[bedolido]

[Support Free Republic]

Let's keep the Dem's on the run!
Click the Pic!

[x1stcav]

This was the first computer I bought my daughter when she was 12. Very fast in its day. Quickly ovetaken by the competition and was replaced 3 years later by an Apple IILC. I think the Commodore is still down in the basement.

[Seeking the truth]

Remember it well!

[capt. norm]

Used to spend many an hour typing in code for some application listing I found in a magazine, and then saving it to a cassette tape.

With today's PC's massive amounts of RAM, it's hard to imagine working with only 64K.

I do believe that the huge amounts of RAM encouraged sloppy programming. (you don't dare be too sloppy with only 64K) In most of the apps out there now, the logo takes up more than 64K.

[JustAnAmerican]

The Vic 20, Commodore 64, and the Timex ZX80 were the real precursors to the "Computer" generation. I know there were a few others, but these were the ones that had readily available and cheap software(Games Esp.:)).

[quack]

Load "*",8,1

Ready

Run

Man,those were the days.The wife and I just took it to the Salvation Army not long ago.Anybody remember GEOS?or who could forget Jumpman!

[angkor]

I worked for a computer store in those days, and we had C-64 backorders for weeks before Christmas 1982. We were also a Commodore distributor, and the owner had big pull with Jack Tramiel (owner of Commodore).

So we finally got our shipment the last week before Christmas and if I recall we moved several hundred units in the course of a few days. It was madness.

[The_Victor]

There are numerous C64 emulators available on the web, most of them free. A quick Google search for "Commodore 64 emulator" turned up thousands of hits. Who'd pay for a "retro C64" when the market has already been satisfied for free?

"M.U.L.E." for the C64 was one of the best computer games ever.

[Richard Kimball]

Remember the old Saturday Night Live commercial parody about Wang computers?

I don't go to the movies anymore. I don't even date. I just stay home and play with my Wang."

[sultan88]

Yes, I had one of these, too. Hooked it up to a small black and white TV set. The kids played Frogman for hours.

[VOA]

bump

[theFIRMbss]

[RottiBiz]

A few years ago, I saw in the local classified that a Commodore 64 club was looking to buy computers, games, etc.

I called the number and told them I was donating my son's computer and all the games and accessories to a local animal shelter's Thrift Store and if they were interested they could buy them there.

The shelter volunteers were amazed that everything was sold the first day.

[flutters]

The Commodore was the first affordable computer for our small business. I’m in the printing business and the Commodore was a blessing to our business and the industry. Before the Commodore, we had two choices for typesetting copy - set the type by hand using a Kroy machine that had a 12” disk that you had to rotate to each letter, number, or punctuation, then press a button to ‘print’ the character. The type came out on one long strip and you had to physically paste the strips of type into position on an art board. It was very time consuming and one slip-up made for a complete redo. The second option was to send the copy to a typesetter. This put us at the mercy of the type house – it was also time consuming and generally the copy would come back with errors which meant it went back and forth 2 or 3 times just to get correct copy.

We also started our first computerized accounting system on a Commodore. Oh, the memories. We’ve came a long way.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

Patience is a 1541 drive.

I had my C-64 fixed several years ago. If you've ever been inside of a C-64, you might have noticed the entire circuit board was almost completly covered by various chips. The repairman told me that the last last models that came out had all of the functions on only one chip.
Anyone else remember the super heated power supply?

[Aquinasfan]

When I was graduating from engineering school in 1984, I heard that Carnegie-Mellon was mandating personal computers for all incoming freshman.

"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of. What do they need a computer for?"
-A stupid thing I once said

[DonQ]

Lordy, how this touches me. I owned a C-64 from 1984 thru 1999 and was absolutely happy with it, including terrific word processing programs (Pocket Writer2 and also FontMaster2) and I even wrote some stuff that was published in bona fide C-64 publications (because I could understand at least some of the C-64 programming but not PC programming).

The only reason I got rid of my C-64 (technically not exactly the same one I bought in 1984, because the keyboard, disk drive, printer, and every other hardware had been replaced at least twice) was because my wife was keen on linking up to the Internet ... and in the four years since I replaced my beloved C-64 with a moderately priced PC, she has been on the Internet for a cumulative total of about two hours. Except for Internet, there's hardly anything I need from my PC that I couldn't also get from my C-64.

For those of you who don't know much about the Commodore computer, I'll give a brief sketch. The Commodore company came out with a number of very basic desktop computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, came out with the VIC-20 around 1980 ... the name meant (I think) Video Interactive Connection ... and it was the first home computer capable of color video. It could do only really simple stuff ... less than what a pocket organizer today can do ... but back in 1980 it was considered very impressive. Then in 1982 the C-64 was introduced, and it was either the first or among the very first home computers capable of both sound and color, and it could do considerably more than the VIC-20. It had as a built-in programming language a Commodore version of BASIC, so that users could contrive their own (simple) programming. The C-64 went through a number of modifications (e.g., there was an early program called Little Computer People that could run on the first generation of C-64 but not on the chips used in later generations). It was, circa 1983-1988, the single most popular home computer - far more popular than the IBM - with the greatest number of programs available at retail, and at its peak about 8 dedicated magazines in the English language and three or four more in European languages.

The Commodore-64 and other Commodore computers have an interesting and eventful history ... which includes clues as to why Commodore eventually went broke.

[MaryFromMichigan]

Boy! Does this bring back memories of our TI99/4A!

Back around 1980, my hubby and I spent many happy hours playing Parsec, Centipede, Congo Bongo, Miner 2049'er and BurgerTime. And I remember how cool it was when we picked up a voice synthesizer!

Could that really have been TWENTY years ago? LOL!!!

[muggs]

Just forwarded the link to my son. I think this will bring back some fond (and not-so-fond) memories. I can't remember if this was his first computer or maybe it was a Vic-20.

[djf]

I had a Timex Sinclair. After that, I had one of these:



Dual 130K single sided floppies, built in monochrome, sadly, didn't come with the forklift ya needed to haul it around. Remember they used to brodcast programs on the radio!

I heard a mint TRS-80 is worth a coupla bucks, if you have all the packaging and original doc.