The Commodore 64 turns 25 and CNN notices
The Commodore 64 turns 25 this year, and amazingly, CNN seems to deem it important enough to merit a front page story. Obviously they have some nerds on staff, because this is far better than their usual sensationalist fare. I’m too young to have grown up with a Commodore, but I do envy everyone who had the experience of using one. From all I’ve read and heard, it sounds like a great system. It was also the best-selling personal computer model of all time, selling 30 million units over its lifespan of twelve years. I can’t even imagine a computer model lasting more than two years these days.
The great thing about the Commodore 64 is that it was affordable (at $600, it was cheaper than a lot of personal computers on the market these days, even adjusting for inflation) and it was hackable. You could get really close to the machine and write all sorts of neat programs out of the box. It turned a generation of kids onto programming. Personal computers these days don’t come with development environments and compilers. If you want to program, you have to go out and download the tools (and many people don’t even realize you can). The way the Commodore 64 did it was much better.
I think it’d be really neat to buy a Commodore 64 and experiment with it to see what the generation of nerds before me was using. It’s not too expensive (going for less than $100 on eBay, and certainly less in local used computer/electronic stores). I already have a bunch of older computers, including some SPARC stations, at my house, so why not add to the collection?
December 7th, 2007 at 20:28
Don’t forget inflation: $600 in 1982 dollars, corrected by CPI, is roughly $1283 today. It was still something like half the price of the Apple II, though the Apple II still sold like hot-cakes in 1982.
If you’d like to play with a C64 you should consider using an emulator. Sure, it’s fairly inexpensive to purchase a C64 today, but without some extra hardware (i.e. a 1541) you won’t get the complete experience, and adding it may increase that cost a lot. The biggest reason you should emulate is because getting software onto a real C64 is a pain, while it’s trivial to get software into an emulator. ;)
Besides, by not buying a C64 you won’t deprive someone who needs one to extract its SID chip for a synthesizer. (For example, http://www.hardsid.com/)
I owned a C64 myself, although in 1985 rather than 1982. One of the first things I did with it was take it apart, much to the dismay of my mother. It went back together trivially enough. One of the things that was interesting about the C64 was the thriving user community (which included a lot of software cracking and piracy, in my experience :) ), something you can’t recreate while using a C64 today, not with a real c64 or an emulator… I’m sure the current C64 collectors culture is different from what I experienced as a child.
December 8th, 2007 at 14:24
I was never a C64 user; I grew up on the much more “respectable” Trash-80, which had far suckier graphics and sound, but a better storage architecture.
However, I was a fond Amiga user for several years. One of the things I regret losing when I moved to Chicago was my Amiga 2000.