There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".
When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC and so on.
[1] yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.
> yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.
Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?
Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.
I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).
Those of us who grew up with computers are truly a special breed, since we had to know how things work in order to do anything at all with the things.
These days kids are served eyeball-bleeding chaos on the supercomputers in their pocket, which they need permission to do anything else with .. and its kind of sad.
Learn what a byte is, kids. Learn where it fits into a register and why. Learn a few opcodes, some peripheral I/O heuristics. Break out that raspberry Pi and go full bare metal for a month.
I sure wish our mobile phones had compilers onboard. This is the one thing that is ruining computing for kids these days, imho. They need corporation-controlled permission, for fucks sake.
I 100% agree with you, but as a person who came up in the tail end of the generation we’re discussing (we bought a bargain bin TI-99/4a at K-Mart) and also a faculty member who has been teaching young people how to program for the last ten years, I can tell you that the overwhelming response they have to your exhortation is “WHY?” The current crop of computer users is basically everybody, and the current crop of CS students has primarily been motivated by well-paying jobs [1]. So really, if you want to get through to them, you have to motivate why they should care about bits and bytes in the first place.
Astonishingly, the Jobsian “bicycle for the mind” idea failed. Almost nobody now buys a computer to scratch an itch. They buy a computer (smartphone) to keep in touch with friends and family and to sometimes play games. The idea that software is a service that you pay for has been totally normalized. I find that it takes an entire semester of “imagine if!” scenarios before students start to catch on that WOW THIS IS AN AMAZING MACHINE! Some of them never get it. By analogy it’s like being upset at somebody in the 1970’s for blithely using their telephone without even stopping to consider what a fucking miracle the modern telephone system was. They would just stare at you like you have two heads.
I don’t really know how to change this, but I feel like this is the central battle in the fight us scientists and nerds need to fight in order to get the world to give a shit… about anything.
I could probably write a blog post with the opposite title, sth. like "My life got ruined by the Commodore C64". Equally hyperbolic, the narrative would go something like this: I was the exact same child/teen as the guy from the other blog, but the problem from 2026 me is that I got lured into IT through games and BASIC, and now I so wish I had chosen a different career. Alas, it's all I know how to do, and at this point in my life, changing careers is not a viable option.
It still remains to be seen, but the C64 may have ruined my son's life as well. I have a similar story to yours and OP's: born in the mid 70's, got a C64 in the mid 80's, convinced myself that I was a genius because I could get it to do anything I wanted (I even learned 6510 assembler back then) and parlayed those skills into joining the internet boom of the mid-90's.
My own son was born in 2003 and he sort of picked up on my passion for computing, but he grew up in the iphone generation, not the C64 generation. When he went to college, he chose to major in CS like his dad did and just graduated last year into the worst employment market since the great depression. He did get a job so that's good, but we'll see how things go...
I do think I'd have an emotional reaction if I typed load "*",8,1 again, though...
I feel you. My son is still younger, but I have similar fears.
As any good husband would, I bought my wife an old SNES for Christmas a few years ago. And my son loves playing Super Mario World on it.
So I thought some time back, that it could be a great father-son bonding experience if he and I were to code up a simple pixel-style 2D jump'n'run together that he designs and I program.
Except that he's been taking way too great a liking in it. He's kinda obsessed with the development of that game already, and now I'm worried that I turned him onto something that I pray to God will never become his career...
Hello there -- I'm the guy who wrote the article! And I couldn't help but laugh at your comment. You are 100% correct, it could very easily go the other way. My story is that I actually graduated with a degree in English (as in literature!) and the only CS class I took was Pascal (where a friend of mine, who was also in the class, joked that we both got another language for a grade - C).
I'd never intended to be in a CS career, but the way I see it, the gravity of the C64 was simply too strong. I was pulled into its orbit whether I liked it or not, and now here I am, in IT for the last 29 years. My other love, writing, I was able to do on the side (five novels), for which I'm equally grateful.
One of my best friend loves making music. And he was also always interested in recording tech. So after we both graduated from high school, he went on to become a sound engineer. But even right after getting his degree, he said that he never really wanted to work in that profession because he didn't want to lose his passion for it.
I guess both you and my friend did it right. I went all in with studying for a degree in CS and whatnot and here I am today, wondering what I was thinking...?!
You kept your passion, I lost mine. I envy you.
Btw, that LucasArts-style adventure game for the C64 that my other friend and I designed as teenagers is still something I must finish before I die.
Btw, completely OT but something I found puzzling when reading your blog post: how did your aunt communicate with the Austrian guy who didn't speak English?!
Ah, the answer is incredibly simple: my aunt speaks fluent German! She moved to Austria as a young woman and picked up the language, and picked up a husband. :) She speaks Korean, of course, so that's how we all are able to communicate with her. Recently we were at a family gathering, and one of my extended relations is married to a German fellow (who speaks both German and English fluently), and it was utterly cool seeing my aunt and him chat away in German (and sing "99 Red Balloons (Luftballons)," the popular 80s tune by the German singer Nena, in their native German)!
I have visited Austria many times, on my own with my wife and also thanks to a friend who was stationed there for a few years. Vienna is such a lovely city, and I got to see one of my favorite paintings (maybe my most favorite painting, really), Gustave Klimt's The Kiss, in person at Belvedere. My aunt lives a number of hours away from Vienna so I never got to see her there, so a return trip is not out of the question!
I don't know. IT is a bit different in that regard. As a doctor, even if the system is shit, you still help people directly. As an engineer, you build something tangible that can make people's lives easier. And so on. In IT, though, the impact often feels much more indirect. Most of the time you're optimizing processes or helping businesses become more efficient, rather than improving people's lives in a direct way. You're often several steps removed from the people who ultimately benefit from your work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just doesn't feel very meaningful to me.
I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.
I had the same kind of childhood with the VIC-20 and C=64 (and TI-99/4a in school as well). And having launched my career in I.T. I started as a Network Operator and then quickly promoted to systems administration, with SunOS 4.1.x mostly.
And I had purchased a beloved briefcase which I dutifully took to work each day, but my job wasn't really working with paper, much less anything that I needed to bring home with me.
And through those early years I really did fret about this: I produced nothing tangible at work. My work wasn't classified or secret, but there was nothing relatable I could really discuss about my work! What could I show people to prove I was a productive worker? How could I prove my worth, such as later on a résumé to a future employer? There was really just nothing.
And it went on like this for decades. I am sure that I, like many, struggled mightily with this intangible nature. Even my father, as a scientist, at least he brought home the Geiger counter, the film badges, the pager and the gadgets.
As other people said everyone goes through this at a certain life stage. You go from exploring the world and developing your own skills, to figuring out what impact you want to have made on the world after you're gone.
How do you figure? Commodore had strong sales through the late 80s, and the C64 wasn't discontinued until 1994.
My family's C64 was the first computer I ever used, and I am barely in my mid 40s. And although my family later purchased an IBM PC clone around '89 or '90, that just meant the C64 moved into my older brother's room, where we used it even more.
Fun nostalgic read (also Korean). I grew up an Atari kid, having spent many hours in arcades and eventually getting an Atari 400 included BASIC, and Asteroids cartridge. No storage not even cassette.
