I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
goto10retro.com
goto10retro.com
When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC and so on.
[1] yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.
These days kids are served eyeball-bleeding chaos on the supercomputers in their pocket, which they need permission to do anything else with .. and its kind of sad.
Learn what a byte is, kids. Learn where it fits into a register and why. Learn a few opcodes, some peripheral I/O heuristics. Break out that raspberry Pi and go full bare metal for a month.
I sure wish our mobile phones had compilers onboard. This is the one thing that is ruining computing for kids these days, imho. They need corporation-controlled permission, for fucks sake.
Astonishingly, the Jobsian “bicycle for the mind” idea failed. Almost nobody now buys a computer to scratch an itch. They buy a computer (smartphone) to keep in touch with friends and family and to sometimes play games. The idea that software is a service that you pay for has been totally normalized. I find that it takes an entire semester of “imagine if!” scenarios before students start to catch on that WOW THIS IS AN AMAZING MACHINE! Some of them never get it. By analogy it’s like being upset at somebody in the 1970’s for blithely using their telephone without even stopping to consider what a fucking miracle the modern telephone system was. They would just stare at you like you have two heads.
I don’t really know how to change this, but I feel like this is the central battle in the fight us scientists and nerds need to fight in order to get the world to give a shit… about anything.
[1] this may be changing
One has to differentiate between "computers as a tool" and "creating computers".
I drive a car. It's good transport. If it breaks I take it to a mechanic. If I bash it I take it to a panel beater. I don't care about engine specs. It's a tool to do a job.
100 years ago if you owned a car you also had to be a mechanic. My father built his own car. Enthusiasts will wax lyrical for hours on engine upgrades.
In the same way, when I was young, the market for computers was basically the "creatives". There wasn't much software to buy. Most (PC) computers got built from parts. You could swap out each part at a time. You set IRQs manually. Good times.
But those products didn't suit the everyman. That only happens in the late 90s. Since then most users are "consumers" not creative.
The creatives still have lots of tools to learn (more than I did). But they will never be more than a tiny tiny fraction of the population.
Its just that entire generations have evolved now to treat their computers as commoditized services - as you noted - and don't understand that they could, as users, program the thing themselves.
Our industry has rigorously enforced hierarchical structures in place to make sure this doesn't happen, and it sucks.
This is why I believe we should not be teaching comp-sci students with modern computers. We should start out by teaching them to program old computers, first - and then let them catch up with the current market in the last few years of their studies.
Not really. You can run pretty much anything you want if you build for the web.
Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?
Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.
I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).
There were around 650 000 PDP machines produced. By contrast Commodore 64 made over 12.5 million. VIC 20 another 1.5. Zx Spectrum about 5 mil. Similar for the Apple 2. IBM pc made 7.5 million by 1987. BBC Micro another couple million.
And of course yes, these were the first "home" pcs. So as I said, before this time the machines were locked away and only used for "real work". PCs were "everywhere". We had a computer club (with 2, count them 2 machines).
Of course, compared to now they were rare. But my generation entered the work-force and spent the 90s "computerising" businesses. Not the giant corporates but the millions of regular businesses. I wrote software but it was common to have to supply hardware to go with the software.
It certainly was fun being around as an entire industry was birthed. It was very dynamic, things moved quickly, and there was a lot of "keeping up".
We saw it again with web, and then mobile, but they were less exciting in many respects.
Or, as I called them: me, and dad.
So, thanks C64!
I still love you, though...
For example phone enshittification. Make your own phone that isn't shit.
And I had purchased a beloved briefcase which I dutifully took to work each day, but my job wasn't really working with paper, much less anything that I needed to bring home with me.
And through those early years I really did fret about this: I produced nothing tangible at work. My work wasn't classified or secret, but there was nothing relatable I could really discuss about my work! What could I show people to prove I was a productive worker? How could I prove my worth, such as later on a résumé to a future employer? There was really just nothing.
