BBC News description:
It is 30 years since the Commodore 64 went on sale to the public.
The machine was hugely successful for its time, helping to encourage personal computing, popularise video games and pioneer homemade computer-created music.
The $595 (£399) device took its name from its US maker, Commodore International, and the fact it had 64 kilobytes of RAM memory.
The firm noted that made it substantially cheaper than other personal computers on the market offered by IBM, Apple and Atari.
Commodore highlighted the fact that since it had designed and manufactured its own chips it had been able keep costs down - and the advantage helped it become the best-selling model in North America.
In Europe it faced competition from two cheaper eight-bit rivals released over the previous year: the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum.
The Commodore's ability to display 16 colours, smoothly scroll graphics and play back music through its superior SID (sound interface device) chip - even while loading programs off tape - helped win over fans, but it did not become the market leader until the late 1980s.
Debates continue to this day about which was the superior system - but what would today's youth make of the C64?
BBC News invited Commodore enthusiast Matt Allen to show schoolchildren his carefully preserved computer, at a primary school and secondary school in London.
Video Journalist: Dougal Shaw
12 Comments
shuacAnd now, let's hop in our Model T and go for a drive since it's just as relevant as modern cars. So just crank that handle sticking out of the grill to get the thing started and we'll be off.
Ridiculous.
siftbot2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.
deathcowspent hundreds of quality hours with my C64 !!! learned to program communications programs, serial handlers etc. on one and still writing them today!!
deathcowThere was a bug in the C64 where if you typed and filled the very bottom line of the screen with text and then kept typing which overflowed to the next line, (which would make the screen text all flow up one line to make room) and THEN you backspaced back onto the last line, it would lock the machine up cold. I lost code to this bug enough times that it eventually became set in the brain at a very low level to avoid this.
To THIS day when working in the bottom line of a text editor, notepad, etc whatever, if I am typing and flowing into new lines in the bottom, my brain raises red flags if I am backspacing.
petpeevedsays...I spent a good deal of my teen years peeking and poking that thing even though my parents didn't approve of it at all.
Mail Order Monsters needs a remake.
antMy next door neighbor had a C64. I used to go over to his house and play so many games on it. It was SO fun during our childhood days. It was awesome to use my old Atari 2600 on it for two players games!
deathcowThey were fun to mess with hardware also, my friend would have custom roms and switch them in and out by toggling address lines with switches he brought out to the case.
oritteropoInteresting. My first c64 wasn't a rev 1 ROM, so it didn't have this bug (did any PAL c64's?).
A bit of googling suggests that if you has pressed play on your datasette, and then stopped it, you could have recovered! If only we'd had the internet in 1982!!!
http://www.c64trivia.com/TRIVIA3A.DAT.html
>> ^deathcow:
There was a bug in the C64 where if you typed and filled the very bottom line of the screen with text and then kept typing which overflowed to the next line, (which would make the screen text all flow up one line to make room) and THEN you backspaced back onto the last line, it would lock the machine up cold. I lost code to this bug enough times that it eventually became set in the brain at a very low level to avoid this.
To THIS day when working in the bottom line of a text editor, notepad, etc whatever, if I am typing and flowing into new lines in the bottom, my brain raises red flags if I am backspacing.
elrondhubbardsays...The 1541 disk drive must not have been as popular in the U.K. as it was in Canada, because no one I knew even had a tape drive -- it was disks or nothing. But even the 1541 was, as the ad for the Epyx Fastload cartridge put it, a lumbering hippo. It used to go out of alignment constantly and couldn't read disks until you paid someone knowledgeable (more knowledgeable than I was, anyway) to fix it. But we liked it anyway! Hooray for the C64!
ChaosEngine>> ^shuac:
And now, let's hop in our Model T and go for a drive since it's just as relevant as modern cars. So just crank that handle sticking out of the grill to get the thing started and we'll be off.
Ridiculous.
Er, why is that ridiculous?
teebeenzsays...Buggy boy was fucking awesome, tho I played it on the far more awesome Amiga.
deathcow>> ^oritteropo:
Interesting. My first c64 wasn't a rev 1 ROM, so it didn't have this bug (did any PAL c64's?).
A bit of googling suggests that if you has pressed play on your datasette, and then stopped it, you could have recovered! If only we'd had the internet in 1982!!!
http://www.c64trivia.com/TRIVIA3A.DAT.html
>> ^deathcow:
There was a bug in the C64 where if you typed and filled the very bottom line of the screen with text and then kept typing which overflowed to the next line, (which would make the screen text all flow up one line to make room) and THEN you backspaced back onto the last line, it would lock the machine up cold. I lost code to this bug enough times that it eventually became set in the brain at a very low level to avoid this.
To THIS day when working in the bottom line of a text editor, notepad, etc whatever, if I am typing and flowing into new lines in the bottom, my brain raises red flags if I am backspacing.
That was cool (bottom trivia question) !!!!
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