I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

Sounds like the normal mid-life crisis. :-P Would probably hit you with every other job too.

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.

[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-...

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+...

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.

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.