And it went on like this for decades. I am sure that I, like many, struggled mightily with this intangible nature. Even my father, as a scientist, at least he brought home the Geiger counter, the film badges, the pager and the gadgets.
My family's C64 was the first computer I ever used, and I am barely in my mid 40s. And although my family later purchased an IBM PC clone around '89 or '90, that just meant the C64 moved into my older brother's room, where we used it even more.
Also, using the Commodore in the 90's is probably pretty rare.
And also why do you believe the life expectancy for HN users (mostly adults, large portion based in US) is only 72?!
I'd never intended to be in a CS career, but the way I see it, the gravity of the C64 was simply too strong. I was pulled into its orbit whether I liked it or not, and now here I am, in IT for the last 29 years. My other love, writing, I was able to do on the side (five novels), for which I'm equally grateful.
It's a life -- my life. I love you, too, C64! :)
I guess both you and my friend did it right. I went all in with studying for a degree in CS and whatnot and here I am today, wondering what I was thinking...?!
You kept your passion, I lost mine. I envy you.
Btw, that LucasArts-style adventure game for the C64 that my other friend and I designed as teenagers is still something I must finish before I die.
So English title would be "99 air balloons" or just "99 balloons".
(Excellent choice btw, among German-language songs it's an all-time classic)
My own son was born in 2003 and he sort of picked up on my passion for computing, but he grew up in the iphone generation, not the C64 generation. When he went to college, he chose to major in CS like his dad did and just graduated last year into the worst employment market since the great depression. He did get a job so that's good, but we'll see how things go...
I do think I'd have an emotional reaction if I typed load "*",8,1 again, though...
As any good husband would, I bought my wife an old SNES for Christmas a few years ago. And my son loves playing Super Mario World on it.
So I thought some time back, that it could be a great father-son bonding experience if he and I were to code up a simple pixel-style 2D jump'n'run together that he designs and I program.
Except that he's been taking way too great a liking in it. He's kinda obsessed with the development of that game already, and now I'm worried that I turned him onto something that I pray to God will never become his career...
Apple removing the compiler from the supercomputer in everyones pocket did, however.
I had friends that had Ataris of course, but also some that had C64s and even a TI-99/4A. The thing in my circle was that the C64 and TI folk were more users and the Atari kids were more hackers, not that there were very many of each at the time. I learned BASIC, machine/assembly, and got into coding and engineering. (One of our pastimes was cracking games just to see how it was protected and see if we could. We'd show off any success amongst ourselves but never distributed as that wasn't the fun part.) I get the feeling that I probably worked for some C64 kids as adults that always seemed to have more of a product or business sense about them than the Atari kids.
It was fun, but primitive, when I learned Pascal at university I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments!
Well, as it turns out, that particular assembler was actually pretty obscure software. My poor Dad had to visit a dozen computer stores in Ann Arbor before he _finally_ found a copy.
Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player we had was broken. When a replacement was obtained in the new-year I started playing games with my sisters, but I'd already been "forced" to play with BASIC and I never really stopped..
Dundee? :-D
There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them.
And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle.
The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.
But the Spectrums were the best-selling UK machine at the time, so I'm sure there were lots of regions where they were super-common.
I think I had a friend with a BBC Micro, but I can't recall anybody else having something different.
(There was a bit of console-split later, between NES and Sega Megadrive, and later still between Atari/Amiga, before we all settled for big grey boxed PCs.)
I wish the Archimedes had won. It kind of did, I guess, damn near everything runs ARM, but we lost RiscOS on the way.
I think both of these machines are really good for learning BASIC: much fewer distractions, you type commands and computer does something.
I feel like storage has improved slightly since microdrives were state of the art too...
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).
But I learned a lot more about disk data organization (hardware-level) via the Apple IIs that were at school.
An interesting side-note: a major factor in my family's decision to get me any computer at all was that I was staying after school almost everyday until usually 7pm.