I had friends that had Ataris of course, but also some that had C64s and even a TI-99/4A. The thing in my circle was that the C64 and TI folk were more users and the Atari kids were more hackers, not that there were very many of each at the time. I learned BASIC, machine/assembly, and got into coding and engineering. (One of our pastimes was cracking games just to see how it was protected and see if we could. We'd show off any success amongst ourselves but never distributed as that wasn't the fun part.) I get the feeling that I probably worked for some C64 kids as adults that always seemed to have more of a product or business sense about them than the Atari kids.
I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.
It was fun, but primitive, when I learned Pascal at university I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments!
I hit the limits of C64 basic pretty quick and I read somewhere that there was a different language called "assembler" that was faster, so I convinced my mom to buy me a book about it. As I started reading the book I realized that I needed some software to go with it (the actual assembler...) and the book was about the "Merlin64 assembler" so I begged my parents to buy me that software for Christmas.
Well, as it turns out, that particular assembler was actually pretty obscure software. My poor Dad had to visit a dozen computer stores in Ann Arbor before he _finally_ found a copy.
I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.
I remember spending hours typing in hex dumps from the back of Compute!s Gazette back then. To this day, I still remember that LDA at A9 and STA was 8D.
Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain).
In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)
And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.
Yep. My father build a ZX Spectrum clone for me somewhere around 1991. Few years later he also got Commodore 64 as a gift from German engineers he was working with.
I think both of these machines are really good for learning BASIC: much fewer distractions, you type commands and computer does something.
Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player we had was broken. When a replacement was obtained in the new-year I started playing games with my sisters, but I'd already been "forced" to play with BASIC and I never really stopped..
> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Dundee? :-D
There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them.
And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle.
The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.
I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee!
But the Spectrums were the best-selling UK machine at the time, so I'm sure there were lots of regions where they were super-common.
I think I had a friend with a BBC Micro, but I can't recall anybody else having something different.
(There was a bit of console-split later, between NES and Sega Megadrive, and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.)
I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out registers on paper gave me a strong foundation in computers. I realized computers would only be tools and always managed to take jobs outside of comp. sci. or IT, but always used a computer and programmed utilities for every job I had in any language I fancied at the time and throughout the years: C, Basic, asm (6502, PIC, Scenix, 68000, 8086/88, now ARM/x64), Forth, Lisp (Lush/Lush2 lush-users on Sourceforge with Yann LeCun to get Lush running, APL, J, Logo, Pascal, Factor, Java, Python, F#, now Rust, Odin, and J is still open on my desktop daily). I had in mind how people were talking about high-paying jobs if you learned WordPerfect, and it was "the future" back in 1991-93. I felt people were putting the tool before thought, intelligence, and process. I did dip into DBA and IT here and there for a little bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing embedded software for the window animation I was working on for a display company, and interactive prox switches on the store window at Sachs to trigger a pneumatically actuated Nutcracker to raise his arm and close his jaw and other fun kinetic pieces in the late 90s (Pre-Arduino saturation days - Parallax Basic Stamp, Scenix, PIC, and PCBs from scratch by hand with resist and etch). Kids loved pressing the Nutcracker switches! The reason I learned so much was that you had to go to the library, write a letter or eventually by the 90s email and user groups, and just plain figure it out through trial and error on your own. I had a VIC-20, Commodore 128, Amiga 500/1000, then a PowerPC Mac running Mach Linux in the late 90s/early 2000. I loved Commodore. It's a shame. They were the best option for the buck.
I grew up with a C64, and the story resonated with me. Not as much about getting pirates games to run, but more trying to play the latest games on our old 386 which came after the C64.
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
I can relate much to the author's experience. I am also a Korean immigrant, with parents who owned a retail business, who grew up in the NYC area with a Commodore 64. I also majored in the liberal arts at an Ivy League school.
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. But my computer background got me hired into tech investment banking out of college, and has shaped every aspect of my life and career. just today I debugged a bash script that is part of the workflow for my one-person business.
Hello my Korean brother! Thanks so much for sharing your story, too. I started out as an engineer (materials science) then switched to English my sophomore year after realizing I couldn't imagine doing that for another three years.
But now look at us, we're like safecrackers in movies who try to go straight but end up in front of the vault again. :)
I can't describe that mystery feeling when getting bunch of random cassette tapes from my cousins with a giant catalog of programs on them, some demos, some games, some wild stuff and just casually browsing them. All I had was a title if I was lucky. Then the fun stuff of calibrating the tape head :) Great memories.
I wanted an Apple II so badly and thought I was getting the short-end-of-the-stick with a C64 but I am so happy (to this day) that my first machine at home was C64.
I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).
If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).
The price + graphics and sound (out-of-the-box) was what really made the difference for me and self-learning.
But I learned a lot more about disk data organization (hardware-level) via the Apple IIs that were at school.
An interesting side-note: a major factor in my family's decision to get me any computer at all was that I was staying after school almost everyday until usually 7pm.
Mom thought surely I must be lying about it and doing something else, probably nothing good.
She made a appointment to meet with the Computer teacher to ask him directly: he confirmed that I was there regularly, had keys for the computer room, and that maybe she should consider getting me my own machine for home.
The thing that truly changed my life was the Commodore Reference Guide, with schematic, and a book from Data Becker that described the schematic in low level detail. Address decoders, chip selects, tri-state data busses…
I had been reading Elektuur (Elektor for English readers) for years, but never quite understood how computers worked.
That book changed everything, like a giant light bulb switching on. Suddenly I could read all those digital schematics. Digital design was what I wanted to do in life. And I did and still do.
Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.
It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.
Yeah, this was '83. They went into the store and saw both on the shelf, and the C64 was "too much" so I got what I got. I think a year later the price on the C64 just made the VIC20 totally pointless.
Also they bought it, brought it home, and then two days later took us all on a 3 week vacation road trip across Canada. I sat in the back of our Toyota Tercel with a pile of magazines with BASIC listings in the back of them fantasizing about getting home to try them out. Torture.
I'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?
The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk
LOAD "*",8,1
The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.
The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.
I (a youngish adult, in the US) had a 1541 drive that broke. I was in love with the "Silent Service" submarine game, and found an ad in one of the computer magazines for a cassette version of the game that I ordered from England. It arrived in a couple weeks, and I had my favorite game again! Thank heavens the lower tech Brits!
There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command).
Meaning that the entire computer, and all its capabilities and speed, was available from within BASIC.
This was true of many home computers of the era, and even of the IBM PC if you were willing to struggle a bit, but it was emphatically not true of all of them: the TI-99/4A, for instance, had a nerfed BASIC that was not only very slow, it also prevented access to any of the system's facilities outside of the commands BASIC provided. This probably had a lot to do with its unusual memory architecture, in which only 128 words of RAM were provided to the CPU and all BASIC memory was accessed indirectly through the video chip.
But yeah, aside from cartridge-based games, every program on the C64 was a BASIC program, just one that was mostly a machine-code memory image.
Booting directly into a programming language REPL (in ~2 seconds, I might add) was a great signal that the C64 was ultimately for programming, even if all you do with it is games.
