Windows 7: Commodore 64 30 years this week

First week of January 1982 Commodore presented their then flagship computer, Commodore 64. General release date was about seven months later, August 1982.

With its 1 MHz processor (no typo there, it was 1 Megahertz, not Gigahertz!) and amazing 64 kB (yes, kilobytes!) of RAM, it was a gamer's dream machine. And it could have been yours with only $600, about $1,400 converted to today's money (source: http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm).

Something to read for old nostalgic geeks like me and you youngsters who do not even know what a sprite was:

• The Commodore 64 is 30 ? reghardware
• Commodore 64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• OLD-COMPUTERS.COM musem ~ Commodore C64

A C64 TV commercial from 1982:





By the way, did you know you can buy a Commodore 64 today with Blu-ray and nVidia graphics and play Skyrim with it?
- Commodore USA

Kari

Loved playing wizards of war. Everything took an eternity to load. Times were much simpler then .

Will we laugh and scoff at 4Ghz processing power and 4Gb of memory in another 30 years?

Those were the days. I loved playing on the ole Commodore 64.

My first computer was an Amstrad then I bought an Amiga 600, fantastic time playing dune 2000.

I also owned a C64 back in the 80s. I used to enjoy playing on it, and I also wrote a number of programs. One of them was a simple implementation of the old sliding piece puzzle, with letters. It was a 4 x 4 grid, with a random selection of 15 out of 26 letters, and I programmed it so that it would save the moves it made to jumble the letters up, thereby enabling it to show the solution if you ran out of time or moves. 9 levels, a simple tune that played if you won, another tune if you lost, and the sound of a ticking clock, together with a constantly updating display completed the game. And it was all in BASIC. No machine code or assembly language was used. I wish I had published that game, as I used to get magazines where you could send in user-submissions.

The C64 was where I found my love of computers, it replaced my zx81 which I didn't quite find a place in my heart like my trusty Commodore.

Any of you geeks used C128? When C64 teached me programming principles with Basic, C128 was then where my interest for coding started, learning assembler for Zilog Z80 processor. Nice times, good memories.

Kari

Not directly, although I have dabbled a bit with the emulator from The VICE Emulator

Yeah I replaced my C64 with a C128, that really screwed up my colour scheme as my floppy drive, tape deck and dot matrix printer matched the biege C64 and not the whitish C128.