By Jon Bernstein, 3 February 2005 13:40
NEWS This article was first published in February 2002 as part of our 'Technologies That Time Forgot' series. We are running the full series again to mark the recent re-birth of Commodore. Thus far we've featured the BBC Micro, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Acorn Electron and the Vic-20. Here Jon Bernstein and silicon.com reader Andy Walmsle pay homage to the Vic-20.
Jon Bernstein writes:
I probably don't deserve to write silicon.com's eulogy to the Commodore 64 because I have a shameful secret. A secret, nearly 20 years later, I only now dare tell.
I'd had my C64 - a Spectrum replacement - for just a couple of months when in an after school session playing a tennis sim it all went wrong. I can't even remember the name of the game but I do remember losing a vital point in the third set and, more embarrassingly, I do remember losing the plot. In a fit of McEnroe-esque rage I slammed my fists against the beige and bulky keyboard. My Commodore 64 was no more.
Having nagged my mum to buy me the thing I couldn't now tell her that I'd had an expensive accident. Instead I pretended I was still using it, disappearing into my bedroom for hours on end. The lying was easy; after all I'd previously pretended that I was using it for schoolwork. (She still doesn't know, so if you don't mind can we keep this between us?)
The Commodore 64 deserved more respect. First shipped in 1982 it weighed in with 64K RAM, 20K ROM, a 1MHz CPU and sound and graphics that blew you away (then not now, obviously). Although it took the Amiga for Commodore to create the world's first multimedia home computer, the C64 was heading in the right direction. As for the keyboard, it didn't seem so beige or bulky back then.
This was 'state of the art' 1980s-style.
That's not to say it didn't have its problems. According to Project64.com, the unofficial chronicler of the C64, about a quarter of the machines originally shipped didn't work. Only later did the company reduce defects to a more tolerable four to five per cent.
A number of 'old skool' commentators in the UK have made that point that to own a Commodore was to support a US goliath against the plucky Brits beavering away at Sinclair Labs. That's not how I remember it. For my teenage mates and me the Spectrum and the C64 demanded equal playground respect.
Did we know that Commodore was founded in 1954 by Jack Tramiel, a Polish Jew who'd survived six years at Auschwitz and other concentration camps? Did we care that Commodore would ship some 22 million C64s turning it into a billion dollar company giant in the process? Did we feel guilty not lobbying our mums and dads hard enough to buy British? Not a bit of it. For us the only thing that mattered were games, games, games.
Still, the history of Commodore is incredible. After the C64, the firm had one last big success with the Amiga before things started to unravel. It remained profitable until the late 1980s but a refusal to build IBM-compatible PCs probably sealed its fate.
When the company finally liquidated its assets in 1994, Byte magazine wrote: "Commodore deserves a eulogy, because its role as an industry pioneer has been largely forgotten or ignored by revisionist historians who claim that everything started with Apple or IBM."
silicon.com reader Andy Walmsley writes:
From its release in 1982 through to the final models rolling off the production line in 1992, estimates suggest as many as 22 million Commodore 64 units were sold worldwide.
This makes it the most popular 8-bit home computer in the world and it's not hard to understand why. The machine's sound and video capabilities were streets ahead of its main rival, the ZX Spectrum. It had a built in sound and video connector, on board parallel and serial connectors, built in joystick ports and even an expansion cartridge interface.
This substantial offering was backed up by a meaty power supply that was always on top of the job (unlike many others) and a host of affordable peripherals which were all made by the same manufacturer and therefore enjoyed some reasonable chance of working at the first attempt.
While we practically consider interconnectivity and interoperability as God-given rights these days, getting the old 8-bit machines to work with third party peripherals could well mean many an after school evening listening to Alphaville and carefully wiring up interconnection leads into esoteric configurations with a fine tipped soldering iron in the hope that there weren't any mistakes on the photocopied instruction leaflet.
A prime example of the benefits of Commodore peripherals attached to a Commodore computer can be found in the venerable old C2N cassette deck. Whilst Speccy owners were left blowing on their volume and tone controls and incanting ritual curses over their Philips battery powered portables in the hope that Manic Miner would load on the ninth attempt, you just plugged the C2N in and off it went.
Power to the motor was supplied and controlled by the computer so you didn't need another mains socket, and they worked every time as long as you didn't use your mum's Sacha Distel tape that had been left on the parcel shelf of your dad's Capri for two years.
A lot of people criticised the 64's primitive BASIC programming language but I can't agree with any of them. Okay, you didn't have the raft of keywords that you got with machines like the BBC B and the Spectrum but at least you were POKEing and PEEKing to change the screen and border colours by the time you got to the fifth page of the user manual.
To do anything useful you had to quickly learn about linear address spaces, random access memory, binary arithmetic, bit masking and all the other lovely things that are still used in exactly the same way in modern programming languages.
Probably more importantly, even though you were programming in BASIC you were only a hair's breadth away from real machine code. Stepping into assembly language and discovering the elegant simplicity of the 6510 processor's instruction set was a walk in the park for any competent C64 BASIC programmer.
And once you were into the machine code world you were rewarded with unhindered access to C64's excellent sound and video subsystems - the possibilities were practically endless for the time.
