn't social media/the pervasive backdrop of everything you do with tech been monetised or commoditised.
Fundamentally you felt like when you bought a computer/OS/Software you were the customer not the product.
Your Commodore 64/BBC Micro didn't do everything it could to gather all your data for targeted advertising, there was no algorithm trying to keep you angry so you'd buy more copies of Crash magazine.
While there will be kids out there having a blast with AI, I suspect the whole experience is flavoured differently because of the world we built for those kids.
I’ve installed my AI on my local hardware (that I own!) and play around with it there. So there is less of the “I’m the product” feeling for me.
Of course, I’m not using fable or the latest top of the line AI but neither was that the case with the C64. After all, it wasn’t exactly a mainframe!
But certainly, today’s renter’s economy discourages tinkering with devices since these are either not owned or intended to be resold when newer devices come out, so shouldn’t be altered.
I get what you mean but I think it's fundamentally different.
The folks back then had more control over the (limited) capabilities of the hardware, and in order not to just blindly type code from a magazine (which we all did) you had to develop a good understanding.
The folks with AI today have much better capabilities with (for most, anyway) much lesser understanding of what's going on.
Both are magic, but one is tinkering with spells, the other is figuring out how to ask a (slightly drunk) wizard to cast spells for you.
>I get what you mean but I think it's fundamentally different.
Well, every generation thinks they invented sex, right? Who knows what wild things they may learn to invent? Maybe even Skynet!
I made a specific point, it cannot be simply deflected with "every generation always thinks <thing>".
I used a saying that describes how common it is for individiuals to attribute their experience as something completely different from all that came before or after. Sorry for referencing something that clearly has no bearing here at all. Carry on.
I understand the saying, I'm arguing it cannot be used as a blanket dismissal instead of actually addressing the point. My comment did elaborate a bit after the sentence you quoted.
It's as irritating as those comments like "they said the same about calculators"... well, maybe AI is not like calculators? Or sex, for that matter.
Hey now! The C64 might have been technically better with sprites, etc, but the Spectrum was way more quirky and British.
Something about the scrappy underdog making awesome games despite the attribute clash, and having the terrible keyboard really set the vibe. Plus the Z80 processor was way more interesting than the 6502, and really set the speccy-folks up for the move to intel in later years.
Back in the day I don't think many would have switched from the Spectrum to the Commodore.
I'll always love the speccy because if it hadn't have existed I wouldn't have had a computer til the early 90's, family couldn't/wouldn't have spent C64 money on what was effectively a toy for noir_lord.
So in that respect it holds a special place in that my entire life/career changed the day I plugged it in.
On the other hand, I'd absolutely have traded it for a C64 if offered that trade even back then.
Hey, but we had a real cpu in the Speccy - not the joke that 6502 was!
Ah, who am I kidding? Of course c64 was better…
My first computer was an IBM 5150 clone that my grandparents setup in our living room. That was my gateway into computers. I was fortunate to find out about the C64 years later and jump into basic programming.
I still have an original C64 on my shelf beside me. Think I'm going to hook it up and play some games in honor of its 44th birthday.
I credit the C64 for setting down the computing path - fondly recall hours spent using BASIC and making my own games. Managed to stick with it when my mates were all getting Amigas but then finally convinced my parents to fork out (some serious £ back then) on a PC...but it all started with the humble C64, fantastic machine.
I started coding on c64 when I was 10. I'm close to 50 now and still code but it was much more fun 40 years ago.
I started with the VIC-20, and I'm now 62. After years of resisting the draw to turn my hobby into a career, I started working as a software developer almost 30 years ago. I feared that I might lose the joy, but (for the most part) it's still there.
I got bit by the bug in a Commodore Vic-20 with a whopping 5K of RAM. I was 14, and a younger friend's parents had bought him this computer. My family had not the money for such "luxuries" back then. My friend knew not what to do with it - he was too young. We were not as precocious back then. ;)
He asked me to help, so I dove into the owner's manual and jumped to the games you could type in - and subsequently lose when powered off - the cassette recorder came later.