Mom thought surely I must be lying about it and doing something else, probably nothing good.
She made a appointment to meet with the Computer teacher to ask him directly: he confirmed that I was there regularly, had keys for the computer room, and that maybe she should consider getting me my own machine for home.
LOAD "*",8,1
The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Users_Guide_1982_Co...
[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...
[2] https://archive.org/details/commodore-1541-disk-drive-users-...
Meaning that the entire computer, and all its capabilities and speed, was available from within BASIC.
This was true of many home computers of the era, and even of the IBM PC if you were willing to struggle a bit, but it was emphatically not true of all of them: the TI-99/4A, for instance, had a nerfed BASIC that was not only very slow, it also prevented access to any of the system's facilities outside of the commands BASIC provided. This probably had a lot to do with its unusual memory architecture, in which only 128 words of RAM were provided to the CPU and all BASIC memory was accessed indirectly through the video chip.
But yeah, aside from cartridge-based games, every program on the C64 was a BASIC program, just one that was mostly a machine-code memory image.
I kind of wish for a modern PC that booted in 2 seconds, directly into Python or something.
In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the 8-bit era and even most commercial software was sold on tape.
Commodore 64’s let you play games and do other stuff (write docs/print, make music, make art) they jump started a generation of us onto computers and what we could do with them.
No one realised at the time that eventually you can sit on the toilet and have a video conference with a thousand people so they were what they were, fun, useful things to have that matched the current time and place.
When windows came along we all built pc’s and learned how to use those, generally fighting with sound card drivers.
The article talks about COMPUTE! magazine. They often had free games where they listed the source code in the magazine pages. The reader would then manually type in the code by hand into the computer and save it to floppy or tape drive. The magazine would have the same game ported to different computers so there would be separate source code listings for Commodore, Atari, etc. The Commodore 64 versions of the game would always end up being the best version to run because of the hardware advantages mentioned above.
https://www.google.com/search?q=compute%21+magazine+program+...
It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.
The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.
Where I grew up (Norway) you rarely if ever saw Apple's until the Mac, and only the occasional other brand like Amstrad or Spectrum.
In my primary school classes, almost everyone who had a home computer had a Commodore 64. As a result, it was easy to get (pirated) games.
The network effect was strong - having a different computer meant you might have nobody nearby to swap games with. I knew one person - vaguely - with an Amstrad, and one person I knew of at my school had a Texas Instruments machine, and one with a Spectrum, but there were half a dozen kids in my home room alone with Commodore 64's.
It was much more tribal for that reason. If you had a Commodore 64 or Amiga, chances were Atari was "the enemy" even when Jack Tramiel (who founded Commodore) was kicked out of Commodore and bought Atari, and Spectrum's were just laughed at.
Mac and PC's were seen as boring business computers.
For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.
(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)
The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.
For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.
You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.
OTOH with Windows 95 it's not really clear how to make a program or do something creative. So I'd argue C64 or similar might be a better choices that W95 PC for kids under 15 y.o.
Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.
It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:
10 PRINT "RetroTechie was here ";
20 GOTO 10
For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).
I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.
Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. But my computer background got me hired into tech investment banking out of college, and has shaped every aspect of my life and career. just today I debugged a bash script that is part of the workflow for my one-person business.
Thank you, Commodore.
But now look at us, we're like safecrackers in movies who try to go straight but end up in front of the vault again. :)
Major bummer. In 20 columns.
Also they bought it, brought it home, and then two days later took us all on a 3 week vacation road trip across Canada. I sat in the back of our Toyota Tercel with a pile of magazines with BASIC listings in the back of them fantasizing about getting home to try them out. Torture.
I had been reading Elektuur (Elektor for English readers) for years, but never quite understood how computers worked.
That book changed everything, like a giant light bulb switching on. Suddenly I could read all those digital schematics. Digital design was what I wanted to do in life. And I did and still do.