The majority of people that owned a C64 ended up playing a lot of games. You couldn't help it really when you had a machine that embodied the best qualities of a hobbyist's home computer and a gamer's video console. I have vivid recollections of spending many, many happy hours playing such classics as Attack of the Mutant Camels, Scramble, Falcon Patrol, Chuckie Egg and Manic Miner.
A recent rash of C64 emulators for the PC has allowed me to dig all my old games out, jerry rig a cassette interface to my machine and transfer the data onto files on my HDD.
All that's left to do then is turn down the lights, turn up the speakers, dig out the joystick and go for it!
Comments
There are 12 comments. Join the discussion
1. Nick Henning
Ahh... it brings back memories!
My first computer was a Commode and I taught myself to program on it (they wouldn't let me take computing at school, and that time the lessons were rubbish anyway!). It had really crap BASIC but that was a good thing for me because it made me figure out what the hardware was doing. I'm a hardware/software engineer now and I truly believe that it was my first encounter with the trusty C64 that had a hand in deciding my future career.
PS. I still have one :-)
2. anonymous
I feel it is appropriate to note, that Commodore went bust because of the obsession of it's management to break into the IBM PC compatible arena.
Irving Gould and Medhi Ali, were convinced that despite the Amiga division of Commodore seeing year-on-year success and growth, the company had to conform to the industry standard in order to be taken seriously in the marketplace.
As a result, they started building Commodore PCs, which were massive boxes. These computers had all the graphics and sound capabilities built into the motherboard. Such a design resulted in a very large form factor, as well as making the computer expensive and difficult to service.
It is widely believed that money was siphoned from the Amiga division, to fund the loss making PC division.
Eventually, the PC division pulled the whole company down with it.
3. Adrian Carter
I never owned a C64, at school you were either on the side of the Spectrum or the C64 and I had the former (there was one kid who reminds me in hindsight of Martin from The Simpsons who had an Oric 1 but even the geeks laughed at him).
I do remember Saturdays at Just Micro on Carver Steet in Sheffield where they had loads of these machines set up (alongside Speccy's, Vic 20's, Amstrad CPC464's and one of those MSX things) with games running and hordes of kids used to spend the better part of the day playing the old Jeff Minter games (Attack of The Mutant Camels anyone?). The place had a bizarre geek status.
I was always impressed with the graphics and sounds on 64. They used to have some nice visual effects and soundtracks playing as they games took an age to load to from cassette (almost a precursor to the iTunes visual thing).
4. David Windmill
The C64 was amazing not just for the games you could play on it, but the GEOS software. This gave you an office suite when MS were still playing at it.
5. Ron Rube
Commodore 64>>>>>>I still have mine and it still works...... My son was great at writing some games and if I dig thru my junk box I believe I still have the cassettes they were saved on. We did share it and now 22 years later it does bring back a lot of memories and no malware.
6. Bob Koehn
What memories. In the early 80's I built TI-99/4A computers in Lubbock, Tx. I had one of the early Radio Shack computers as well. But nothing influenced me like the C-64 and eventually, the C-128D (which by the way I still have and it still works). My first real experiences with programming were with these computers and I'll never regret it. They got me started on the road to success.
7. Armando Canales
My first also, who can forget her....I had worked with the VIC-20 at A&M classes for the HP Peripheral Interface on it, & received a C64 for Christmas. We were already being taught assembler w/6502 interface breadboard boxes. (1980) So jumping into the 6510 wasn't a big step. I went as far as the Commodore 128. Wrote a display program to swap video pages every other frame to quadruple the number of colors it could display, if anyone remembers the SciAm cover circa 1980 - August w/a Mandelbrot displayed written in Postscript, I wrote an assembler version for the C64, & finally wrote a Midi Librarian for GEOS, in Assembler, for the Yamaha TX81Z multi timbral Box...Yep..It's how I got started too...
8. Dick Vanstone
We bought a Commodore 64 for our two sons many/many years ago and I remember only too well that both son's made us look like idiots when they showed us what they could do. I am 68 years of age and still have the unit in my workshop and have converted it to a TV and use it on a daily basis. The color and picture is perfect. I bet it will outlast my lifetime.
9. anonymous
Still have mine. With SW that emulates a Mac.
10. Linda Garcia
The Commodore 64 gave me many years of game playing, programming, and business use. I received it in high school. On a thermal printer, I learned enough about POKEing to get it to print sine waves and geometric shapes. With a serial-to-Brother typewriter port adapter, it typed up my first resume. I made some money maintaining a database for a video store. It is currently packed up in a closet, and no doubt it will still work. I miss Broderbund's "Castles of Dr. Creep."
11. anonymous
I never played games on my C64. The machine was far too important as an instrument of exploration. At that point in history, appliances were all sort of dead. But the C64 was alive. The program you wrote became its DNA. Its not like today where computers are everywhere, but their power is co-opted.
12. Michael Myers
Great article! Thanks for helping me relive some of my misspent youth. But, I hate to add a correction but Commodore *did* in fact make PC clones for a little while, so it wasn't necessarily their refusal to make PC clones that forced them out of business. Just thought I'd add my two bits worth. Thanks for a great article!!!