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- Hacker News
- > Commodore expected both the VIC-20 and C-64 to have a shelf life of around 3 years. They were about right in the case of the VIC-20, but the C-64 kept selling about 700,000 units a year through the end of the decade and was still hanging on in 1993. It wasn’t selling well in 1993, mind you, and Commodore didn’t want to be making them by then. But there was still demand for them, and Commodore in 1993 wasn’t in a position to say no to a sale.
This reminds me of the Apple II family. It is well-known that even in 1984, Steve Jobs considered it irrelevant - despite the fact that it alone was providing the revenue that kept Apple solvent. The Lisa and the Mac had both landed with a thud in terms of adoption and sales, mainly due to being very, very expensive (and I'm sure in part because they only supported monochrome displays, until Mac II in 1987, which only got less affordable -- $10,000 in today's money). The Apple II series on the other hand, kept being sold -- schools and consumers couldn't get enough of them - demand that lasted until the last Platinum IIe (1993) and IIgs (1994) rolled off the assembly lines.
The Amiga seems to have been a similar story - Commodore trying to get people to adopt an unquestionably better PC well before the point in the cycle where it was as affordable as the previous PC they were selling.
It seems like there's a lesson here. Trying to drag the public to your "better" new product only works when (A) it solves a real problem for them, and (B) they can clearly see that it's worth the price you're asking.
In the late 80s and early 90s, a lot of people didn't see anything relevant to them that the Mac or Amiga (or the IBM PC) could do that a C64, Apple II, or Atari 8-bit computer couldn't do. Or at least, not nearly enough to spend 10 grand (in today's money). Eventually, relevant capabilities (I'd argue that multimedia CD-ROM software and then, the 'modern-day Internet' were those catalysts) and price both got things back into that sweet spot that "flagship" PCs had been divorced from since 1987.
by xp84 - I got my C64 (actually C64C) when I was 7, switched to a PC five years later just as I mastered BASIC and was starting to learn assembly.
To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.
Happy birthday, C64!
by nathell - Literally everything you said is also true about me! and my name is also Daniel!by dmd
- Being behind Iron Curtain I sold (well, my parents, I was too young) my Atari 65 XE + tape reader (which I received as a gift in 1988) and got C64 (the original ovalish one) with 1541 in 1990, it was bundled together with a set of hundreds (pirated of course, that was the reality back then) of 5 1/4" discs with various software and games. It was like receiving internet in a package.
Entering incantations like: "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part). Or playing with assembly with LDA, STA (or same for X and Y) was fun.
by krzyk - > "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part).
Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address).
Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot.
But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
by ajross - Somewhat relevant
DOOM on C64 with variable height floor/ceilings
And my favorite, Quake on C64
- For some reason I read that as Quack. Long live BFINN.by b112
- I had a ZX Spectrum and learned Basic and played a ton of pirated games on that. My school had Commodore 64s - but I didn't use them much. They didn't really know how to teach for them and there was no hacking around allowed.by wateralien
- >there was no hacking around allowed
You fool! That was to encourage latent hackers to emerge into the world.
by tclancy - I visited this ZX Spectrum museum in this summer: https://loadzx.com/en/
So strange to stumble upon this blast from the 80s in a small town in the middle of Portugal. But I think this reinforces the fact that the Spectrum was to Europe what the C64 was to North America.
Anyway, wonderful memories in there!
by mig39 - Commodore 64 in 1982 cost US$595 ($2,059 today).
ZX Spectrum in 1982 cost $200 ($692 today) for 16 KB model and had a 48K model for 40% more.
It was the difference between affordable and unaffordable for many people.
by silvestrov - The Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.
It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.
Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)
by gxd - Back when writing 500 lines of code by simply typing it line by line from the "handover" booklet the C64 shipped with. Then running it and it magically made a frog-game appear where you hit "space" and the tongue of the frog needs to catch a fly. Then forgot to save on the 5,25'' disk and everything was gone. Good times :)by donmb
- Wow, that frog game - I haven't thought about this in a loooong time! Didn't it also come with the demo disk for the 1541?by Cockbrand
- Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
Long, strange trip.
by georgemcbay - Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.by christkv
- May your trip continue!
