25-year anniversary of the Commodore 64 computer

[StevenHW]

For those of you who are nostalgic (or even curious) about computers in the 1980's decade, here's an article on the most popular single make/model at the time.

Next Monday (Dec. 10, 2007), there will be a 25-year anniversary celebration of the Commodore 64 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/12/07/c64/index.html

Website devoted to the C64:
http://www.c64.com/

Computer History Museum:
http://www.computerhistory.org/

And BTW...no, I didn't own a Commodore in those days! My first computer was the original IBM-PC.

 

[VF21]

I actually have a Commodore 64 (upgraded to a 128) in my closet, along with the monitor, tons of big floppy disks, the disk drive AND a cassette recorder made especially for data storage and retrieval.

The Commodore wasn't my first computer, though. I also had an Atari 400 and a Vic-20.

 

[kupman]

Happy B-day Commodore 64!

here is a picture of my first computer (well, it was not mine - but used it regularly):

http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html

ah, the days of the cassette memory.

 

[Prophetess]

The commodore PET was the first computer in my childhood home. I remember dad teaching me how to do basic on it.
I had to first create my hangman program before I could play it!

 

[pdxKingsFan]

I loved my Commodore 64. I may still have mine in my dad's storage. The delete (I think that was how backspace was labeled) key was busted and so it had to be taped up to prevent it from always being active. I played games on that thing all the way through high school graduation despite having more powerful computers by then.

My first computer was the Timex Sinclair 1000. Anyone remember that one?

 

[mcsluggo]

A friend of mine just took my old commodore and his (plus disk drives) and created a single functioning frankenmachine.

We played a Loderunner, Jumpman, and Castle Telengard for a couple of minutes for nostalgia... I think he is going to sell the system plus a couple of shoe boxes of floppys on ebay, we'll see.

 

[VF21]

On a related note, did anyone else subscribe to "Compute" magazine back in the day when you spent hours and hours copying a program into your commodore or Atari to be able to play something like Artillery? I know the most frustrating part was when it wouldn't work and you'd have to wait until the next issue - or even longer - to find out what line of code was missing or messed up. Ah, the joys of BASIC.

10 Print "HAPPY BIRTHDAY"
20 Goto 10

 

[vj9999]

On a related note, did anyone else subscribe to "Compute" magazine back in the day when you spent hours and hours copying a program into your commodore or Atari to be able to play something like Artillery? I know the most frustrating part was when it wouldn't work and you'd have to wait until the next issue - or even longer - to find out what line of code was missing or messed up. Ah, the joys of BASIC.

10 Print "HAPPY BIRTHDAY"
20 Goto 10

I remember typing in pages and pages of code to make it play regular audio tapes through C64 cassette deck.

Anybody using c64 emulators to play old games? I was playing Olympic Skier over the weekend on VICE emulator.

 

[kupman]

A friend of mine just took my old commodore and his (plus disk drives) and created a single functioning frankenmachine.

We played a Loderunner, Jumpman, and Castle Telengard for a couple of minutes for nostalgia... I think he is going to sell the system plus a couple of shoe boxes of floppys on ebay, we'll see.

Loderunner, Jumpman, artillery....man, this is bringing back memories that I have not thought of in a very, very long time.

Do any of you remember this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wumpus

 

[Monty'sBiggestFan]

It does bring back memories..sigh. We had a 64 and I taught myself rudimentary programming so I could write programs that really didn't do much of anything but amuse the hell out of me that I made the computer do something cool.

I also remember staying up nearly all night writing a paper and losing it to a system freeze, the more things change the more they stay the same.

 

[Warhawk]

It does bring back memories..sigh. We had a 64 and I taught myself rudimentary programming so I could write programs that really didn't do much of anything but amuse the hell out of me that I made the computer do something cool.

I also remember staying up nearly all night writing a paper and losing it to a system freeze, the more things change the more they stay the same.

My first real computer was an NEC 386SX/20 back in the very early 90's.

A friend and I were taking a German class at a local college and we knew the instructor's family (his wife was our German teacher in high school). He had bought a computer as well and said that if we wanted to work together on the homework and turn it in on a floppy that would be OK.

We waited until the last week of school to go through the book and do all our homework in one shot, saved it to a floppy, and gave it to him.

We both got A's. But he couldn't read the homework, as he had a single-density floppy drive and I had a double density one.

When I got to Chico State and had to do real work on it (spreadsheets with Excel, graphs, etc, for my civil engineering classes) I found out the limits of that piece of crap. I used to make my spreadsheet in Excel, copy the cells over to Cricket Graph (the Excel graphing wasn't that great for what we were doing), and go cook and eat dinner while waiting for it to make the chart! Bought a Gateway 486DX/2 66 screamer of a machine soon thereafter and wow, what a difference....

 

[pdxKingsFan]

On a related note, did anyone else subscribe to "Compute" magazine back in the day when you spent hours and hours copying a program into your commodore or Atari to be able to play something like Artillery? I know the most frustrating part was when it wouldn't work and you'd have to wait until the next issue - or even longer - to find out what line of code was missing or messed up. Ah, the joys of BASIC.

I never subscribed but I had a few of these. Some of them for the C-64 were kind enough to actually include the programs on disc (Loadstar comes to mind).

The worst though was one I wrote for the Timex Sinclair, the 16k(!!!) memory expansion connections weren't very solid so it would come out now and again reducing me to 2k. So I typed this program out on the stupid Timex, anyone who did that knows what a nightmare that is with its joke of a keyboard only to run out of physical memory - not to run the stupid program, but to store it before it could be saved and run. Ugggh. Funny to think that my television remote control probably has 1000 times the memory of that thing.

 

[GoGoGadget]

I never had a C-64, but I did have a Tandy "computer" from Radio Shack that plugged into my TV.

It had no memory or storage to speak of (except for an attachment that supposedly saved computer programs to audio cassettes... yeah, I still don't get how that worked), but was just a keyboard with a slot for video game cartridges and two attached joysticks. It had awesomely bad games. And I could enter in basic programs, which I thought was uber cool, so I'd sit in my room on a rainy afternoon and enter 1,000,000,000,000,000 lines of code just so that my "monitor" would flash pretty colors for 20 seconds.

Kids these days are way too spoiled.

 

[kennadog]

And I could enter in basic programs, which I thought was uber cool, so I'd sit in my room on a rainy afternoon and enter 1,000,000,000,000,000 lines of code just so that my "monitor" would flash pretty colors for 20 seconds.

Kids these days are way too spoiled.

This must be a modern version of the "walking to school in a snowstorm and uphill both ways" stories of a prior generation.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

I spent quite a bit of time trying to write my own version of Zork among other things.

My parser was significantly more limited.

I was just reminded of the fact that until a few months ago my C-64 Monitor was actually sitting in my office where I used it for my old video game systems and to check the on screen menu of of home theater receiver which is incompatible with HD displays.