I've been doing the same thing for 46 years now. Creating, marveling, and sometimes wanting to defenestrate the machines. :)
Memory.
Then as now it’s memory that matters.
Anyhow if you want a brand new Commodore 64 get it here:
https://commodore.net/
An alternative that's a bit like cheating since it's not a real C64 but a lookalike running VICE is getting a TheC64.
https://retrogames.biz/products/thec64/
It looks a lot like a C64 breadbin, with an actual working keyboard, but inside there's an ARM and of course it outputs to HDMI and has USB ports for pendrives.
It's a good middle ground between "just an emulator on your laptop" and "a real C64 with all the inconveniences".
For me a good portion of the appeal of a nostalgic device like that is the display. Any recommendations?
Estate sales. You can score a dozen CRTs a week if you for some reason want to...
Anybody know what happened to the C64 serial number registry? Last I had checked it, which was a long while ago, I had the second oldest serial numbered machine on it (excluding prototypes). But I just went to look and the registry seems to be gone.
It's at https://rittwage.com/c64pp/dpb9db.html?pg=registry
Thank you!! And I guess I'm still there at #2 :)
When it released, it cost $595 (back then, not in today's money), considering the price dropped to just $229 the following year, that was not a good buy when it came out.
Not unusual in that era though, home computers were evolving ridiculously fast.
There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.
It's even a bit crazier than that: the Commodore Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, a bit less than three years after the C64, in july 1985.
A friend of mine, whose father was an art teacher, had an Amiga 1000 at home. Mind blown (I'm super lucky for later on another friend had an early SGI Indy at home for his stepfather was president of SGI Benelux). So I got to see and salivate on those mythic machines early on.
Of course I was stuck on the C64 until the Amiga 500, way more affordable, came out.
Still have my C128 and it was still working last time I cleaned it/tried it (when I was locked inside during Covid) and a few floppy disks were still reading fine (so I took a NOS --new old stock-- pack of 5"1/4 floppies and made a copy of Fast Hack'em and a copy of the Commando game): pure time capsule.
Fetched two C64s too: I know the PSU is tricky on the C64 and I don't know if those work or not. I've got floppy disk readers too.
But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
> I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone?
Feel that way every time I see a YT video on a "retro" computer I would have been able to play while having a beer legally (18 in the UK so 1998), it's then a shock to realise that was nearly 30 years ago.
> Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same.
So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
> And the games. So many games...
Still a gamer, there are three constants in my life, programming, reading and video games (roughly in that order).
> So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
That's the thing right? I love the missus (only met her at 38 y/o but it's been 15 years of love) and our daughter she's now 11 y/o. And it's perfect.
I just wish life would play in slow-mo. The same life, but in slow-mo.
> But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
Yep. 10 here. A lot of the same feelings.
It was an incredible time to live through as a young kid. There was a Cambrian explosion of computer designs - new systems coming out every month, each outdoing the previous ones. I remember rushing to the store each month to buy and devour the latest computer magazines. Felt like a time of endless possibilities. Only downside was I couldn't afford any of it except for a ZX81 (which was great in its own way).
My grandfather worked for Sperry and we had circuit boards from Univacs in our basement when I was young. Then I bought an Atari 400 and B&W TV for the display when I was 11. Looking back it was pretty neat getting to see what came before, down in my basement. I don't think I ever had a tape drive for the Atari. I met some kids that had C64s (and modems) and that lured me over to the C64. The documentation for the C64 was so much better than anything I had for the Atari. I had BASIC for the Atari, but that was it. The C64 manual I had included assembly language programming, and the full schematics for the computer, so I was really able to learn everything about the system and explore all of it. It was so much fun.
And as a teen- going from making a MASH game using graphics characters on a trash-80 to color characters on a vic and getting my own PC for the first time, C64, and discovering sprites..