At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.
by intrasight - Who are you, and why are you writing my biography? Your journey was nearly identical to mine. I truly, sincerely feel like we went through a golden age, where amazing things were starting to become possible but you hard to work hard enough to get them that you couldn't help but learn something new along the way.by kstrauser
- That very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)by nurettin
- Greetings, fellow old people.by wateralien
- Sup
- Yeah I had one of those as a kid and spent many happy hours learning about it and of course playing games.by davidw
- my first internet was on a commodore, on a C128, with a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. we got insane speeds! seconds per character!
- I wonder what today’s youngster hackers will reminisce over in 44 years.by layer8
- We are not old. We've just typed more words than Stephen King and probably written scarier stories in a single sprint.by mkovach
- Some of my fave C64 memories as a kid: listening to cassette tapes with stuff stored on them, punching in COMPUTE! listings with MLX, discovering 6510 and learning the Merlin assembler, long runs in Moon Patrol, making sprites with Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, trying to understand how GEOS could possibly work, wearing out the spiral binding of the Programmer’s Reference Guide.by davepeck
- Funny enough, I'm only in my early 30s and grew up with the Commodore 64. It was the basement computer that I could do whatever I wanted to, whereas the Windows computer (initially 3.1 and got upgraded all the way to 98) computer upstairs had to be shared and had more supervision. So I enjoyed writing a lot of code and trying things. I managed to have quite a collection of software and accessories just by asking around who still had stuff in the late 90s and early 00s in their basement for an 80s computer, and more did than you would expect.by gtk40
- > Greetings, fellow old people.
Greetings back! The only drawback is that (statistically speaking) remaining lifespan is shorter for a 'greybeard' than a youngster.
Apart from that, I feel lucky to have experienced in my life the introduction of: b/w -> color TV, walkmans, home/personal computers, networks/BBSes, floppy/hard drives, CD/DVD/BR, LAN parties, 3D gaming, internet, mp3 players, mobile phones, smartphones, cheapo+powerful compute hw like Raspberry Pi family, and now AI. Not to mention enormous advances in science (especially medical), materials technology & general wealth. I could go on but you get the picture. We truly are living in an age of marvels.
My dad's day job (so 1 gen back) mostly involved paperwork & manually calculating numbers on a calculator. Public libraries did housekeeping on paper cards (see a previous submission of mine), and did so for generations. A century+ ago most people spent their days in agriculture & living under desperately poor conditions.
No doubt today's youngsters will see many advances of their own. But they won't eg. appreciate what cheap cpu's can do, as they haven't witnessed a time those didn't exist. Smartphones & co have been around them since birth.
Greybeards among us are lucky to have the perspective of experiencing that 'tech-hockeystick-curve' of the past ~50y or so.
by RetroTechie - To whom it may concern, I believe the year was 1987 or 1988. (I was around 9ish, I think.) My brothers and I stumbled upon a Commodore 64 amidst trash beside a country road. In the box, even the manual was in good shape.
This was promptly carried home and plugged into the TV via coax, if I remember correctly. Sample programs from the manual were entered, and before long, custom programs were written.
The power brick was large and hot. My dad would not let me leave the computer on overnight. Nor did I have a disk drive.
I got good at typing out programs from memory. By the time I reached college, code (at college course level, as well as fast touch-typing) was generally easy, and I felt like my fellow students were learning what felt "natural" to me. (Unfortunately, this also instilled a bad habit of preferring the easy route, and never being a diligent, hard-working programmer. Not to mention... dropping out.)
This machine was definitely instrumental in my chosen career path! I did not own a proper PC until sometime early in college when I bought an IBM from my second roommate, and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium 200Mhz...
by neogodless - Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
by mkovach