There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".
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.
The thing that truly changed my life was the Commodore Reference Guide, with schematic, and a book from Data Becker that described the schematic in low level detail. Address decoders, chip selects, tri-state data busses…
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.
I could probably write a blog post with the opposite title, sth. like "My life got ruined by the Commodore C64". Equally hyperbolic, the narrative would go something like this: I was the exact same child/teen as the guy from the other blog, but the problem from 2026 me is that I got lured into IT through games and BASIC, and now I so wish I had chosen a different career. Alas, it's all I know how to do, and at this point in my life, changing careers is not a viable option.
Hello there -- I'm the guy who wrote the article! And I couldn't help but laugh at your comment. You are 100% correct, it could very easily go the other way. My story is that I actually graduated with a degree in English (as in literature!) and the only CS class I took was Pascal (where a friend of mine, who was also in the class, joked that we both got another language for a grade - C).
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.
One of my best friend loves making music. And he was also always interested in recording tech. So after we both graduated from high school, he went on to become a sound engineer. But even right after getting his degree, he said that he never really wanted to work in that profession because he didn't want to lose his passion for it.
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.
Btw, completely OT but something I found puzzling when reading your blog post: how did your aunt communicate with the Austrian guy who didn't speak English?!
Ah, the answer is incredibly simple: my aunt speaks fluent German! She moved to Austria as a young woman and picked up the language, and picked up a husband. :) She speaks Korean, of course, so that's how we all are able to communicate with her. Recently we were at a family gathering, and one of my extended relations is married to a German fellow (who speaks both German and English fluently), and it was utterly cool seeing my aunt and him chat away in German (and sing "99 Red Balloons (Luftballons)," the popular 80s tune by the German singer Nena, in their native German)!
It still remains to be seen, but the C64 may have ruined my son's life as well. I have a similar story to yours and OP's: born in the mid 70's, got a C64 in the mid 80's, convinced myself that I was a genius because I could get it to do anything I wanted (I even learned 6510 assembler back then) and parlayed those skills into joining the internet boom of the mid-90's.
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...
I feel you. My son is still younger, but I have similar fears.
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...
I don't know. IT is a bit different in that regard. As a doctor, even if the system is shit, you still help people directly. As an engineer, you build something tangible that can make people's lives easier. And so on. In IT, though, the impact often feels much more indirect. Most of the time you're optimizing processes or helping businesses become more efficient, rather than improving people's lives in a direct way. You're often several steps removed from the people who ultimately benefit from your work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just doesn't feel very meaningful to me.
I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.
I had the same kind of childhood with the VIC-20 and C=64 (and TI-99/4a in school as well). And having launched my career in I.T. I started as a Network Operator and then quickly promoted to systems administration, with SunOS 4.1.x mostly.
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.
As other people said everyone goes through this at a certain life stage. You go from exploring the world and developing your own skills, to figuring out what impact you want to have made on the world after you're gone.
How do you figure? Commodore had strong sales through the late 80s, and the C64 wasn't discontinued until 1994.
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.
I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out registers on paper gave me a strong foundation in computers. I realized computers would only be tools and always managed to take jobs outside of comp. sci. or IT, but always used a computer and programmed utilities for every job I had in any language I fancied at the time and throughout the years: C, Basic, asm (6502, PIC, Scenix, 68000, 8086/88, now ARM/x64), Forth, Lisp (Lush/Lush2 lush-users on Sourceforge with Yann LeCun to get Lush running, APL, J, Logo, Pascal, Factor, Java, Python, F#, now Rust, Odin, and J is still open on my desktop daily). I had in mind how people were talking about high-paying jobs if you learned WordPerfect, and it was "the future" back in 1991-93. I felt people were putting the tool before thought, intelligence, and process. I did dip into DBA and IT here and there for a little bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing embedded software for the window animation I was working on for a display company, and interactive prox switches on the store window at Sachs to trigger a pneumatically actuated Nutcracker to raise his arm and close his jaw and other fun kinetic pieces in the late 90s (Pre-Arduino saturation days - Parallax Basic Stamp, Scenix, PIC, and PCBs from scratch by hand with resist and etch). Kids loved pressing the Nutcracker switches! The reason I learned so much was that you had to go to the library, write a letter or eventually by the 90s email and user groups, and just plain figure it out through trial and error on your own. I had a VIC-20, Commodore 128, Amiga 500/1000, then a PowerPC Mac running Mach Linux in the late 90s/early 2000. I loved Commodore. It's a shame. They were the best option for the buck.
I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.
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!
I hit the limits of C64 basic pretty quick and I read somewhere that there was a different language called "assembler" that was faster, so I convinced my mom to buy me a book about it. As I started reading the book I realized that I needed some software to go with it (the actual assembler...) and the book was about the "Merlin64 assembler" so I begged my parents to buy me that software for Christmas.
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.
I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.