I kind of wish for a modern PC that booted in 2 seconds, directly into Python or something.
I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.
Of the 1980s 8-bit computing era, the Commodore 64 was the "best value" for getting a lot of functionality for the price. It had 64k of RAM when some others only had 16k. It had a really good built-in sound chip with polyphonic sounds (makes it richer sounding for programming video games music and sound effects). Some other computers had cheaper chips with monophonic sound which makes simplistic beeps and tones. It outsold all the other computers like Apple II, Atari 400/800, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc. This meant it had a big ecosystem of 3rd-party add-ons.
The article talks about COMPUTE! magazine. They often had free games where they listed the source code in the magazine pages. The reader would then manually type in the code by hand into the computer and save it to floppy or tape drive. The magazine would have the same game ported to different computers so there would be separate source code listings for Commodore, Atari, etc. The Commodore 64 versions of the game would always end up being the best version to run because of the hardware advantages mentioned above.
It was the best-selling single model of home computer for a very long time (relatively speaking in a very fast-moving field) in an era where most new models ditched compatibility, and in some countries it totally dominated.
Where I grew up (Norway) you rarely if ever saw Apple's until the Mac, and only the occasional other brand like Amstrad or Spectrum.
In my primary school classes, almost everyone who had a home computer had a Commodore 64. As a result, it was easy to get (pirated) games.
The network effect was strong - having a different computer meant you might have nobody nearby to swap games with. I knew one person - vaguely - with an Amstrad, and one person I knew of at my school had a Texas Instruments machine, and one with a Spectrum, but there were half a dozen kids in my home room alone with Commodore 64's.
It was much more tribal for that reason. If you had a Commodore 64 or Amiga, chances were Atari was "the enemy" even when Jack Tramiel (who founded Commodore) was kicked out of Commodore and bought Atari, and Spectrum's were just laughed at.
Mac and PC's were seen as boring business computers.
It boots into BASIC which makes it really easy to learn BASIC. It feels like a programmable computer even to kids who know nothing about programming, as the only way to get anywhere is to type a command. So it's very easy to start. You can also practice typing straight away, or do colorful 'ASCII art' (actually what people call 'ANSI art' - drawing using colorful text blocks).
OTOH with Windows 95 it's not really clear how to make a program or do something creative. So I'd argue C64 or similar might be a better choices that W95 PC for kids under 15 y.o.
A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.
The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.
For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.
You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.
For me, it was mainly the excellent game library plus a group of friends in the neighborhood who had them so we could swap games and copy them. I did very little programming on it, but did wind up as a reviewer for some small game publisher for while (no idea how I managed this) and, later on, my dad’s business partner gave us a 128 with a modem and I did the BBS thing for a while which was really fascinating at 12 or so.
> If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98.
Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.
It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:
10 PRINT "RetroTechie was here ";
20 GOTO 10
And the store's machine would show your name scrolling until the next kid came along. Color, sound, games & machine code were next.
For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).
I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.
Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...
It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.
For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.
(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)
At the time personal computers didn’t do that much, lots of work places had no computers and libraries (in the uk at least) wouldn’t have had a computer you could use.
Commodore 64’s let you play games and do other stuff (write docs/print, make music, make art) they jump started a generation of us onto computers and what we could do with them.
No one realised at the time that eventually you can sit on the toilet and have a video conference with a thousand people so they were what they were, fun, useful things to have that matched the current time and place.
When windows came along we all built pc’s and learned how to use those, generally fighting with sound card drivers.
For many of us, it was our first computer. It was very simple to understand at every level and very hackable. I was very young when I used it, but I learned so much about the internals of computers.
Thank you. A lot of Western developers a couple generations older than me have fond memories of the Commodore 64, and now I can see why. Thanks for letting me know. Have a nice day.
In addition to other comments, Windows 95 came more than a decade after the Commodore 64. The IBM PC at that time cost roughly three -four times as much in my memory, Apple II was almost as much. The Commodore quickly got a large game library , better than competitors. It was a golden age for smaller scale games not requiring the massive teams of the modern AAA photorealistic or open world games - this was during maybe the height of the arcade video game craze when some kids like me would spend oodles of quarters at convenience stores and video arcades. Eventually many of us would switch to Windows 3.1/95/98 for work.
The 6510 CPU was easy to programme in assembler and it was supported by a graphics chip VIC and a sound chip SID who both had some fun tricks up their sleeves (not like a graphics card, much much more simple).
For their time and the price they were quite capable and fun to use.
8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.
The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.
It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.
The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.
1977; I was with my Mum visiting one of her friends. Bored out of my mind I poked around her living room and peeked underneath a cover, expecting to see a typewriter - it was a teletype terminal with the earcup telephone/modem receptacle, a stream of z-paper folds neatly piled up like some holy sacrament, with which my Mums friend was learning computing. She taught me a few commands, which I still remember and use today .. "ls" .. "cd" .. "cc" .. and she showed me a few lines of this 'new powerful language' she was learning, C. It was the first time I saw a printf(), and the precise moment I learned the real difference betweeen a \r and an \n and what it meant to the paper scroll, rolling underneath endlessly.
1978; I travelled with my Dad to a distant outback town to visit one of his clients. While I waited for them to conclude business, a big box arrived, and the client interrupted my Dad to unpack it, with great enthusiasm. We stood by while the styrofoam was spread around the office in a flurry of unpacking and cardboard ripping chaos. The client swept all the paper nonsense off a spare desk onto the floor and promptly plonked down a brand new Commodore Pet. He poked at it a few times, promptly disclaimed "I have no idea what to do with this thing, I just know I need it <chuckle chuckle>..." Dad and the client left me alone for an hour, and I spent my time typing every single weird character I could, learning how the shift and Commodore keys worked, eventually drawing a weird maze on the screen, which I recognized much later on in my youth as what could have been the beginnings of an RPG-like map.
1980; I was a bit delinquent at a local posh college, supposed to be applying myself to my homework; instead, I followed my fellow classmates with excitement, at the end of the school day, to the local "Computer Age" shop, which had just opened up in our local neighborhood (Claremont, Perth, Western Australia) .. and there, touched my first Apple II, and then Atari 800, computers. I spent so much time after school in that shop, learning BASIC on both systems, that the salesman eventually gave me my first 5.4" floppy disc, to save all the work on in between visits. I still have that floppy, buried in the depths of some book I also value highly. Somewhere.
1982; My regular jaunts around the shopping district of Subiaco took me to every single newsstand in the suburb, and then the Tandy store, and then to my mates place, who had just gotten himself a C64 - which, much to my dismay, couldn't read the code off my Apple II 5.4" floppy, nor would it allow me to just type it all in and RUN it without a hefty serving of pokes. Nevertheless, for a little while (before my mate started getting games in the mail from his British cousins), he and I would spend our weekends porting BASIC listings from the endless magazine piles we'd collected, to the C64 - my first serious cross-platform porting project, an activity and set of experiences which led to MUCH greater success a few years later in my career.