What's crazy is that the much more advanced Amiga custom chips were manufactured at the same 5 micron feature size as the C64 chips. That's why the Amiga needed two custom chips for video (Agnus and Denise) instead of the one in C64 (VIC-II).
It was a good buy for folks who got in early to build software/games for it. Friend of family was building games in 1982/1983 and had some early clones of games out (pacman, centipede, frogger clones, etc) and... while there were a lot of early publishers, it was fairly cheap to do in the early days, and they made more than enough to justify the $595 price (multiple units, IIRC).
It's one of the more popular retro-computers, but cheap to get into, there are a lot of them around: it's still always cheaper than its original sticker price! I think I paid more for the replacement power supply (the original ones haven't aged well, and have been known to fry them).
We ordered one of the first batch in Canada. $$$. They gave us a Vic20 loaner until it arrived. We didn't time it well but the family had a history of that. In fact, my accountant dad bought a Wang mainframe for a small fortune right before everyone was switching to ibm clone desktops.
But if you pre-ordered, you got a tape drive, which was, like, a $75 value!
In praise of "obsolete" technology: I got my C64 for Christmas 1987, when there were already much more powerful machines available, but the C64 was the only one my parents could afford. Unexpectedly to me, they stretched their budget to get me the disk drive as well.
I used it up into the 90's. There was enough to do and learn with this machine to satisfy a young mind forever, but there was still that nagging inferiority complex that came from not having the latest and greatest.
Despite the fact that genuine hardware improvements have slowed down and software is stuck in the mud, it's easier than ever to get infected by the FOMO that drives the endless churn. But now, a little older and hopefully wiser, I perceive how pointless all that is. When it comes to how I use technology on my own time, I try to mindfully use only what sparks my own joy of learning and creating, and disregard everything else.
My first computer was a Microbee, a Z80-based Australian computer made by Applied Technology. I loved that thing to death, and thank my Mum and Dad for buying it for me, and getting me started in a field that I loved.
My school had a VIC-20, later an Apple II, and an enterprising teacher brought in a Commodore PET.
Later on, my friends had ZX Spectrums, Amstrad CPCs (not sure of the model), and lots and lots of C64s. A few Tandy 1000s and Cocos. I was always envious of the great games that they had.
I'm what you'd probably call a "90s kid" but I lived in a rural area. Around 1994, while the kids in more 'normal' places were using Mac LC-IIs with color screens, and I'm assuming others were using Windows 3.1, I was reading the manual cover to cover to learn how to use MS-DOS on a Tandy 1000 and teaching myself Applesoft Basic on a Franklin ACE (Apple II clone). I'm actually really grateful that thanks to lack of money I basically had a "Gen-X" computer childhood, allowing me to learn the command line, and, I think, to understand how computers worked better than those whose first computer experiences were Macs or Windows.
We had one when i was growing up.
I only did a very little Basic on it, my mom used GEos (writer)? to write up her masters degree thesis. In fact, I think it and a bunch of floppies are still up in our Attic ... i really doubt it still works if I were to plug it in someplace :D I don't think we had the first generation c64. I enjoyed alot of the video games, I would go to our local Target store and buy games on floppies, especially when they were on sale for like $4.99....
Edit: sorry I said Target, I think I ment Gemco (which is now the building the Target is in) :D
Ah - endless hours visiting my friend as a 10-year old and playing "Speed Racer".
(Let me tell you, we were NOT going for the "heavenly points"...)
Years later, my first actual home PC was a "hand-me-down" VIC-20 with a giant box of unlabeled tapes which someone had painstakingly hand-typed from the back of magazines... (BYTE !)... my favorite game of all of those was AMOK.
Went missing during a move, then nothing until a 386... (my computing needs until then had to be met in school labs - Tandy's PETs and ICONs)
I had a C16 as my first computer followed by a C128. But for the latter the majority of time was spent in C64 mode. So I basically had a C64 in a nicer casing. Lovely times
> [...] a C128. But for the latter the majority of time was spent in C64 mode.
