Comments on: Silicon Valley celebrates Commodore 64 at 25
At the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., some of Silicon Valley's best and brightest came out to applaud 25 years of what might be the best-selling computer of all time.
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Some things never change.
But...I had a 64. It was great fun. At the time, I (as the article said) couldn't afford an Apple machine. And, when it was time to graduate to a better machine...I still couldn't afford an Apple (Mac), so I became entwined with MS-DOS, et. al.
If IBM had not come along when they did, we would still have computers on our desktops but it would have been delayed a few years and we would probably be much more fragmented with several viable brands all of which were more expensive.
At the time Apple was just the biggest contender in a market that had no clear winners. Nobody had a breakthough computer until IBM. Nobody followed up with a breakthrough computer of their own in time to do anything but fail.
I learned, BASIC and Assembly on it and also played a lot of games.
Recently I even bought one of those C64 in a joystick things. Nostalgia?
All good fun at the time and an excellent introduction to computers.
As an aside ? I see the value of the OLPC to be the same as the C64 and other machines of the time. It gives people the opportunity to tinker and learn. How many technical people reading news.com started out with a C64, Spectrum, or Tandy.
Programming is programming. Configuring hardware is the same. Once you know the basics you can apply it anywhere. I?m still building computers and programming using some of the skills I learned 15-20 years go. It?s different but very much the same.
FWIW, I was using CBM PETS at college but £700 for a 32k machine was too much in those days, so I had to have a brief sojourn into the realms of ZX80 & ZX81 (2 weeks) before going the Commodore route (VIC20, Commodore 64, 128, Amiga500 & finally A1200).I always thought when I finally went intel that if the same money/marketing & developement had gone into CBM as went into "PC" then we could have had the equivalent of a CRAY for a few hundred $£ (celect currency of choice)
Was it so difficult to make an article that simply celebrated the Commodore 64 and the changes that it made to the lives of so many geeks, myself included? Was it so hard to just write an article reminiscing about a wonderful, by-gone era of computing? Was it impossible to just report on the things that were said without acting like a National Inquirer reporter trying to dig up some old grudge?
"Silicon Valley celebrates Commodore 64 at 25"? How about a more appropriate title like "Apple fan-boy tries to stir up old feelings that belong in the past"?
Sheesh.
I do remember friendly debates with owners of the first "PC"s. I would argue that my C64 had 16 colors, and 3 channels of waveform audio, and was ridiculously cheap. (I remember buying the main board for $89..)
They suffered with CGA: 4 "colors", including pink and cyan, and could only -beep- on one audio channel, and had to pay thousands for the downgrade.
At the time, I don't remember any reasonable come-backs to the question: "So what can you do with that thing that the C64 can't do?"
Then the Amiga came out to compete with these "PC"s, and I knew the answer. "Grow." The C64 and the Timex and the Atari were dead ends.
And here we are.
1. I learned to create my first BASIC program on the Vic 20.
2. I played some of the best games at the time on the 128.
3. It opened up a new world to me; broadened my imagination.
I can go on and on with reasons...
However when I think about it, the single most important reason the Commodore puts a smile on my face is that it helped a young Latino boy, of a single parent household on welfare, escape from the poverty, crime, and hopelessness that existed in the neighborhood at the time. It also helped that young boy realize what he wanted to do with his life. Work with computers.
So with that in mind not only does the Commodore put a smile on my face but it moves me to thank Mr. Tramiel for making the decision to keep the Commodore affordable for the masses. Because if he hadn't, who knows where I would be today.
Thank you Mr. Tramiel.
I bet you were #1 cracker in your town.
How many chicks did you get in high school? haha
computer. Not a single one was pirated. Partially because I was a
kid and simply didn't know where to go to pirate anything. But
also because I got a tape of new games every month from
"Cursor" magazine. Ratrun (a maze from the rat's perspective),
Frog! (catch flies, looked good on the green screens some PETs
had) were some favorites.