1983; my Dad had finally agreed to get me my first computer, but it was not without great conditions - I had to work at least 4 hours every weekend with him, carting rubbish and bricks and detritous around various building sites he had his hands on, and .. we had to drive to Melbourne (from Perth) to get it, since it would be an opportunity for some quality family time vacation, as well as providing a considerable discount, since my Dad knew the computer importer who was bringing the machines to Australia. And so it was, after a 4 day trip across the Nullabor Plain, I was loaded up with an Oric-1 and a couple of cassette tapes, which I promptly plugged into every single cheap television set I could find on the way back home. Somewhere out there on the Nullabor, was a hotel TV with "Ready" burned into its screen. That was me. That was the end of quality family time on the Nullabor plain too - nobody in my family had the foggiest clue what I was doing to burn those Ready's into the screens.
1987; I have by now become an Assembly programmer and a budding C hacker, and knew far too much about anything to be bothered continuing with my studies, so I drop out of high school and get myself a job on the only electronics assembly production line in Western Australia, at that time, at first stringing endless marine cable harnesses, then touching up a near endless stream of clothes-iron temperature controllers as they pour through the wave solder, and then eventually I get to touch-up the box full of Australias first home-grown modem product - which didn't work, until me and the hardware guys realized there was not enough space between various components near the connectors - necessitating a redesign, a failed schedule, and an abandoned project as the designers gave up in light of the fierce competition from Singapore and Hong Kong and so on. Well, I at least got a patched-up PCB to play with, and with that I taught myself how to write a MODEM driver - first for CP/M, the only operating system available to me at the factory, and then .. when I showed other engineers in the lab that it could actually work, for MS-DOS, on the brand new PC the factory bought for the purpose of demonstrating the one Australian modem that was ever made in Perth. I got paid handsomely for that project, my first proper terminate and stay resident program ...
1988; I arrive in Los Angeles, California, my skills having sharpened enough to cut my teeth on writing an undelete program for the funky proprietary filesystem that Progress/4GL was using to bypass all the OS cruft that got in the way of performance. Astonished that I'd gotten it working (it was easy), the company offered me another project, and then another, and then another .. and after a year, with a litany of things under my belt - a multimedia engine that made fancy graphics on CGA and EGA (and eventually VGA) without requiring additional artist fart'ery, I was ready for more. Always another adventurous thing to write/compile/build/run/test/debug. And so it was, one beautiful glorious afternoon, a brand new MIPS Magnum pizzabox showed up on my desktop, far from the operations room I'd usually have to card my way into, halon emergency mask lessons and all, and suddenly .. I was a Unix/C programmer, and I had daemons to write, systems integrity to check, and a whole set of legacy terminal-based software to port. I need another terminal, but wasn't getting one until I actually wrote the terminal, on the brand new PC that I was also using, less enthusiastically. I wrote the terminal, I used it to log on to my MIPS box, I gained access to the ops room from a grand distance.
1990; BBS'es had my eyeballs pretty much glued to the screen, day and night, and from this it was a short step onto the Internet. I spend every moment of free time parsing USENET, downloading code, getting it to work on my pizzabox, sharpening and refining things, such that my boss just gave me endless challenges to complete - no longer doubting that it would happen, but rather expecting it.
1994; I participate in building the technical backbone of one of America's biggest ISP's at the time, and after a few weeks of hair-on-fire T1 configurations, modem-bank alignments, DNS and USENET server setups, I sit back, turn on the wire tap, and watch as a veritable firehose onslaught of daily new customers from all over Southern California spend 95% of their newly gained online time, downloading porn. (Oh, and I subscribe to minix-list to get me some hot Unix action on my mostly-useless 486, and as soon as Linus' little project hit funet.fi, I am hooked, line and sinker, as a Linux developer.)
2000; I'm burned out, I have a room full of SGI gear, and too much money. Motorbikes, Hollywood girlfriends, trips all over the country. I decide, its time to make synthesizers.
2001; I move to Germany to work for one of Germany's greatest synth companies, and spend my idle time in the Ruhrgebiet learning German and writing firmware loaders, USB drivers, and other such mundane things. I make a lot of cruddy synthesizer music, I learn how Germans party, I find myself far too many distractions.
...
2026; I'm sitting here in Austria, surrounded by 40 years of computing history, which still works just as it ever did over the decades. I can count my productive, shipped userbase for various big commercial projects literally in terms of millions, accrued over the decades, but all I really wanna do is hack on 80's computers and make them valuable again.
I've introduced 40,000+ folks in Vienna to the concept of retrocomputing, giving them hands-on time with machines many of them have never heard of, let alone considered worthy of attention .. a pimped out ZX Spectrum 128+, an Amstrad CPC6128, and an Oric Atmos - each with peripherals designed and built in the 21st Century, to bring each machine up to date with such things as USB storage, class drivers for mice and serial lines, and brand new display capabilities. The microcontrollers in these peripherals are many thousands of times more powerful than the original Z80/6502 CPU's in the 40 year old computers they are serving bytes to, but this doesn't matter any more. The only thing that matters is the fact that there are still brand new software titles being written for these machines every single day. Yes, the Oric Atmos gets new stuff, the Speccie and the Amstrad too of course, and .. any day now .. the Atmos will have a browser, surf the web, download software - finally catching up with its peers in terms of capabilities.
What a wonderful journey its been. One day, all of these machines will find other eyes and hands to entertain, but until then .. I hack on. And on. With dreams of the Nullabor journey still etched in my mind, a never to disappear "Ready" prompt floating in front my eyeballs, its time to read a bit more Hacker News, dig into some of the great repos' from todays preening, and build some stuff.
Holy cow!! Tech has been like a coiling vine around the trunk of your life, and what a life it's been. The C64 was just one of your many computer branches. :)
There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".
When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC and so on.
[1] yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.
For us in the same age cohort in Europe it was ZX Spectrums and Amstrad CPCs, besides the C64 which made it there too. Fun times.
Yup, I remember early school. Two guys in class had a computer, one was a ZX81 the other (me) a C64. We're still friends! =)
> yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.
Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?
Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.
I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).
Those of us who grew up with computers are truly a special breed, since we had to know how things work in order to do anything at all with the things.
These days kids are served eyeball-bleeding chaos on the supercomputers in their pocket, which they need permission to do anything else with .. and its kind of sad.
Learn what a byte is, kids. Learn where it fits into a register and why. Learn a few opcodes, some peripheral I/O heuristics. Break out that raspberry Pi and go full bare metal for a month.
I sure wish our mobile phones had compilers onboard. This is the one thing that is ruining computing for kids these days, imho. They need corporation-controlled permission, for fucks sake.
I 100% agree with you, but as a person who came up in the tail end of the generation we’re discussing (we bought a bargain bin TI-99/4a at K-Mart) and also a faculty member who has been teaching young people how to program for the last ten years, I can tell you that the overwhelming response they have to your exhortation is “WHY?” The current crop of computer users is basically everybody, and the current crop of CS students has primarily been motivated by well-paying jobs [1]. So really, if you want to get through to them, you have to motivate why they should care about bits and bytes in the first place.