Did you make use of CP/M applications? I often wonder how well that worked back in the day; one of my best friends had a Commodore 128, but used it exclusively as a 64 as well for his pal across the street owned a Brotkasten (breadbin).
No never. Booted it up. Didn't know what to do with it. Had zero software for it. Let it go. That was pre-internet obviously and no one I knew ever used CPM
I never had a Commododore , but I had several other computers starting from around 1979. From that era , from arount 1975 forward there where often SEVERAL NEW different computers released each year. That include SBC Single board computer that was sold as the board , often without a power eupply or case and S100 systems and DIY hobbyiest build systems I still have most of books and magazines from that era, most of my computers , got lost, I still have a few.
[dead]
LOAD *.*,8,1
?SYNTAX ERROR
lO"*",8,1
POKE 1,0 would mess up the bank switching of addresses above $A000 and switch on the Datasette motor. Probably not what you wanted. I guess you meant POKE 646,1 (white text on black screen).
I memory serves me the sequence turns the screen black and POKE 1,0 hangs it. At least that is what I intended, maybe it was POKE 0,1?
Ah, yeah, POKE 1,0 might plausibly have caused a hang. Sorry!
Isn’t wild how our mind remembers these things? It has probably been 2+ decades since that command was in the front of my dome and yet, when I wanted it, it was there instantly
I had a Commodore 128 but that command is still totally in my brain.
I can't remember how you switched to 64 mode anymore though. i remember switching to CP/M mode and being utterly lost.
You either held in the Commodore key while powering it on or you typed in GO64.
It's firmly lodged in my fingers still.
SYS64738
SYS 49152
Got mine in 85. Still have it in it's (now tattered) box in the garage. It's non-functioning, but can't seem to let go.
Fond memories too and like other folks put me on my software dev career path and being a life long gamer.
My friend had the breadbox one and i had the slimmer profile model. We spent countless weekends coming back from computer store with boxes of blank floppy disks and using a box cutter to put a notch to make them double sided.
I was taught on how to use my new C64C since I was 5. My favorite games were Boulder Dash and Gridder (hence my hn handle). Good times
I have seen the date "September 1" be disputed on forums. Is there a credible source other than the book that the article refers to?
Is there a credible source other than the book that the article refers to?
Plenty of computer magazines from that era on archive.org. Try Byte or Compute!.
I'm loving my C64U.
The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.
Same, got it last Christmas and it became the "family computer". At the moment I'm trying to beat Wizball on it. Great stuff!
Impossible Mission for me; didn't realise that it's actually a good game. Very very good for the time too.
I love the game, but it was truly impossible back then (pirated, no manual, no idea what I had to do) and even today, with an emulator and every hint on the internet ;)
I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have.
Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!
Recently moved into our new house, which was left abandoned for many years before we bought it. Much to my surprise, among all the rubbish, I found a working Commodore 64 in there. Mostly working anyway. With a Commando tape still in its case. I couldn't believe my luck!
The C64 was a tremendously hackable machine—you had so much control. And, IIRC, the clock was something like 900Khz but that still allowed (with the help of VIC and SID) all kinds of incredible effects in assembly. I'm grateful my parents bought us one.
Ah, that was the first one I owned. The little 1520 4 color pen plotter you could get was incredible. Printed on receipt paper. It was also eventually my bridge to the BBS world via the 300 baud vicmodem.
The Commodore 64 was FUN. Making it do things, discovering its secrets.
Three pieces of software that are mind-boggling on that hardware:
1. GEOS and the whole suite (GeoWrite, etc)
2. The Last Ninja video game
3. Echelon video game
Oh, it’s been 24 years already?! How time flies…
Make that 44...
