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?

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