Astonishingly, the Jobsian “bicycle for the mind” idea failed. Almost nobody now buys a computer to scratch an itch. They buy a computer (smartphone) to keep in touch with friends and family and to sometimes play games. The idea that software is a service that you pay for has been totally normalized. I find that it takes an entire semester of “imagine if!” scenarios before students start to catch on that WOW THIS IS AN AMAZING MACHINE! Some of them never get it. By analogy it’s like being upset at somebody in the 1970’s for blithely using their telephone without even stopping to consider what a fucking miracle the modern telephone system was. They would just stare at you like you have two heads.
I don’t really know how to change this, but I feel like this is the central battle in the fight us scientists and nerds need to fight in order to get the world to give a shit… about anything.
[1] this may be changing
I could probably write a blog post with the opposite title, sth. like "My life got ruined by the Commodore C64". Equally hyperbolic, the narrative would go something like this: I was the exact same child/teen as the guy from the other blog, but the problem from 2026 me is that I got lured into IT through games and BASIC, and now I so wish I had chosen a different career. Alas, it's all I know how to do, and at this point in my life, changing careers is not a viable option.
So, thanks C64!
I still love you, though...
It still remains to be seen, but the C64 may have ruined my son's life as well. I have a similar story to yours and OP's: born in the mid 70's, got a C64 in the mid 80's, convinced myself that I was a genius because I could get it to do anything I wanted (I even learned 6510 assembler back then) and parlayed those skills into joining the internet boom of the mid-90's.
My own son was born in 2003 and he sort of picked up on my passion for computing, but he grew up in the iphone generation, not the C64 generation. When he went to college, he chose to major in CS like his dad did and just graduated last year into the worst employment market since the great depression. He did get a job so that's good, but we'll see how things go...
I do think I'd have an emotional reaction if I typed load "*",8,1 again, though...
I feel you. My son is still younger, but I have similar fears.
As any good husband would, I bought my wife an old SNES for Christmas a few years ago. And my son loves playing Super Mario World on it.
So I thought some time back, that it could be a great father-son bonding experience if he and I were to code up a simple pixel-style 2D jump'n'run together that he designs and I program.
Except that he's been taking way too great a liking in it. He's kinda obsessed with the development of that game already, and now I'm worried that I turned him onto something that I pray to God will never become his career...
The C64 didn't ruin anything.
Apple removing the compiler from the supercomputer in everyones pocket did, however.
Hello there -- I'm the guy who wrote the article! And I couldn't help but laugh at your comment. You are 100% correct, it could very easily go the other way. My story is that I actually graduated with a degree in English (as in literature!) and the only CS class I took was Pascal (where a friend of mine, who was also in the class, joked that we both got another language for a grade - C).
I'd never intended to be in a CS career, but the way I see it, the gravity of the C64 was simply too strong. I was pulled into its orbit whether I liked it or not, and now here I am, in IT for the last 29 years. My other love, writing, I was able to do on the side (five novels), for which I'm equally grateful.
It's a life -- my life. I love you, too, C64! :)
One of my best friend loves making music. And he was also always interested in recording tech. So after we both graduated from high school, he went on to become a sound engineer. But even right after getting his degree, he said that he never really wanted to work in that profession because he didn't want to lose his passion for it.
I guess both you and my friend did it right. I went all in with studying for a degree in CS and whatnot and here I am today, wondering what I was thinking...?!
You kept your passion, I lost mine. I envy you.
Btw, that LucasArts-style adventure game for the C64 that my other friend and I designed as teenagers is still something I must finish before I die.
Btw, completely OT but something I found puzzling when reading your blog post: how did your aunt communicate with the Austrian guy who didn't speak English?!
Ah, the answer is incredibly simple: my aunt speaks fluent German! She moved to Austria as a young woman and picked up the language, and picked up a husband. :) She speaks Korean, of course, so that's how we all are able to communicate with her. Recently we were at a family gathering, and one of my extended relations is married to a German fellow (who speaks both German and English fluently), and it was utterly cool seeing my aunt and him chat away in German (and sing "99 Red Balloons (Luftballons)," the popular 80s tune by the German singer Nena, in their native German)!
"Luft" in German = "air".
So English title would be "99 air balloons" or just "99 balloons".
(Excellent choice btw, among German-language songs it's an all-time classic)
The English version by the same musician chose to add "Red" to presumably maintain the song's cadence.
Awesome family constellation, thanks for taking the time to explain!
Great! Did you ever visit Austria? Maybe you can take some of the early impressions of German-language speaking with you ..
I have visited Austria many times, on my own with my wife and also thanks to a friend who was stationed there for a few years. Vienna is such a lovely city, and I got to see one of my favorite paintings (maybe my most favorite painting, really), Gustave Klimt's The Kiss, in person at Belvedere. My aunt lives a number of hours away from Vienna so I never got to see her there, so a return trip is not out of the question!
Sounds like the normal mid-life crisis. :-P Would probably hit you with every other job too.
I don't know. IT is a bit different in that regard. As a doctor, even if the system is shit, you still help people directly. As an engineer, you build something tangible that can make people's lives easier. And so on. In IT, though, the impact often feels much more indirect. Most of the time you're optimizing processes or helping businesses become more efficient, rather than improving people's lives in a direct way. You're often several steps removed from the people who ultimately benefit from your work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just doesn't feel very meaningful to me.
I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.
I suggest you run this by an actual doctor.
I had the same kind of childhood with the VIC-20 and C=64 (and TI-99/4a in school as well). And having launched my career in I.T. I started as a Network Operator and then quickly promoted to systems administration, with SunOS 4.1.x mostly.
And I had purchased a beloved briefcase which I dutifully took to work each day, but my job wasn't really working with paper, much less anything that I needed to bring home with me.
And through those early years I really did fret about this: I produced nothing tangible at work. My work wasn't classified or secret, but there was nothing relatable I could really discuss about my work! What could I show people to prove I was a productive worker? How could I prove my worth, such as later on a résumé to a future employer? There was really just nothing.
And it went on like this for decades. I am sure that I, like many, struggled mightily with this intangible nature. Even my father, as a scientist, at least he brought home the Geiger counter, the film badges, the pager and the gadgets.
Find an IT-related problem facing the whole world right now and fix it.
For example phone enshittification. Make your own phone that isn't shit.
As other people said everyone goes through this at a certain life stage. You go from exploring the world and developing your own skills, to figuring out what impact you want to have made on the world after you're gone.
If you grew up with a Commodore your mid life is way past.
How do you figure? Commodore had strong sales through the late 80s, and the C64 wasn't discontinued until 1994.
My family's C64 was the first computer I ever used, and I am barely in my mid 40s. And although my family later purchased an IBM PC clone around '89 or '90, that just meant the C64 moved into my older brother's room, where we used it even more.
There's certainly that. But a lot of the points of the sibling and nephew comments here ring true, too.
Fun nostalgic read (also Korean). I grew up an Atari kid, having spent many hours in arcades and eventually getting an Atari 400 included BASIC, and Asteroids cartridge. No storage not even cassette.