(that was the joke)
I may be alone in this but I really grew to despise the C64. It represented frustration and failure to me. The basic was so limited, it did not provide access to the otherwise excellent video and sound hardware. Information pre internet was hard to come by, and I never discovered the assembler pathway. I wanted to do cool stuff with it but a kid in rural US had zero access to resources.
My biggest success was piecing together how to switch out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.
Oh damn that BASIC :) I remember as a kid going to the library and devouring all the microcomputer books and trying to enter their BASIC programs, only to find the C64 severely lacking. Everyone else's BASIC was better!
I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did.
I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid.
It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid.
I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.
> Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again
I have as well; to conquer that feeling of failure at last.
I was in nearly the same boat, not quite rural, but close enough that I was one of a couple of "computer kids" in the whole school. I got my hands on the "Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide"[0] and it was literally life-changing. It simultaneously demystified computers for me ("oh, this is how it knows where to draw my sprite, and here's how to go from a hand-drawn picture to a pixel grid to a list of hex values") and made them more magical ("I can create an entire universe with my brain and hands").
Yeah, the BASIC sucked. I'm glad it sucked just enough to make me want to learn more on my own.
[0] https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref
Another useful tool was a debugging cartridge.
My C64 came with a Super Snapshot. It had a button on the cartridge that would freeze the running program and provide options like editing the memory, modify machine code, persist current state to disk, etc.
I would type programs in BASIC and then examine the machine code that it got compiled to. I learned a lot more than I would have without the cartridge.
Young me is envious. I downloaded or typed in, I forget which, some monitor program[0] that I used a lot, but loading it was far more manual than what you described and was basically impossible to load while another machine code (i.e. non-BASIC) program was running.
I still learned so much from typing short programs into it. I talked my parents into buying me an assembler so that I could make changes without re-typing a whole program.
[0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor
I agree completely, it was a tragedy that Commodore shipped with that one.
Even though I still have lots of original home / computer hardware including multiple versions of the C64 (working or still to be fixed..) I just ordered the Cyberpunk 2077 ornate "Commodore 77" so as to be able to play with it and potentially port over and adapt BBC basic adjacent basic like MMbasic (or make my own focused attempt at it).
It's a semi open FPGA platform and latest one here is still not MiSTer grade on many fronts but should give enough freedom at least to have my own bespoke ROM replacement come up on init.
The goal would exactly be that of eventually getting rid of the builtin basic for recreational biking of the mind with our young padawan...
I also own a MiSTer and the community's well done BBC core already largely gets us to where I want us to be but the platform chiefly lacks the SID as well as the nature of a dedicated device.
Booting into "C64 BBC basic" is a must; I hope to book some time for this project next year at the very latest.
https://commodore.net/store/commodore64/?shape=Breadbin&colo...
https://mmbasic.com/overview.html
The User's Guide had a single bitmap mode example, but POKEs needed for hardware sprites and sound were adequately covered. Joystick polling in BASIC is a fool's errand however.
I recall joystick PEEKs being fine as long as you used port 2. Port 1 was muxed with the keyboard port and would type characters (2's and left arrows from what I remember).
Indeed, and space bar is thought to be held when you press fire.
I despised the limitations of the included BASIC but loved my C64. I also had a pirated Pascal and learned a bit with it (not much). It wasn't a good platform for programming, but it still made me fall in love with computers.
Getting my first PC XT clone with GW BASIC felt liberating, suddenly I could write graphical games with ease! But to this day I still love my C64, wherever it is now.
My dad bought our first C64 from a co-worker and it came with hundreds of disks, mostly pirated and other "scene" stuff.
I don't know if I'll ever get around to "ripping" those disks to sort through and possibly find anything worthy of sending to the Internet Archive. And this is also assuming they still have anything readable on them.
Feels like yesterday.
changed my life
super cool!
fantastic machine.
... however (say what you will but chuckie egg wasnt on the commodore)
> chuckie egg wasnt on the commodore
It was originally written for the ZX Spectrum, but there was a C64 port too.
i have wronged you c64 im sorry
[flagged]