Can the 64 and 128 survive? (1988) [pdf]
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Gazette: Despite this, the machines sometimes get rapped as being old-fashioned, obsolete.
McIntyre: Today, if we positioned the 64 in the marketplace – forget RAM, bytes, bits – if we went out and functionally described the Commodore 64, it would be heralded as a fantastic advancement in personal micro-computing.
The problem is that if you start to talk to people who have been in the business since its inception, they start to get jaded: "it's only eight-bit."
Who cares? You are buying this machine for a specific reason. If it satisfies that need, it is never obsolete. Only your requirements become obsolete. If you no longer require it, then you obviously no longer need hardware to satisfy the need. The need ceases to exist – not the hardware. If the need continues to exist until the year 2000, then that machine is still satisfactory.
There is no such thing as hardware obsolescence. That is a phrase that was coined by the naysayers in this industry. That's baloney.
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In a way, he's not entirely wrong, but I think it's also quite myopic. Sure, a C64 can be "satisfactory" even today for many tasks in the sense "it'll work", but that's not the same as "good". The C64 is 320×200; even just a doubling of that to 640×400 (never mind fancy things like 800×600 or 1024×768) can be a huge productivity boost in many scenarios simply because you can display more text, never mind all the "RAM, bytes, bits" that do actually matter since you can do more faster.
With that machine my nostalgia is absolutely maxed out :)
1. Commodore 64
2. Commodore 128
3. 10 MHz 8088
After the 128 I considered a) Buying a Lt Kerrnal 20 MB hard drive b) Buying an Amiga c) Going IBM Compatible
Thank God I went with the 8088 but I probably own 15 Commodore 64s now. I taught myself component level repair on them so I buy them broken for cheap and repair them. I have a full set of 64 and 128 with matching CRT monitors and Ultimate II+ and more.
I have great nostalgia for its twin 3.5” floppy drives, Microsoft mouse (Windows 2) and orange monochrome display.
Man I wish I’d bought an Amiga at the time though. With hindsight PCs were so crap back then, even if the limitations were fun.
Double would be 448x280.
The C64 wasn't even a good 8-bit machine for a start
And even if it was, it is so removed from today's computers to be useless. Really
I'd say a 386 is not obsolete from that point of view (of the discussion). Or even the Amiga as others mentioned. But the C64 is.
(Disclaimer: Oric-1/Atmos user here. A much better machine than the C654 - it taught me to program.)
When the C64 came out, it had the best graphics and sound, but not the best ROM software. I wouldn't even say it had an operating system. It was really just a small, simple KERNAL with some system calls. It didn't have a very good BASIC either, and couldn't auto boot. It was essentially a video game console with a keyboard and a slow floppy drive so parents would think it was a computer. It didn't even have a proper backward compatible upgrade path. The C128 and C65 aren't backward compatible with it, they have a C64 mode.
I had a VIC-20 and then a C64 in the 80's but looking back now, I'd rather have had an Atari 800/XL/XE. The graphics and sound were almost as good but it had a real OS, custom DOSes, and lots of interesting programming languages available for it. But I, as many others in software and IT today who got started with Commodore computers, couldn't afford the Atari or Apple systems so I am grateful Jack Tramiel made computers for the masses, not the classes.
The NES (a few years later) had better graphics, and the Apple //e had better text, but the C64 was pretty much the overall champ.
There are 8-bit machines today like the Arduino that can run circles around the C64 in some ways, because they're made with dramatically better fabrication technology so they can run much faster; is that what you mean about it not being a good 8-bit machine? I've synthesized audio on an Arduino that you couldn't have done on the C64.
Obsolete, though, it certainly is.
Note the article is from the trailing edge, and the other 8-bit systems pretty much almost dead at that point, and the C64 was just barely still selling for another year or so on cheap fumes.
(Never was even aware of C128, so no comment on that.)
Commodore seems to have really believed obsolescence wasn't real. WDC launched the 65CE02 in 01988, and Commodore tried to build the Commodore 65 on it in 01991.
A decision I've never understood from that period: IBM introduced the PS/2 Model 30, with an 8-MHz 8086, in 01987. The 8086 was from 01976, but at least it had a 16-bit data bus, and at 8 MHz it was over a MIPS (though only 0.4 Dhrystone MIPS if we believe http://www.netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col1.h..., that's still 8 times the Cromemco Z2 with its Z80, and 20 times the C64, though at this point we're well outside the area where Dhrystone is a good measure). They did replace it with the "PS/2 Model 30 286" the next year, but unfortunately not before my school district got suckered into buying some of the crippled beasts.
