Commodore 64 Partial Recall…
Posted in Vintage Computing by wayne.porter on December 7th, 2007 CNN ran a piece on the C-64 (I still recall our VIC-20)…Peek, Poke, Sprites, SAM, and intrepid ones might recall JMP, STP, XOR, etc and the handy Hesmon application that let you write in assembly code. For me the C-64 was the machine that really ushered in the computer age as a youngster of about eleven…that and the 1541 Floppy Disk Drive…
My children still cringe when I explain we had to use tape cassettes to transfer over programs…It was a cool computer though. Far better than the ugly Trash 80 and unlike the Apple II et all. of the time- it really was user friendly. I burned many school nights staying up with my father and working the concept of a dimensional. As an aside my kids still cringe when I explain we only had three television channels.
Or perhaps you, the reader, can relate to keying in a huge program from RUN Magazine, only to see it crash and burn…we learned how to debug and pay attention to our syntax- and after a couple of those incidences dad sprung for a tape drive. I have one here somewhere, and our old family unit is still working…now if I could remember their idiosyncratic version of BASIC.
From the piece:
C64.com visitors are mostly nostalgia seekers — men in their 30s looking to download their favorite childhood games. Emulators let them play the games without having a machine. Popular downloads include “Boulder Dash,” “Ghostbusters,” and “The Great Giana Sisters.”
“It may have not been the most sophisticated computer, but it did have a lot of personality and it was lovable and remains loveable,” said Harry McCracken, vice president and editor in chief of PC World.
Often overshadowed by the Apple II and Atari 800, the Commodore 64 rose to great heights in the 1980s. From 1982-1993, 17 million C64s were sold. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the Commodore 64 as the best-selling single computer model.
I will close with some trivia (for scott m.) the Apple and C-64 shared which microprocessor? The one it did not share was used by the venerable VIC-20 I think…
The 6510 or 6502?
CommodorePopularity: 3% [?]
I used to wish for the C64 from afar - playing with it whenever I went to JC Penney back in the day.
We had an Atari 400 back then - great games, but otherwise sort of sucky.
I guess Steve Jobs liked it, because the iPhone keyboard is similar to the Atari 400.
I had the tape drive, too. And maybe I can consider myself a blogger from the early 80’s.
I used to write a couple sentence recap of each day and end it with the “Babe of the Day” - whichever girl in my school was my crush that given day.
I saved this daily to the cassettes, but never published it to the Interwebs. So, I guess I couldn’t have been a blogger.
Maybe a dlogger (dork logger).
I do believe you’re correct.
I’m thinking the 65xx was first used in the C64 while the Vic-20 shared the 65xx with the Apple.
But I won’t spoil the answer for Scott M.
Where is Jim Butterfield when you need him?
What’s really funny is I hadn’t seen the CNN piece but I wrote in my Blog today about one of my old C64 experiences called Habitat. C= must be in the air.
Bill