There were unexpected lessons like how I learned that random
number generators aren't really random. A cousin played a card
game so much he could watch us play a few hands then tell us
the next card. The rest of us kids gave up playing that game
with him. 8)
It was a culture where computers were inclusive. You bought a machine sometimes based on price and features, and sometimes based on what your friends had so you could trade software with them. Once obtained, the computer was an island. Few people had, or could convince their parents to allow them, access to online systems and even then the majority were locally run BBSes which would regularily hold user meets. Computers were about meeting people. You got a new game or piece of hardware and you called your friends to come over, or you brought it to their house, or you brought it to the next users group meeting. If you wanted to find out about something hardware or software, you called your friends, went over their houses, or went to users group meetings. This inclusivity has been replaced by the Internet where computers no longer have that power to bring people together and instead has them sitting in their homes accessing the information online that they used to interract directly with other people.
Were there arguements between owners of one system and owners of a competing system? Yes. But again, these arguements were the same on both sides and was more of an attempt to justify the owners choice of one system over the others. This is the same thing we see today not in computers since one system dominates the market but we do see in online games in the arguements between players of WoW, or EQ, or UO.
One thing that IS important to point out though is how much more creativity there was then compared to now. Even in video games, while the graphics are primitive by today's standards, the game play is much more original than they are today. Today, you get cookie cutter software. The graphics is fantastic but its the same game from last year, year before that, and before that... None of the gaming companies today want to take a risk. Rather they prefer to play it safe. Simple games like Jumpman or MULE had replay value for weeks. Now its just a fighting game or driving game or first person shooter.
my family was robbed as a child, we got a c64, really nice machine.
Then we got a Mac SE, and that was the end of that; lifelong Mac
user ever since.
dad sent Commodore our old Sears Color Pong Video Game
Console system to get my $100 buck rebate on the Commodore
64. $100 for a system that played four version of Pong was a
pretty good deal at the time.
I was lucky enough to work in Silicon Valley writing computer games for all those micro computers, and was intimately aware of the simularities and differences between them.
The PET and Apple II were considered mre business class machines, while the Atari was geared more toward games. The C64 grew from the Vic-20 and seemed to straddle the fence between business and game software. Then the Apple II+ (and next gens) seemed to dance on the fence too, and the real desktop business computer was the PC (the PET being retired).
At our shop, we liked the Atari platform the best then, because it had a better development IDE system. We actually wrote 6502 code on the Atari, and then ported it to the C64 via a custom cable built out of joystick cables to link the Atari and C64 together (custom driver software allowed basic transfer capability similar to saving a file to disk).
PCs were just coming into their own, and we eventually started coding more games for it, but graphics were different, processors were different, and games written for the 6502 family (Atari, Apple, and Commodore) couldn't just be converted, but almost totally rewritten. We experimented with writing C code and using the compitler to generate Assembly based on the platform target, but it was kludgy at best.
When the Lisa came out, and afterwards, the Mac, we knew it was a big development leap, but felt that it again seperated the gaming world from the business world, and PC and Macs would rule the business world, whilst Atari and Commodore would stay with the gaming. However, it was obvious that at such costs as computers were becoming, it would be harder and harder for parents to justify buying two computers for a family, and business needs seemed to point in the direction of Mac and PC. It wasn't until the Nintendo gaming system came out that it was clear how evolution had played it's hand.
As for my fond memories of the C64, it was in the SID chip that allowed real music to be written, that gave it the WOW factor for me. So much so that I helped develop routines that allowed the other boxes to mimic it, and the days of clicks and beeps were over...
But one thing is certain. To develop class software now takes a lot more education, hard work, and business sense than when we all could spend a long weekend in our basement cranking out code for the C64, and be proud of it and amaze our friends. Would anybody today pay for a text-based adventure game, or even Jumpman (and that took 6 months to convert from Atari to C64 back in the day!)