I agree that the C64 was pretty similar to the Atari 800, but it had much better sound, it had 256 multicolor sprites instead of 8 two-color sprites, and the 800 shipped with 8K and couldn't hold more than 48K. So there was a pretty big difference in what you could do on an Atari and what you could do on a C64.
My school had a number of 8086-based PS/2 Model 25's. By the time I used them in 1991, they had been retired to second-tier labs, but they were still perfectly usable for checking email, word processing, telnet to the UNIX server, and some light games. (I remember Star Control ran particularly well on its quasi-VGA "MCGA" graphics.)
These particular PS/2 Model 25's probably had an edge on the C64, though. Having proper Ethernet cards and access to Netware servers allowed loading applications a lot faster than, say, a 1541 disk drive. Although my present-day C64 with Ethernet adapter, SD2IEC, etc., might could give it a run for its money. :)
Commodore didn't have the money to sell the C64 below cost. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest they did other than possibly for very short periods. People thought they did at the time, sure, but Commodore's ability to cost-cut was in large part due to their extreme vertical integration at the time.
In 1988 the C64 was still selling over a million units a year. It was losing market share fast, but due to the growth of the overall market, not due to dropping C64 sales - sales at that point were still stable. The NES sold ~7-8m in 1988.
Yeah, maybe it remained the "pirate's choice" in certain circles, as a lot of the adverts there were for copy carts etc.
So, no, it wasn't the best
> Also it only had 48K.
I think you mixed up the numbers here? The 48K refers to the ROM size (C64 had 20K), not RAM (MSX2 machines commonly came with 128K RAM, but you also had 256K models).
Apart from more colours and higher resolution, there's nothing in those 50 games you linked that would be clearly impossible on a c64. You should link to a demoscene showreel instead ;)
Definitely if I'd seen stuff like those C64 demos in 01982 when the C64 came out, my reaction would have been total incredulity; it is so far beyond what I imagined computers were capable of that it would have seemed like alien technology. And that is not true of the MSX2 games. But to a significant extent that's not really about the capabilities of the computers themselves but about the SID and the VIC-II, and to a smaller extent it's about algorithms and tricks that were developed years after the C64 itself. Boogie Factor, for example, is from 02005.
MSX* demos I've seen like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=busiDuS94qY are more visually impressive than the games linked upthread, and very impressive indeed for a Z80, but still not in the league of the C64 demos, despite having lots more RAM to work in. I suspect the anemic CPU is to blame; that demo leans on raster shears pretty hard.
Really, though, I'm more convinced by GEOS. In GEOS the C64 had a WIMP GUI with a WYSIWYG word processor with multiple proportional fonts, a pixel paint program like MacPaint, a faxing program, etc. Because what's really important is how computers increase human ability and especially how they empower human creativity, not how many colors they can show.
I mean, that comment predates the "Andy & Bill law" [1]: what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. There was no need to upgrade stuff back then.
In that context, not a very weird comment - especially for someone whose job it is to sell these machines.
However, given the context of the interview in general ("you're losing market share, sales are slowing, you're losing customers, etc., what are you going to do about it?"), arguing basically "nothing's wrong" bespeaks a certain arrogance that would, even without the benefit of hindsight, give me tremendous pause.
(For what it's worth, I was encountering people who used 8-bit micros well into the late 90's. They were happy with what they had, but they were also very much using their computers in isolation.)
Modern computing uses the same hardware principles, expanded and speeded up by many orders of magnitude. But a hugely bigger set of affordances.
Mass storage just works without floppy swapping or cassette saving, data and applications are distributed, there's pocket as well as desktop access, and cameras, sound, and video are a given. And that's just the hardware.
It's like comparing a high speed rail network to a skateboard.
Using a C64 or C128 today would be kinda silly, but that wasn't the case in the late 1980's through mid-1990's. They were fine for many smaller tasks, and a great deal better than the alternatives if you could not afford a "real computer". Even as a glorified typewriter, a C64 was orders of magnitude better than an actual typewriter. Even as a calculator, a C64 was order of magnitude better than an actual calculator.
Of course cost is the deciding factor here because computers aren't the same as transportation networks. Aside from cost high end computer is going to be better than a high end one in every case. It has physics working for it, rather than against it. Yet cost of replacement is still a factor.
However, old computing does have a place, as has been mentioned before here on HN, Ben Eater has done an awesome job at getting folks involved with hardware and low-level software design:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/beneater Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/beneater/
Note that I don't know the guy (though I really wish I did, would love to have a couple beers with him.) I stumbled across his stuff just this year and loved it thanks to my background along with my family background.