I had friends that had Ataris of course, but also some that had C64s and even a TI-99/4A. The thing in my circle was that the C64 and TI folk were more users and the Atari kids were more hackers, not that there were very many of each at the time. I learned BASIC, machine/assembly, and got into coding and engineering. (One of our pastimes was cracking games just to see how it was protected and see if we could. We'd show off any success amongst ourselves but never distributed as that wasn't the fun part.) I get the feeling that I probably worked for some C64 kids as adults that always seemed to have more of a product or business sense about them than the Atari kids.
I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.
It was fun, but primitive, when I learned Pascal at university I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments!
I hit the limits of C64 basic pretty quick and I read somewhere that there was a different language called "assembler" that was faster, so I convinced my mom to buy me a book about it. As I started reading the book I realized that I needed some software to go with it (the actual assembler...) and the book was about the "Merlin64 assembler" so I begged my parents to buy me that software for Christmas.
Well, as it turns out, that particular assembler was actually pretty obscure software. My poor Dad had to visit a dozen computer stores in Ann Arbor before he _finally_ found a copy.
I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.
I was more lucky, I bought a book about C64 assembler in a second hand book store with my pocket money (must have been in 1989 or 1990).
I remember spending hours typing in hex dumps from the back of Compute!s Gazette back then. To this day, I still remember that LDA at A9 and STA was 8D.
I’ll never forget 53280 and 53281.
Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain). In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)
And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.
Yep. My father build a ZX Spectrum clone for me somewhere around 1991. Few years later he also got Commodore 64 as a gift from German engineers he was working with.
I think both of these machines are really good for learning BASIC: much fewer distractions, you type commands and computer does something.
Still counts! Poor, eager, young, and a bit geeky: C64 was made for those that fell into this category.
Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player we had was broken. When a replacement was obtained in the new-year I started playing games with my sisters, but I'd already been "forced" to play with BASIC and I never really stopped..
> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Dundee? :-D
There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them.
And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle.
The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.
I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee!
But the Spectrums were the best-selling UK machine at the time, so I'm sure there were lots of regions where they were super-common.
I think I had a friend with a BBC Micro, but I can't recall anybody else having something different.
(There was a bit of console-split later, between NES and Sega Megadrive, and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.)
> and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.
I wish the Archimedes had won. It kind of did, I guess, damn near everything runs ARM, but we lost RiscOS on the way.
Speccy guy back in the day here, but these days I love Linux, and you know Linus cut his teeth on the QL, right?
I feel like storage has improved slightly since microdrives were state of the art too...
I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out registers on paper gave me a strong foundation in computers. I realized computers would only be tools and always managed to take jobs outside of comp. sci. or IT, but always used a computer and programmed utilities for every job I had in any language I fancied at the time and throughout the years: C, Basic, asm (6502, PIC, Scenix, 68000, 8086/88, now ARM/x64), Forth, Lisp (Lush/Lush2 lush-users on Sourceforge with Yann LeCun to get Lush running, APL, J, Logo, Pascal, Factor, Java, Python, F#, now Rust, Odin, and J is still open on my desktop daily). I had in mind how people were talking about high-paying jobs if you learned WordPerfect, and it was "the future" back in 1991-93. I felt people were putting the tool before thought, intelligence, and process. I did dip into DBA and IT here and there for a little bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing embedded software for the window animation I was working on for a display company, and interactive prox switches on the store window at Sachs to trigger a pneumatically actuated Nutcracker to raise his arm and close his jaw and other fun kinetic pieces in the late 90s (Pre-Arduino saturation days - Parallax Basic Stamp, Scenix, PIC, and PCBs from scratch by hand with resist and etch). Kids loved pressing the Nutcracker switches! The reason I learned so much was that you had to go to the library, write a letter or eventually by the 90s email and user groups, and just plain figure it out through trial and error on your own. I had a VIC-20, Commodore 128, Amiga 500/1000, then a PowerPC Mac running Mach Linux in the late 90s/early 2000. I loved Commodore. It's a shame. They were the best option for the buck.
Kindred spirits, you and me. That PDP-11 put you on the right path, for sure.
I grew up with a C64, and the story resonated with me. Not as much about getting pirates games to run, but more trying to play the latest games on our old 386 which came after the C64.
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
I can relate much to the author's experience. I am also a Korean immigrant, with parents who owned a retail business, who grew up in the NYC area with a Commodore 64. I also majored in the liberal arts at an Ivy League school.
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. But my computer background got me hired into tech investment banking out of college, and has shaped every aspect of my life and career. just today I debugged a bash script that is part of the workflow for my one-person business.
Thank you, Commodore.
Hello my Korean brother! Thanks so much for sharing your story, too. I started out as an engineer (materials science) then switched to English my sophomore year after realizing I couldn't imagine doing that for another three years.
But now look at us, we're like safecrackers in movies who try to go straight but end up in front of the vault again. :)
I can't describe that mystery feeling when getting bunch of random cassette tapes from my cousins with a giant catalog of programs on them, some demos, some games, some wild stuff and just casually browsing them. All I had was a title if I was lucky. Then the fun stuff of calibrating the tape head :) Great memories.
I wanted an Apple II so badly and thought I was getting the short-end-of-the-stick with a C64 but I am so happy (to this day) that my first machine at home was C64.
I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).
If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).
The price + graphics and sound (out-of-the-box) was what really made the difference for me and self-learning.
But I learned a lot more about disk data organization (hardware-level) via the Apple IIs that were at school.
An interesting side-note: a major factor in my family's decision to get me any computer at all was that I was staying after school almost everyday until usually 7pm.
Mom thought surely I must be lying about it and doing something else, probably nothing good.
She made a appointment to meet with the Computer teacher to ask him directly: he confirmed that I was there regularly, had keys for the computer room, and that maybe she should consider getting me my own machine for home.
The thing that truly changed my life was the Commodore Reference Guide, with schematic, and a book from Data Becker that described the schematic in low level detail. Address decoders, chip selects, tri-state data busses…
I had been reading Elektuur (Elektor for English readers) for years, but never quite understood how computers worked.
That book changed everything, like a giant light bulb switching on. Suddenly I could read all those digital schematics. Digital design was what I wanted to do in life. And I did and still do.
Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.
Loved the ads. Such memories.
I bought a C64 ultimate recently as well. I am thoroughly enjoying it and re-learning the eccentricities that all made sense to me back in the 80s...
I am curious how many of you other C64 greybeards got exposed to a language called COMAL (not a typo) on the C64 back in the day?
It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.
s/Commodore 64/Apple IIe/
My parents were too cheap for the C64 and I got the VIC20 instead.
Major bummer. In 20 columns.
I just got lucky that the price fell so precipitously, and so quickly. The drop outpaced my teenage patience!
Yeah, this was '83. They went into the store and saw both on the shelf, and the C64 was "too much" so I got what I got. I think a year later the price on the C64 just made the VIC20 totally pointless.
Also they bought it, brought it home, and then two days later took us all on a 3 week vacation road trip across Canada. I sat in the back of our Toyota Tercel with a pile of magazines with BASIC listings in the back of them fantasizing about getting home to try them out. Torture.
My first machine was an Oric 1, I was 8 years old, it was 1982 - Never looked back ^_^
I started on a TI-99/4A. I've met TI greybeards who've never heard of it and didn't know TI even made a personal computer...
Any Vic 20 users?