I remember spending hours typing in hex dumps from the back of Compute!s Gazette back then. To this day, I still remember that LDA at A9 and STA was 8D.
Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain).
In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)
And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.
Yep. My father build a ZX Spectrum clone for me somewhere around 1991. Few years later he also got Commodore 64 as a gift from German engineers he was working with.
I think both of these machines are really good for learning BASIC: much fewer distractions, you type commands and computer does something.
Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
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..
> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
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.
I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee!
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 can't describe that mystery feeling when getting bunch of random cassette tapes from my cousins with a giant catalog of programs on them, some demos, some games, some wild stuff and just casually browsing them. All I had was a title if I was lucky. Then the fun stuff of calibrating the tape head :) Great memories.
Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.
I wanted an Apple II so badly and thought I was getting the short-end-of-the-stick with a C64 but I am so happy (to this day) that my first machine at home was C64.
I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).
If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).
I grew up with a C64, and the story resonated with me. Not as much about getting pirates games to run, but more trying to play the latest games on our old 386 which came after the C64.
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.
Yeah, this was '83. They went into the store and saw both on the shelf, and the C64 was "too much" so I got what I got. I think a year later the price on the C64 just made the VIC20 totally pointless.
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'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?
The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk
LOAD "*",8,1
The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.
The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.
There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command).
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.
Booting directly into a programming language REPL (in ~2 seconds, I might add) was a great signal that the C64 was ultimately for programming, even if all you do with it is games.
I kind of wish for a modern PC that booted in 2 seconds, directly into Python or something.
I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.
Of the 1980s 8-bit computing era, the Commodore 64 was the "best value" for getting a lot of functionality for the price. It had 64k of RAM when some others only had 16k. It had a really good built-in sound chip with polyphonic sounds (makes it richer sounding for programming video games music and sound effects). Some other computers had cheaper chips with monophonic sound which makes simplistic beeps and tones. It outsold all the other computers like Apple II, Atari 400/800, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc. This meant it had a big ecosystem of 3rd-party add-ons.
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.
It was the best-selling single model of home computer for a very long time (relatively speaking in a very fast-moving field) in an era where most new models ditched compatibility, and in some countries it totally dominated.
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.
It boots into BASIC which makes it really easy to learn BASIC. It feels like a programmable computer even to kids who know nothing about programming, as the only way to get anywhere is to type a command. So it's very easy to start. You can also practice typing straight away, or do colorful 'ASCII art' (actually what people call 'ANSI art' - drawing using colorful text blocks).
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.
In addition to other comments, Windows 95 came more than a decade after the Commodore 64. The IBM PC at that time cost roughly three -four times as much in my memory, Apple II was almost as much. The Commodore quickly got a large game library , better than competitors. It was a golden age for smaller scale games not requiring the massive teams of the modern AAA photorealistic or open world games - this was during maybe the height of the arcade video game craze when some kids like me would spend oodles of quarters at convenience stores and video arcades. Eventually many of us would switch to Windows 3.1/95/98 for work.
A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.
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.
For me, it was mainly the excellent game library plus a group of friends in the neighborhood who had them so we could swap games and copy them. I did very little programming on it, but did wind up as a reviewer for some small game publisher for while (no idea how I managed this) and, later on, my dad’s business partner gave us a 128 with a modem and I did the BBS thing for a while which was really fascinating at 12 or so.
8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.
It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.
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)
At the time personal computers didn’t do that much, lots of work places had no computers and libraries (in the uk at least) wouldn’t have had a computer you could use.
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.
For many of us, it was our first computer. It was very simple to understand at every level and very hackable. I was very young when I used it, but I learned so much about the internals of computers.
Thank you. A lot of Western developers a couple generations older than me have fond memories of the Commodore 64, and now I can see why. Thanks for letting me know. Have a nice day.
The 6510 CPU was easy to programme in assembler and it was supported by a graphics chip VIC and a sound chip SID who both had some fun tricks up their sleeves (not like a graphics card, much much more simple).
For their time and the price they were quite capable and fun to use.
The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.
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.
There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".
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.
For us in the same age cohort in Europe it was ZX Spectrums and Amstrad CPCs, besides the C64 which made it there too. Fun times.
Yup, I remember early school. Two guys in class had a computer, one was a ZX81 the other (me) a C64. We're still friends! =)
The thing that truly changed my life was the Commodore Reference Guide, with schematic, and a book from Data Becker that described the schematic in low level detail. Address decoders, chip selects, tri-state data busses…
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.
I could probably write a blog post with the opposite title, sth. like "My life got ruined by the Commodore C64". Equally hyperbolic, the narrative would go something like this: I was the exact same child/teen as the guy from the other blog, but the problem from 2026 me is that I got lured into IT through games and BASIC, and now I so wish I had chosen a different career. Alas, it's all I know how to do, and at this point in my life, changing careers is not a viable option.
So, thanks C64!
I still love you, though...