In the absence of elementary silicon design classes, we find YouTubers stepping up. I am rather critical of such folks, as most tend to be super pushy wish sponsorships, ads, and what not, however, his videos (thus far) do not do that. Note that I did (eventually) buy a couple of his kits.
I guess if you assume that computation requires no energy…
Funnily enough Melbourne Metro used C64 systems well into the 2000s for displaying timetables.
The trick was to sell at parents the idea that they were buying a powerful but still cheap machine for their kids so they could learn how to use computers[0].
But once in their bedrooms, 95% of kids spent all of their time just playing games and ignoring what "RAM, bytes, bits" or even Basic was.
Once more sophisticated consoles (Nintendo, Sega) and 16/32bit PC games hit the market, the C64 lost all of its appeal.
[0]: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
I don't have time to go looking for prices in '94 when production ceased, but even as prices for other machines were dropping rapidly, C64 prices remained lower. An issue of RUN from '92 has ads for the C64 at $140-$150. At that point the 1541 disk drive was the most expensive part, at <$165, but you could get the 3.5" 1581 for $109.95
For comparison, an Amiga 600 cost $399 from the same retailer, the same magazine has PC's starting at $500+. Far more capable at that point, sure, but you'd end up paying more than that if you wanted decent graphics and sound, and you needed a monitor whereas the C64 could connect to your TV, and suddenly the C64 was sufficiently cheaper at that point to be seen as a toy.
After all, "a computer on every desk and in every home" was still just a company vision statement.
But I could afford an Amiga, and had one, yet still used my C64 a lot of the time for coding, for demos and for games, and so did many of the people I went to school with at the time. While a lot of people couldn't afford alternatives, a lot of people also could afford them and either had those alternatives but still also used the C64, or could afford something else but had other priorities and saw the C64 price point as just low enough to make it worthwhile.
By the time I "retired" my C64 in the 90's, I had two heavily expanded Amiga's. First at that point my C64 saw little enough use to be put aside. From what I saw at the time, that was not unusual - a lot of both Amiga and PC users held on to a C64 for years to scratch itches their other computers did not.
When I went to the first The Gathering [1] in '92, while I took one of my Amiga's, there were still plenty of C64's there with people who spent more on peripherals than it would have cost them to buy an Amiga or PC, where it was a clear choice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gathering_(LAN_party)#Begi...
> There is no such thing as hardware obsolescence.
Often devices are still needed, but the ecosystem surrounding their usage has changed. That is what often brings around obsolescence in this industry.
That is software obsolescence, not hardware.
"If [this machine] satisfies the need, it is never obsolete. (...) If the need continues to exist until the year 2000, then this machine is still satisfactory. There is no such thing as hardware obsolescence. That is a phrase that was coined by the naysayers in this industry. That's baloney."
It is so far from reality for the general public, but so true for my 1980's machines that are still very funny, to play with and program!
This is the result of using Cross Plattform development to the extreme: https://www.c64demo.com/big-parallax-logo-mover/
It took years for the pc game industry to become as good as the 8bit era.
Doom changed everything of course.
The 286 was "brain damaged" for implementing operating systems according to Bill Gates for two reasons: (1) you could not get back to real mode without doing a terrible hack resetting the whole machine, (2) you could not write to segment registers at all from user mode so writing programs that use more than a 64k data segment and 64 k code segment means doing an OS call.
The 386 on the other hand took forever to get to the point where a 32-bit OS was mainstream, from 1985 release of the 386 to 1995. Some of us (me) were using Linux before then, but that was it.
My conclusion about the 286 being pivotal came from my own experience (switched in 1987) and also looking at old issues of Byte magazine circa 1987 and seeing that all the advertisers were in a state of turmoil. For instance some firms like Cromeco who sold S-100 bus and CP/M machines to OEM's to put, say, a cash register system in a supermarket were giving up the ghost because PC's were crushing them. Similarly there were ads for PC clone makers all over the place but anything associated with the 8-bits was vanished. The original IBM PC was much more expensive than 8-bit machines but not much better in terms of power, PC AT clones were still more expensive but they were so much more powerful that it was worth it.
The big change I saw was in the early 90s when 386 PCs with VGA displays became common place. This is when the people I knew upgraded and 8088 machines completely faded from the scene. The killer app driving 386 sales was Windows 3.0.
My company, Magicomm, wrote 3rd party add-ons for the main system and eventually my partner was hired on with them directly...me? Not so lucky I remember interviewing directly with the owner, Tim Striker, and I was so nervous because I wanted to work there so badly...I almost completely blanked out for the interview and couldn't remember even the simplest of C basics. (Describe an union, what command do you use to zero out memory after you malloc etc etc)
I bombed the interview and never did get to work for my dream company like my partner, who I basically trained on how to use C, did, and to this day this fact irks me lol.