Same!
I'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?
The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk
The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Users_Guide_1982_Co...
[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...
[2] https://archive.org/details/commodore-1541-disk-drive-users-...
>While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks.
In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the 8-bit era and even most commercial software was sold on tape.
I (a youngish adult, in the US) had a 1541 drive that broke. I was in love with the "Silent Service" submarine game, and found an ad in one of the computer magazines for a cassette version of the game that I ordered from England. It arrived in a couple weeks, and I had my favorite game again! Thank heavens the lower tech Brits!
There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command).
Meaning that the entire computer, and all its capabilities and speed, was available from within BASIC.
This was true of many home computers of the era, and even of the IBM PC if you were willing to struggle a bit, but it was emphatically not true of all of them: the TI-99/4A, for instance, had a nerfed BASIC that was not only very slow, it also prevented access to any of the system's facilities outside of the commands BASIC provided. This probably had a lot to do with its unusual memory architecture, in which only 128 words of RAM were provided to the CPU and all BASIC memory was accessed indirectly through the video chip.
But yeah, aside from cartridge-based games, every program on the C64 was a BASIC program, just one that was mostly a machine-code memory image.
Booting directly into a programming language REPL (in ~2 seconds, I might add) was a great signal that the C64 was ultimately for programming, even if all you do with it is games.
I kind of wish for a modern PC that booted in 2 seconds, directly into Python or something.
I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.
Of the 1980s 8-bit computing era, the Commodore 64 was the "best value" for getting a lot of functionality for the price. It had 64k of RAM when some others only had 16k. It had a really good built-in sound chip with polyphonic sounds (makes it richer sounding for programming video games music and sound effects). Some other computers had cheaper chips with monophonic sound which makes simplistic beeps and tones. It outsold all the other computers like Apple II, Atari 400/800, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc. This meant it had a big ecosystem of 3rd-party add-ons.
The article talks about COMPUTE! magazine. They often had free games where they listed the source code in the magazine pages. The reader would then manually type in the code by hand into the computer and save it to floppy or tape drive. The magazine would have the same game ported to different computers so there would be separate source code listings for Commodore, Atari, etc. The Commodore 64 versions of the game would always end up being the best version to run because of the hardware advantages mentioned above.
https://www.google.com/search?q=compute%21+magazine+program+...
It was the best-selling single model of home computer for a very long time (relatively speaking in a very fast-moving field) in an era where most new models ditched compatibility, and in some countries it totally dominated.
Where I grew up (Norway) you rarely if ever saw Apple's until the Mac, and only the occasional other brand like Amstrad or Spectrum.
In my primary school classes, almost everyone who had a home computer had a Commodore 64. As a result, it was easy to get (pirated) games.
The network effect was strong - having a different computer meant you might have nobody nearby to swap games with. I knew one person - vaguely - with an Amstrad, and one person I knew of at my school had a Texas Instruments machine, and one with a Spectrum, but there were half a dozen kids in my home room alone with Commodore 64's.
It was much more tribal for that reason. If you had a Commodore 64 or Amiga, chances were Atari was "the enemy" even when Jack Tramiel (who founded Commodore) was kicked out of Commodore and bought Atari, and Spectrum's were just laughed at.
Mac and PC's were seen as boring business computers.
It boots into BASIC which makes it really easy to learn BASIC. It feels like a programmable computer even to kids who know nothing about programming, as the only way to get anywhere is to type a command. So it's very easy to start. You can also practice typing straight away, or do colorful 'ASCII art' (actually what people call 'ANSI art' - drawing using colorful text blocks).
OTOH with Windows 95 it's not really clear how to make a program or do something creative. So I'd argue C64 or similar might be a better choices that W95 PC for kids under 15 y.o.
A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.
The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.
For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.
You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.
Hah! This was me, as well...first a Timex, then a C=64.
For me, it was mainly the excellent game library plus a group of friends in the neighborhood who had them so we could swap games and copy them. I did very little programming on it, but did wind up as a reviewer for some small game publisher for while (no idea how I managed this) and, later on, my dad’s business partner gave us a 128 with a modem and I did the BBS thing for a while which was really fascinating at 12 or so.
> If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98.
Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.
It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:
And the store's machine would show your name scrolling until the next kid came along. Color, sound, games & machine code were next.For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).
I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.
Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...
It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.
For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.
(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)
At the time personal computers didn’t do that much, lots of work places had no computers and libraries (in the uk at least) wouldn’t have had a computer you could use.
Commodore 64’s let you play games and do other stuff (write docs/print, make music, make art) they jump started a generation of us onto computers and what we could do with them.
No one realised at the time that eventually you can sit on the toilet and have a video conference with a thousand people so they were what they were, fun, useful things to have that matched the current time and place.
When windows came along we all built pc’s and learned how to use those, generally fighting with sound card drivers.
For many of us, it was our first computer. It was very simple to understand at every level and very hackable. I was very young when I used it, but I learned so much about the internals of computers.
Thank you. A lot of Western developers a couple generations older than me have fond memories of the Commodore 64, and now I can see why. Thanks for letting me know. Have a nice day.
In addition to other comments, Windows 95 came more than a decade after the Commodore 64. The IBM PC at that time cost roughly three -four times as much in my memory, Apple II was almost as much. The Commodore quickly got a large game library , better than competitors. It was a golden age for smaller scale games not requiring the massive teams of the modern AAA photorealistic or open world games - this was during maybe the height of the arcade video game craze when some kids like me would spend oodles of quarters at convenience stores and video arcades. Eventually many of us would switch to Windows 3.1/95/98 for work.
The 6510 CPU was easy to programme in assembler and it was supported by a graphics chip VIC and a sound chip SID who both had some fun tricks up their sleeves (not like a graphics card, much much more simple). For their time and the price they were quite capable and fun to use.
8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.
The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.
It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.
The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.
> These games didn’t come with any instructions, so figuring out how to play them was often a bigger challenge than the game itself.
Ah yes, the "special compilations" on TDK D90s swapped in the playground ;-)
Wait, pirate game mixtapes? Awesome!
1977; I was with my Mum visiting one of her friends. Bored out of my mind I poked around her living room and peeked underneath a cover, expecting to see a typewriter - it was a teletype terminal with the earcup telephone/modem receptacle, a stream of z-paper folds neatly piled up like some holy sacrament, with which my Mums friend was learning computing. She taught me a few commands, which I still remember and use today .. "ls" .. "cd" .. "cc" .. and she showed me a few lines of this 'new powerful language' she was learning, C. It was the first time I saw a printf(), and the precise moment I learned the real difference betweeen a \r and an \n and what it meant to the paper scroll, rolling underneath endlessly.
1978; I travelled with my Dad to a distant outback town to visit one of his clients. While I waited for them to conclude business, a big box arrived, and the client interrupted my Dad to unpack it, with great enthusiasm. We stood by while the styrofoam was spread around the office in a flurry of unpacking and cardboard ripping chaos. The client swept all the paper nonsense off a spare desk onto the floor and promptly plonked down a brand new Commodore Pet. He poked at it a few times, promptly disclaimed "I have no idea what to do with this thing, I just know I need it <chuckle chuckle>..." Dad and the client left me alone for an hour, and I spent my time typing every single weird character I could, learning how the shift and Commodore keys worked, eventually drawing a weird maze on the screen, which I recognized much later on in my youth as what could have been the beginnings of an RPG-like map.