Loved the ads. Such memories.
Ah yes, the "special compilations" on TDK D90s swapped in the playground ;-)
1978; I travelled with my Dad to a distant outback town to visit one of his clients. While I waited for them to conclude business, a big box arrived, and the client interrupted my Dad to unpack it, with great enthusiasm. We stood by while the styrofoam was spread around the office in a flurry of unpacking and cardboard ripping chaos. The client swept all the paper nonsense off a spare desk onto the floor and promptly plonked down a brand new Commodore Pet. He poked at it a few times, promptly disclaimed "I have no idea what to do with this thing, I just know I need it <chuckle chuckle>..." Dad and the client left me alone for an hour, and I spent my time typing every single weird character I could, learning how the shift and Commodore keys worked, eventually drawing a weird maze on the screen, which I recognized much later on in my youth as what could have been the beginnings of an RPG-like map.
1980; I was a bit delinquent at a local posh college, supposed to be applying myself to my homework; instead, I followed my fellow classmates with excitement, at the end of the school day, to the local "Computer Age" shop, which had just opened up in our local neighborhood (Claremont, Perth, Western Australia) .. and there, touched my first Apple II, and then Atari 800, computers. I spent so much time after school in that shop, learning BASIC on both systems, that the salesman eventually gave me my first 5.4" floppy disc, to save all the work on in between visits. I still have that floppy, buried in the depths of some book I also value highly. Somewhere.
1982; My regular jaunts around the shopping district of Subiaco took me to every single newsstand in the suburb, and then the Tandy store, and then to my mates place, who had just gotten himself a C64 - which, much to my dismay, couldn't read the code off my Apple II 5.4" floppy, nor would it allow me to just type it all in and RUN it without a hefty serving of pokes. Nevertheless, for a little while (before my mate started getting games in the mail from his British cousins), he and I would spend our weekends porting BASIC listings from the endless magazine piles we'd collected, to the C64 - my first serious cross-platform porting project, an activity and set of experiences which led to MUCH greater success a few years later in my career.
1983; my Dad had finally agreed to get me my first computer, but it was not without great conditions - I had to work at least 4 hours every weekend with him, carting rubbish and bricks and detritous around various building sites he had his hands on, and .. we had to drive to Melbourne (from Perth) to get it, since it would be an opportunity for some quality family time vacation, as well as providing a considerable discount, since my Dad knew the computer importer who was bringing the machines to Australia. And so it was, after a 4 day trip across the Nullabor Plain, I was loaded up with an Oric-1 and a couple of cassette tapes, which I promptly plugged into every single cheap television set I could find on the way back home. Somewhere out there on the Nullabor, was a hotel TV with "Ready" burned into its screen. That was me. That was the end of quality family time on the Nullabor plain too - nobody in my family had the foggiest clue what I was doing to burn those Ready's into the screens.
1987; I have by now become an Assembly programmer and a budding C hacker, and knew far too much about anything to be bothered continuing with my studies, so I drop out of high school and get myself a job on the only electronics assembly production line in Western Australia, at that time, at first stringing endless marine cable harnesses, then touching up a near endless stream of clothes-iron temperature controllers as they pour through the wave solder, and then eventually I get to touch-up the box full of Australias first home-grown modem product - which didn't work, until me and the hardware guys realized there was not enough space between various components near the connectors - necessitating a redesign, a failed schedule, and an abandoned project as the designers gave up in light of the fierce competition from Singapore and Hong Kong and so on. Well, I at least got a patched-up PCB to play with, and with that I taught myself how to write a MODEM driver - first for CP/M, the only operating system available to me at the factory, and then .. when I showed other engineers in the lab that it could actually work, for MS-DOS, on the brand new PC the factory bought for the purpose of demonstrating the one Australian modem that was ever made in Perth. I got paid handsomely for that project, my first proper terminate and stay resident program ...
