Commodore 64 30 years this week

[Kari]

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

 

[Hipster Doofus]

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

 

[Qdos]

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

 

[Brink]

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

 

[dwarfer66]

Great

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

 

[Dwarf]

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.

 

[z3r010]

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.

 

[Kari]

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

 

[Dwarf]

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

 

[z3r010]

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.

 

[Katsumoto]

C64 had the best flight Sims. Loved Airborne Ranger and trailblazer, too. Wonderboy (I think that's what its name was,), rocked, too. 'On the Edge is a great round up of the company.

Still have an NOS Amiga500, VIC20, A600, A1200 and an A4000. Beautiful hardware.

 

[pparks1]

My dad got me into computers with our VIC-20 and our C64. I remember the days of loading software from the tape drive and then eventually the ole 1541 disk drive. Commands like, Load x ,8,1.

 

[boohbah]

i vaguely remember the c64, computers were just emerging in our school as i left Scotland to move to England.
it took until four years ago for me to get around to purchasing a computer for the first time. so embarrassingly my first system was vista,

 

[Borg 386]

Yepperz, I remember getting to play with one at a friends house. My Dad wouldn't get me one, too expensive and as he put it, "A waste of time & money."

 

[Dude]

C64 Games

I remember playing games on the C64 years ago. I liked one where you piloted a spaceship, going through mazes and such. I can't remember the name of the game though does anyone here know?

 

[Frank1]

The first computer I used was in June of 1983. It was a KPro with two 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. The guy that demonstrated it said that one day it will become obsolete. I thought that he must be kidding. How could such a thing become obsolete.

 

[Katanyavich]

I've still got mine, an early round-case with 2 disk-drives (runs GEOS)
and 2 tape-drives (if it wouldn't load on one, which was common, you'd
try the other). Also has a 'Freeze Machine' cartridge. Still have all the
accessories too.

Still runs fine, although it is seldom used nowadays.

 

[w1dpc]

i still have my commadore vic-20 which i played ultima 1 on it. learning peeks and pokes and sprites was alot of fun.

 

[fseal]

i still have my commadore vic-20 which i played ultima 1 on it. learning peeks and pokes and sprites was alot of fun.

Heh yeah, the C64 was the lazy man's computer! WAY too many commercial games and software for it.

I started out on a Commodore PET 2008. If you wanted a game, you had to write it yourself! And I did, I wrote DOZENS of games for that computer. Then I moved onto a VIC 20 which was truly mine (The PET was my fathers). The VIC had a small number of games but again, if you wanted anything else you wrote it yourself (Till towards the end when commercial games on tape became more widespread)

Sometimes to get a new game you had to type in 10 pages of code from a magazine!

Then came the C64 and commercial software was in full swing and you didn't have to lift a finger to peek or poke again if you didn't want too... tsk tsk.

 

[Katanyavich]

i still have my commadore vic-20 which i played ultima 1 on it. learning peeks and pokes and sprites was alot of fun.

Heh yeah, the C64 was the lazy man's computer! WAY too many commercial games and software for it.

I started out on a Commodore PET 2008. If you wanted a game, you had to write it yourself! And I did, I wrote DOZENS of games for that computer. Then I moved onto a VIC 20 which was truly mine (The PET was my fathers). The VIC had a small number of games but again, if you wanted anything else you wrote it yourself (Till towards the end when commercial games on tape became more widespread)

Sometimes to get a new game you had to type in 10 pages of code from a magazine!

Then came the C64 and commercial software was in full swing and you didn't have to lift a finger to peek or poke again if you didn't want too... tsk tsk.

That's true, to some extent, but many of us DID code our own stuff.

And yes, I can remember the hours spent typing in program listings from scratch.

Then there was the fun of de-bugging them enough to get them to run......