1980; I was a bit delinquent at a local posh college, supposed to be applying myself to my homework; instead, I followed my fellow classmates with excitement, at the end of the school day, to the local "Computer Age" shop, which had just opened up in our local neighborhood (Claremont, Perth, Western Australia) .. and there, touched my first Apple II, and then Atari 800, computers. I spent so much time after school in that shop, learning BASIC on both systems, that the salesman eventually gave me my first 5.4" floppy disc, to save all the work on in between visits. I still have that floppy, buried in the depths of some book I also value highly. Somewhere.
1982; My regular jaunts around the shopping district of Subiaco took me to every single newsstand in the suburb, and then the Tandy store, and then to my mates place, who had just gotten himself a C64 - which, much to my dismay, couldn't read the code off my Apple II 5.4" floppy, nor would it allow me to just type it all in and RUN it without a hefty serving of pokes. Nevertheless, for a little while (before my mate started getting games in the mail from his British cousins), he and I would spend our weekends porting BASIC listings from the endless magazine piles we'd collected, to the C64 - my first serious cross-platform porting project, an activity and set of experiences which led to MUCH greater success a few years later in my career.
1983; my Dad had finally agreed to get me my first computer, but it was not without great conditions - I had to work at least 4 hours every weekend with him, carting rubbish and bricks and detritous around various building sites he had his hands on, and .. we had to drive to Melbourne (from Perth) to get it, since it would be an opportunity for some quality family time vacation, as well as providing a considerable discount, since my Dad knew the computer importer who was bringing the machines to Australia. And so it was, after a 4 day trip across the Nullabor Plain, I was loaded up with an Oric-1 and a couple of cassette tapes, which I promptly plugged into every single cheap television set I could find on the way back home. Somewhere out there on the Nullabor, was a hotel TV with "Ready" burned into its screen. That was me. That was the end of quality family time on the Nullabor plain too - nobody in my family had the foggiest clue what I was doing to burn those Ready's into the screens.
1987; I have by now become an Assembly programmer and a budding C hacker, and knew far too much about anything to be bothered continuing with my studies, so I drop out of high school and get myself a job on the only electronics assembly production line in Western Australia, at that time, at first stringing endless marine cable harnesses, then touching up a near endless stream of clothes-iron temperature controllers as they pour through the wave solder, and then eventually I get to touch-up the box full of Australias first home-grown modem product - which didn't work, until me and the hardware guys realized there was not enough space between various components near the connectors - necessitating a redesign, a failed schedule, and an abandoned project as the designers gave up in light of the fierce competition from Singapore and Hong Kong and so on. Well, I at least got a patched-up PCB to play with, and with that I taught myself how to write a MODEM driver - first for CP/M, the only operating system available to me at the factory, and then .. when I showed other engineers in the lab that it could actually work, for MS-DOS, on the brand new PC the factory bought for the purpose of demonstrating the one Australian modem that was ever made in Perth. I got paid handsomely for that project, my first proper terminate and stay resident program ...
1988; I arrive in Los Angeles, California, my skills having sharpened enough to cut my teeth on writing an undelete program for the funky proprietary filesystem that Progress/4GL was using to bypass all the OS cruft that got in the way of performance. Astonished that I'd gotten it working (it was easy), the company offered me another project, and then another, and then another .. and after a year, with a litany of things under my belt - a multimedia engine that made fancy graphics on CGA and EGA (and eventually VGA) without requiring additional artist fart'ery, I was ready for more. Always another adventurous thing to write/compile/build/run/test/debug. And so it was, one beautiful glorious afternoon, a brand new MIPS Magnum pizzabox showed up on my desktop, far from the operations room I'd usually have to card my way into, halon emergency mask lessons and all, and suddenly .. I was a Unix/C programmer, and I had daemons to write, systems integrity to check, and a whole set of legacy terminal-based software to port. I need another terminal, but wasn't getting one until I actually wrote the terminal, on the brand new PC that I was also using, less enthusiastically. I wrote the terminal, I used it to log on to my MIPS box, I gained access to the ops room from a grand distance.
1990; BBS'es had my eyeballs pretty much glued to the screen, day and night, and from this it was a short step onto the Internet. I spend every moment of free time parsing USENET, downloading code, getting it to work on my pizzabox, sharpening and refining things, such that my boss just gave me endless challenges to complete - no longer doubting that it would happen, but rather expecting it.
1994; I participate in building the technical backbone of one of America's biggest ISP's at the time, and after a few weeks of hair-on-fire T1 configurations, modem-bank alignments, DNS and USENET server setups, I sit back, turn on the wire tap, and watch as a veritable firehose onslaught of daily new customers from all over Southern California spend 95% of their newly gained online time, downloading porn. (Oh, and I subscribe to minix-list to get me some hot Unix action on my mostly-useless 486, and as soon as Linus' little project hit funet.fi, I am hooked, line and sinker, as a Linux developer.)
2000; I'm burned out, I have a room full of SGI gear, and too much money. Motorbikes, Hollywood girlfriends, trips all over the country. I decide, its time to make synthesizers.
2001; I move to Germany to work for one of Germany's greatest synth companies, and spend my idle time in the Ruhrgebiet learning German and writing firmware loaders, USB drivers, and other such mundane things. I make a lot of cruddy synthesizer music, I learn how Germans party, I find myself far too many distractions.
...
2026; I'm sitting here in Austria, surrounded by 40 years of computing history, which still works just as it ever did over the decades. I can count my productive, shipped userbase for various big commercial projects literally in terms of millions, accrued over the decades, but all I really wanna do is hack on 80's computers and make them valuable again.
I've introduced 40,000+ folks in Vienna to the concept of retrocomputing, giving them hands-on time with machines many of them have never heard of, let alone considered worthy of attention .. a pimped out ZX Spectrum 128+, an Amstrad CPC6128, and an Oric Atmos - each with peripherals designed and built in the 21st Century, to bring each machine up to date with such things as USB storage, class drivers for mice and serial lines, and brand new display capabilities. The microcontrollers in these peripherals are many thousands of times more powerful than the original Z80/6502 CPU's in the 40 year old computers they are serving bytes to, but this doesn't matter any more. The only thing that matters is the fact that there are still brand new software titles being written for these machines every single day. Yes, the Oric Atmos gets new stuff, the Speccie and the Amstrad too of course, and .. any day now .. the Atmos will have a browser, surf the web, download software - finally catching up with its peers in terms of capabilities.
What a wonderful journey its been. One day, all of these machines will find other eyes and hands to entertain, but until then .. I hack on. And on. With dreams of the Nullabor journey still etched in my mind, a never to disappear "Ready" prompt floating in front my eyeballs, its time to read a bit more Hacker News, dig into some of the great repos' from todays preening, and build some stuff.
Holy cow!! Tech has been like a coiling vine around the trunk of your life, and what a life it's been. The C64 was just one of your many computer branches. :)
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