I do remember though spending a lot of time at All Books and Records on Sunrise Blvd (I think) next to the Sears. Coolest book and record store around except for maybe Robert A Hittel’s bookstore on Federal Hwy..
Also spent a lot of time going to Sunshine Software on Cypress Creek Rd.. kind of a magical place run by two rly cool computer dudes..
I went with dad and brother a few times, and yes, middle-aged computer guys selling stuff. I was always more excited by the hardware than software, so I didn't check out those tables so much.
New Mexico Tech had Sun workstations based on SPARC and in 1993 the talk was of Linux because a 386 machine would beat a Sun workstation easily.
Other 32 bit machines like the high-end Amigas and the Atari Falcon 030 could not keep up. Macs were expensive but sold well because of the refined GUI but when Windows 95 came out with an adequate GUI, Apple went into crisis.
There was that time I used my 12 MHz 286 to develop software for a Z-80 based CP/M machine and I could emulate the Z-80 faster than a real Z-80.
Graphics and sound really did suck compared to machines specialized for that. The best you could do for games at the time were tile systems like the Nintendo NES and the TI-99/4A which were not that different from text mode except the ‘font’ was customizable and the tiles were square. The Atari 400/800 normalized changing your video mode on every scan line but the C-64 had the best system balance in terms of quality output on an NTSC television.
The EGA introduced tricks that would let you make the video card copy multiple planes of data at the same time, also you could do some pretty neat tricks with the palette to make layers that blended like sprites. I see Commander Keen as a watershed because it had scrolling as good as Super Mario Brothers and ran on the EGA. Of course they figured out Mode X for the VGA and we got Doom a few years later.
Obviously, you couldn't buy a hundred thousand GTIA or VIC-II chips and solder them into ISA cards, but there were some non-exclusive options-- the graphics chips used on MSX hardware, for example.
There were definitely low-end PCs that would have been able to tread into the "home computer" space occupied by the C64 and Atari 800, by price and design (there were a few 8088-class "PC in the keyboard" designs-- some Tandy 1000s, and a Vtech/Laser one come to mind), but they were hardly the ones kids were gonna beg their parents for with those mediocre graphics.
Maybe once the 386 came along then PC stepped into the picture
https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-07_202104/page/n379/mo...
The entry-level price of a C128 was much less but if you add a disk drive and a monitor so you can use the 80 column mode you're not saving that much money. The 286 machine is a lot more computer at $1100, the 386 is twice that.
I had a hard time finding any 8088 machines advertised in Byte in 1990. To be fair Byte was aimed at the high end of the market, yet, Byte had plenty of coverage of the early 8-bitters, but I think the C-64 didn't get covered in Byte proportional to its popularity because it was late enough to the party that the IBM PC was getting mindshare.
Byte had an odd mismatch between what was getting advertised (you'd have thought Cromeco was really something, other vendors of S-100 bus machines that supported CP/M were big) and was getting written about (low-end 8-bitters got a lot more press than CP/M ever did)
It felt like I had that C64 forever. I learned CBM BASIC, 6502 assembler, and even K
There were SO many Commodore ads and articles in that magazine. I’m guessing this was a version of Compute! just geared toward Commodore correct?
For recent C64 SW, see: https://csdb.dk/latestreleases.php
https://www.the8bitguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Petsci...
- It was a somewhat open system that you could build something for without asking for permission!
- You could copy all software.
- The longevity of the hardware surpasses most devices built after for a fraction of the cost.
- It was repairable.
- Most sold compatible architecture with ability to be productive ever in the history of mankind, probably forever.
- 15W is pretty low power considered the lithography at the time (micrometers).
- Keyboard built in that still works 40 years later!
- S-video built-in before it was even called that, not even the amiga had that!
- The SID is unparalleled still in some regards.
- The VIC was incredible, sharing the 2MHz RAM with 1Mhz CPU interleaved and hardware sprites!
The only flaws I can find are:
- The IEC bug that slowed IO from the VIC until the 128.
- One button joysticks?! the device has POTx and POTy why not use those?!?!
- No built in assembly monitor in the default setting.
To me human progess has ONLY been the C64 -> Raspberry 4 arc: from micrometer to nanometer. And the raspberry uses linux and has all compilers built in, and still very few kids use it for it's initial intended purpose: to build software!
With electricty prices rising I think the Raspberry 4 will have a resurgence so I always develop my software to work on that device too.
