Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

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ggiuliomagnifico about 3 hours ago 37 commentsRead Article on dfarq.homeip.net

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Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mkovach•15 minutes ago

Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.

I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.

Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.

I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.

That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.

monkeydust•7 minutes ago

I credit the C64 for setting down the computing path - fondly recall hours spent using BASIC and making my own games. Managed to stick with it when my mates were all getting Amigas but then finally convinced my parents to fork out (some serious £ back then) on a PC...but it all started with the humble C64, fantastic machine.

wateralien•12 minutes ago

Greetings, fellow old people.

boltzmann-brain•4 minutes ago

my first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!

wateralien•13 minutes ago

I had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.

gxd•2 minutes ago

The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in many ways it's more important than the mighty C64.

It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually buy one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.

Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)

noir_lord•about 1 hour ago

Grew up in that era, I always wanted a C64 (I had a Spectrum and as much as we'd argue about the relative merits on the playground, deep down us Speccy users knew the C64 was better).

I still occasionally consider buying one but then I remember it'll just sit on a shelf collecting dust, better someone who actually uses it gets one.

xvxvx•about 1 hour ago

My experience was the same. Loved my Spectrum 128 but friends had the Commodore and its graphics were superior. Very expensive though.

The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.

Towaway69•23 minutes ago

> The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.

You say it “magic”, it wasn’t “better” or “different” or “worse”, it was a kind of magic that happens when tech is new and folks experiment.

I’m sure many will look back in 40 years and say the same about AI - we’re living through the magical age of AI.

Just as we did when we got our C64’s back in the day ;)

EDIT:

Perhaps I should clarify what I meant. There are folks having their C64 moment with AI today. These folks are getting into computers via AI just as the grey beards amongst us did with the C64.

I don’t think we should be begrudging them for their starting point. After all, those that started with punch cards don’t generally go around laughing at the C64 kids!

noir_lord•6 minutes ago

Not so sure that that is true.

You have to consider the backdrop/time as well - back then there was no BigTech(TM), there wasn't social media/the pervasive backdrop of everything you do with tech been monetised or commoditised.

Fundamentally you felt like when you bought a computer/OS/Software you were the customer not the product.

Your Commodore 64/BBC Micro didn't do everything it could to gather all your data for targeted advertising, there was no algorithm trying to keep you angry so you'd buy more copies of Crash magazine.

While there will be kids out there having a blast with AI, I suspect the whole experience is flavoured differently because of the world we built for those kids.

AltruisticGapHN•about 1 hour ago

Somewhat relevant

DOOM on C64 with variable height floor/ceilings

https://kweepa.itch.io/doom64

And my favorite, Quake on C64

https://kweepa.itch.io/quake64

asdefghyk•35 minutes ago

I never had a Commododore , but I had several other computers starting from around 1979. From that era , from arount 1975 forward there where often SEVERAL NEW different computers released each year. That include SBC Single board computer that was sold as the board , often without a power eupply or case and S100 systems and DIY hobbyiest build systems I still have most of books and magazines from that era, most of my computers , got lost, I still have a few.

radicalbyte•32 minutes ago

I'm loving my C64U.

The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.

technothrasher•about 1 hour ago

Anybody know what happened to the C64 serial number registry? Last I had checked it, which was a long while ago, I had the second oldest serial numbered machine on it (excluding prototypes). But I just went to look and the registry seems to be gone.

MobileVet•about 1 hour ago

LOAD *.*,8,1

weinzierl•39 minutes ago

    POKE 53280, 0
    POKE 53281, 0
    POKE 1,0

MobileVet•33 minutes ago

Isn’t wild how our mind remembers these things? It has probably been 2+ decades since that command was in the front of my dome and yet, when I wanted it, it was there instantly

dosisking•about 1 hour ago

?SYNTAX ERROR

sedatk•10 minutes ago

lO"*",8,1

Marcuss2•about 2 hours ago

When it released, it cost $595 (back then, not in today's money), considering the price dropped to just $229 the following year, that was not a good buy when it came out.

noir_lord•about 1 hour ago

Not unusual in that era though, home computers were evolving ridiculously fast.

There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.

TacticalCoder•42 minutes ago

It's even a bit crazier than that: the Commodore Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, a bit less than three years after the C64, in july 1985.

A friend of mine, whose father was an art teacher, had an Amiga 1000 at home. Mind blown (I'm super lucky for later on another friend had an early SGI Indy at home for his stepfather was president of SGI Benelux). So I got to see and salivate on those mythic machines early on.

Of course I was stuck on the C64 until the Amiga 500, way more affordable, came out.

Still have my C128 and it was still working last time I cleaned it/tried it (when I was locked inside during Covid) and a few floppy disks were still reading fine (so I took a NOS --new old stock-- pack of 5"1/4 floppies and made a copy of Fast Hack'em and a copy of the Commando game): pure time capsule.

Fetched two C64s too: I know the PSU is tricky on the C64 and I don't know if those work or not. I've got floppy disk readers too.

But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...

noir_lord•18 minutes ago

> I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone?

Feel that way every time I see a YT video on a "retro" computer I would have been able to play while having a beer legally (18 in the UK so 1998), it's then a shock to realise that was nearly 30 years ago.

> Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same.

So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.

> And the games. So many games...

Still a gamer, there are three constants in my life, programming, reading and video games (roughly in that order).

mgkimsal•19 minutes ago

> But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...

Yep. 10 here. A lot of the same feelings.

mgkimsal•21 minutes ago

It was a good buy for folks who got in early to build software/games for it. Friend of family was building games in 1982/1983 and had some early clones of games out (pacman, centipede, frogger clones, etc) and... while there were a lot of early publishers, it was fairly cheap to do in the early days, and they made more than enough to justify the $595 price (multiple units, IIRC).

Findecanor•about 2 hours ago

I have seen the date "September 1" be disputed on forums. Is there a credible source other than the book that the article refers to?

georgemcbay•about 2 hours ago

Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.

Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.

Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).

Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.

Long, strange trip.

intrasight•7 minutes ago

May your trip continue!

At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.

nurettin•about 2 hours ago

That very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)

christkv•about 2 hours ago

Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.

tom_•about 1 hour ago

The C64 disk drive would still have left you with plenty of reading time.

TacticalCoder•36 minutes ago

> Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck.

A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so.

Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive...

We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.

georgemcbay•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, I was lucky enough to miss the "Datasette" days.

I had the luxury of a disk drive, and even eventually had an Epyx Fast Load cartridge to speed (some) things up even further! Practically zooming for the time!

andrewstuart•about 2 hours ago

Memory.

Then as now it’s memory that matters.

Anyhow if you want a brand new Commodore 64 get it here:

https://commodore.net/

simgt•about 2 hours ago

For me a good portion of the appeal of a nostalgic device like that is the display. Any recommendations?

myself248•39 minutes ago

Estate sales. You can score a dozen CRTs a week if you for some reason want to...

ionwake•15 minutes ago

fantastic machine.

... however (say what you will but chuckie egg wasnt on the commodore)