1988; I arrive in Los Angeles, California, my skills having sharpened enough to cut my teeth on writing an undelete program for the funky proprietary filesystem that Progress/4GL was using to bypass all the OS cruft that got in the way of performance. Astonished that I'd gotten it working (it was easy), the company offered me another project, and then another, and then another .. and after a year, with a litany of things under my belt - a multimedia engine that made fancy graphics on CGA and EGA (and eventually VGA) without requiring additional artist fart'ery, I was ready for more. Always another adventurous thing to write/compile/build/run/test/debug. And so it was, one beautiful glorious afternoon, a brand new MIPS Magnum pizzabox showed up on my desktop, far from the operations room I'd usually have to card my way into, halon emergency mask lessons and all, and suddenly .. I was a Unix/C programmer, and I had daemons to write, systems integrity to check, and a whole set of legacy terminal-based software to port. I need another terminal, but wasn't getting one until I actually wrote the terminal, on the brand new PC that I was also using, less enthusiastically. I wrote the terminal, I used it to log on to my MIPS box, I gained access to the ops room from a grand distance.
1990; BBS'es had my eyeballs pretty much glued to the screen, day and night, and from this it was a short step onto the Internet. I spend every moment of free time parsing USENET, downloading code, getting it to work on my pizzabox, sharpening and refining things, such that my boss just gave me endless challenges to complete - no longer doubting that it would happen, but rather expecting it.
1994; I participate in building the technical backbone of one of America's biggest ISP's at the time, and after a few weeks of hair-on-fire T1 configurations, modem-bank alignments, DNS and USENET server setups, I sit back, turn on the wire tap, and watch as a veritable firehose onslaught of daily new customers from all over Southern California spend 95% of their newly gained online time, downloading porn. (Oh, and I subscribe to minix-list to get me some hot Unix action on my mostly-useless 486, and as soon as Linus' little project hit funet.fi, I am hooked, line and sinker, as a Linux developer.)
2000; I'm burned out, I have a room full of SGI gear, and too much money. Motorbikes, Hollywood girlfriends, trips all over the country. I decide, its time to make synthesizers.
2001; I move to Germany to work for one of Germany's greatest synth companies, and spend my idle time in the Ruhrgebiet learning German and writing firmware loaders, USB drivers, and other such mundane things. I make a lot of cruddy synthesizer music, I learn how Germans party, I find myself far too many distractions.
...
2026; I'm sitting here in Austria, surrounded by 40 years of computing history, which still works just as it ever did over the decades. I can count my productive, shipped userbase for various big commercial projects literally in terms of millions, accrued over the decades, but all I really wanna do is hack on 80's computers and make them valuable again.
I've introduced 40,000+ folks in Vienna to the concept of retrocomputing, giving them hands-on time with machines many of them have never heard of, let alone considered worthy of attention .. a pimped out ZX Spectrum 128+, an Amstrad CPC6128, and an Oric Atmos - each with peripherals designed and built in the 21st Century, to bring each machine up to date with such things as USB storage, class drivers for mice and serial lines, and brand new display capabilities. The microcontrollers in these peripherals are many thousands of times more powerful than the original Z80/6502 CPU's in the 40 year old computers they are serving bytes to, but this doesn't matter any more. The only thing that matters is the fact that there are still brand new software titles being written for these machines every single day. Yes, the Oric Atmos gets new stuff, the Speccie and the Amstrad too of course, and .. any day now .. the Atmos will have a browser, surf the web, download software - finally catching up with its peers in terms of capabilities.
What a wonderful journey its been. One day, all of these machines will find other eyes and hands to entertain, but until then .. I hack on. And on. With dreams of the Nullabor journey still etched in my mind, a never to disappear "Ready" prompt floating in front my eyeballs, its time to read a bit more Hacker News, dig into some of the great repos' from todays preening, and build some stuff.
I consider it a blessing that I grew up with computers. We both came of age about the same time, even ..