But most important; with computers as with protocols there is no competition, you need to follow the standard and in the 80s that standard was the C64. I think ARM+linux will be that final standard unless risc-v can pull the open hardware trick off!
Seen that kids, that weren't even born when the C64 died, buy one and try to develop for it is a pretty good sign that the C64 will survive!
Digital joysticks were best for most games. It's too bad no one brought out a game pad as they are better for some games. A second fire button could have been added. There were analog joysticks available but typically for special software such as flight simulators. It is too bad Commodore didn't put out an analog stick to encourage their use in driving and flight games. The joystick industry would have ran with it and would have brought out lots of them.
The VIC-20 didn't have a built-in assembler either. Jack wasn't a computer user so he didn't see them as being important and was more focused on keeping the prices low, especially for the home models. Commodore did release ML monitors and even the Super Expanders on cartridge for the VIC-20 and C64.
The IBM PC only won because it was built from off-the-shelf parts, meaning the hardware was effectively open source. Once the BIOS was cloned, there was no way anyone else could keep up. The only survivor is Apple and they almost didn't make it. If the CP/M machines had time to become mainstream on 16-bit processors before the IBM PC was cloned, it might have won and Digital Research might have become what Microsoft has.
I wonder what the equivalent headline would be today. Which hardware or software technologies are currently blasting away, but if you look at the cutting edge, are actually obsolescent?
I'm going to get buried for this but, even though I have been a JavaScript programmer for many years, in the software side I think it's JavaScript, and even further a few years after that, web browsers.
I see web assembly as a compelling target for many types of applications on the backend, or blockchain etc.
I think that _could_ also eventually translate into momentum for standards for i/o devices for web assembly.
Having said that, web assembly has the potential for an even bigger library of modules to be built up, since modules written in one programming language could potentially interoperate with those written in another language.
Oh boy Rich... posterity has given you an answer!
Edit: There is a review later on, however, that was fun. A game called Trap! could be sped up by poking memory.
And then I got to the file listings... some of the programs you literally entered in machine code! How did people ever find the time?!
And the BMX 2000 too: geez, I loved that thing (but was still jealous of that one guy in the neighbourhood on a golden Raleigh Burner).
IIRC there was a program in BASIC you had to run to start the machine language prompt. Entering lines basically involved typing a series of numbers and their checksum. If you entered the line without errors, a bell sound would play. Otherwise you would hear a buzzing sound.
I knew how to touch type and would just treat the number row on the keyboard as the home row. It was actually faster to transcribe the machine code due to the checksum feature compared to BASIC code.
Looking back on it, I wish they would have just had the program listings in assembly language instead of machine code. That would have made it easier to follow along.
More generally, I'd suggest that ten-thousand ants could convey a ton of leaves with much better overal energy-efficiency than using a single pickup truck. ('Relative greenness') Might even be a law of nature!
To me, had I been forced to buy a computer based on page 38 alone, then unless I had specific software needs (e.g. Word Perfect or similar), I'd have opted for the Complete Commodore 64C System for $395.95, even though I'd have preferred to buy one without the monitor and used a colour TV instead (but the price in question is competitive w/packages without a monitor, so I'm guessing they were clearing out old stock given it's a tiny monochrome monitor).
Had PC's stayed like that, the C64 would have kept doing just fine in the low end of the home market. Of course PC's didn't stay like that for very long at all.
I believe they were able to work around the original flaws in the disk drives introduced for backwards compatibility with the Vic-20.
> Without hardware modifications, some "fast loader" utilities (which bypassed routines in the 1541's onboard ROM) managed to achieve speeds of up to 4 KB/s.
In detail: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=568
looking back now, it seems there was way too many options. it would have been confusing as a consumer to choose.
People decided which hardware to buy based on what software they want to run and their budget. If they wanted business software before the IBM PC came out, they chose CP/M, Tandy's TRS-80, or perhaps the Apple II with VisiCalc, or sometimes with Microsoft's Z-80 card to run CP/M.
If they wanted education for their children, they'd often buy what their children's school had, if they could afford it. In the US this was usually an Apple II, Atari 800 or Commodore 64. In Canada it was usually the Commodore 64. In the UK it was the BBC Micro. In France, it was the Thomson.
In North America, if they wanted the best games, they bought an Apple II, until the Atari 800 came out, and only until the Commodore 64 came out. In the UK it was the BBC Micro if you had money and wanted more than just games, and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum if you didn't have money or wanted more games. The Commodore 64 was also a popular option there, once it was released.
If people couldn't afford those options, they bought a Commodore VIC-20 or 64, or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the UK. Another lower cost option was the Tandy Color Computers.