Hirez proof:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/geosc64
I had and used GEOS on a C64. It was pretty cool for its day - a little crude when compared to the Mac, but miles better than Windows was at that time. The only gripe I had was that the C-64 was still limited in RAM (they did make and sell a 512K memory module/cartridge, but few programs knew what to do with it, and it took forever to page it up).
*sigh* - I wish I hadn't got rid of the thing a few years ago...
/P
http://cbmfiles.com/geos/index.html
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/masters/geos/
http://galway.c64.org/geosds/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
Both the Apple II and C64 versions were released as "freeware" a few years ago.
The Atari 800 came out long before the Commodore 64, and was a lot faster. The crippling performance of the C64 original floppy drive...was so bad, even for the times, it was bad, it was like running a tape drive.
The Atari 800's original lead in having more software and arcade ports was eventually eroded by Commodore, but the machines were similarly spec'd and (after Atari moved manufacturing to asia) similarly priced.
And yes, we would have gotten an Apple II if we could afford it...but being overpriced was not a feature.
The Atari 400 was a souped up Atari 2600 (1976) with better graphics and sound due to those ANTIC chips that Jay Miner (father of the Amiga as well, RIP) invented. Originally Atari wanted a keyboard to turn the 2600 into a home computer, but scrapped it in 1978 for the Atari 400 and later Atari 800 series.
Did I want an Apple? When I went to buy my first computer, sure. Then I got hit with sticker shock. So I decided to "settle" for the Atari 400.
However, once I got to know my Atari intimately (I owned [i]De Re Atari[/i] and any other book I could find - along with the tech sheets that Atari would mail out for free), I wouldn't have switched if someone paid me to take one.
8,000 times more memory
3,000 times faster processor
500,000 more storage space
1/2 the $
On thing I beleived in was having the OS on a ROM chip. It ran so much faster.
Linux distro burned (written) right into the BIOS/EFI chips...
seems we're coming full-circle sometimes.
/P
Even with all the extra speed and stuff it does the same thing
</cynical>
My first computer was a Commodore Pet. I was 11 years old and my dirt poor mom somehow managed to buy the thing for my birthday.
The Pet was great: integrated monitor (green screen) & keyboard in a pyramid kind of shape. And lets not forget about the cassette tape drive! I always loved leaving one of those computer tapes in the stereo as a prank.
I believe the Pet was the first system Commodore put out. I learned so much from that thing. I remember saving my nickles to ride the bus down to a computer store in Mountain View to buy games on tape (we lived in Santa Clara). I also would pickup magazines that would have source code included that you could type in to reproduce the game. The games inspired me to write my own. We got a TI-99/4a several years later but I always loved the Pet. I wrote a screen-scroller type car game for both systems and submitted an article to one of the geek rags at the time. They rejected it but oddly enough the next month's publication had a very similar looking screen-scroller type car game...
Thank you Commodore for all of the great memories!
Well i still love playing it and the kids like it as well.
first. People literally bought VisiCalc first then bought something
to run it on. People nowadays forget how revolutionary
spreadsheets were. Later VisiCalc came out for other computers.
If you read the wikipedia article for VisiCalc, you'll see it
suggests that IBM jumped into personal computing because it
finally saw it was missing out.
The C64 helped drive prices down. Commodore literally drove
Texas Instruments out of the home computer business, a David
vs. Goliath feat. TI had a 'better' chip, it was 16 bit vs
Commodore's 8-bit. But the TI-99 also had more chips overall,
they could not beat Tramiel's pricing because the C-64 was
cheaper to make.
To claim there were no "breakthrough" computers until the IBM
is to ignore history in favor of IBM hagiography. The IBM was
nothing new, not even it's operating system (which Microsoft
bought from Seattle Computer). It did come from IBM, which is a
very big deal for those whose world consists only of
corporations.
Go back to your mp3 player, that's all Apple is these days.
- Name wrong
- by martygoldberg December 29, 2007 7:28 PM PST
- Who is "Alan Acorn"? Its Alan Alcorn.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(43 Comments)