Hello there -- I'm the guy who wrote the article! And I couldn't help but laugh at your comment. You are 100% correct, it could very easily go the other way. My story is that I actually graduated with a degree in English (as in literature!) and the only CS class I took was Pascal (where a friend of mine, who was also in the class, joked that we both got another language for a grade - C).
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! :)
One of my best friend loves making music. And he was also always interested in recording tech. So after we both graduated from high school, he went on to become a sound engineer. But even right after getting his degree, he said that he never really wanted to work in that profession because he didn't want to lose his passion for it.
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.
Btw, completely OT but something I found puzzling when reading your blog post: how did your aunt communicate with the Austrian guy who didn't speak English?!
Ah, the answer is incredibly simple: my aunt speaks fluent German! She moved to Austria as a young woman and picked up the language, and picked up a husband. :) She speaks Korean, of course, so that's how we all are able to communicate with her. Recently we were at a family gathering, and one of my extended relations is married to a German fellow (who speaks both German and English fluently), and it was utterly cool seeing my aunt and him chat away in German (and sing "99 Red Balloons (Luftballons)," the popular 80s tune by the German singer Nena, in their native German)!
Awesome family constellation, thanks for taking the time to explain!
It still remains to be seen, but the C64 may have ruined my son's life as well. I have a similar story to yours and OP's: born in the mid 70's, got a C64 in the mid 80's, convinced myself that I was a genius because I could get it to do anything I wanted (I even learned 6510 assembler back then) and parlayed those skills into joining the internet boom of the mid-90's.
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...
I feel you. My son is still younger, but I have similar fears.
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...
Sounds like the normal mid-life crisis. :-P Would probably hit you with every other job too.
I don't know. IT is a bit different in that regard. As a doctor, even if the system is shit, you still help people directly. As an engineer, you build something tangible that can make people's lives easier. And so on. In IT, though, the impact often feels much more indirect. Most of the time you're optimizing processes or helping businesses become more efficient, rather than improving people's lives in a direct way. You're often several steps removed from the people who ultimately benefit from your work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just doesn't feel very meaningful to me.
I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.
I suggest you run this by an actual doctor.
I had the same kind of childhood with the VIC-20 and C=64 (and TI-99/4a in school as well). And having launched my career in I.T. I started as a Network Operator and then quickly promoted to systems administration, with SunOS 4.1.x mostly.
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.
Find an IT-related problem facing the whole world right now and fix it.
For example phone enshittification. Make your own phone that isn't shit.
As other people said everyone goes through this at a certain life stage. You go from exploring the world and developing your own skills, to figuring out what impact you want to have made on the world after you're gone.
If you grew up with a Commodore your mid life is way past.
How do you figure? Commodore had strong sales through the late 80s, and the C64 wasn't discontinued until 1994.
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.
There's certainly that. But a lot of the points of the sibling and nephew comments here ring true, too.
I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out registers on paper gave me a strong foundation in computers. I realized computers would only be tools and always managed to take jobs outside of comp. sci. or IT, but always used a computer and programmed utilities for every job I had in any language I fancied at the time and throughout the years: C, Basic, asm (6502, PIC, Scenix, 68000, 8086/88, now ARM/x64), Forth, Lisp (Lush/Lush2 lush-users on Sourceforge with Yann LeCun to get Lush running, APL, J, Logo, Pascal, Factor, Java, Python, F#, now Rust, Odin, and J is still open on my desktop daily). I had in mind how people were talking about high-paying jobs if you learned WordPerfect, and it was "the future" back in 1991-93. I felt people were putting the tool before thought, intelligence, and process. I did dip into DBA and IT here and there for a little bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing embedded software for the window animation I was working on for a display company, and interactive prox switches on the store window at Sachs to trigger a pneumatically actuated Nutcracker to raise his arm and close his jaw and other fun kinetic pieces in the late 90s (Pre-Arduino saturation days - Parallax Basic Stamp, Scenix, PIC, and PCBs from scratch by hand with resist and etch). Kids loved pressing the Nutcracker switches! The reason I learned so much was that you had to go to the library, write a letter or eventually by the 90s email and user groups, and just plain figure it out through trial and error on your own. I had a VIC-20, Commodore 128, Amiga 500/1000, then a PowerPC Mac running Mach Linux in the late 90s/early 2000. I loved Commodore. It's a shame. They were the best option for the buck.
I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.
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!
I hit the limits of C64 basic pretty quick and I read somewhere that there was a different language called "assembler" that was faster, so I convinced my mom to buy me a book about it. As I started reading the book I realized that I needed some software to go with it (the actual assembler...) and the book was about the "Merlin64 assembler" so I begged my parents to buy me that software for Christmas.
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.
I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.
I was more lucky, I bought a book about C64 assembler in a second hand book store with my pocket money (must have been in 1989 or 1990).
I remember spending hours typing in hex dumps from the back of Compute!s Gazette back then. To this day, I still remember that LDA at A9 and STA was 8D.
I’ll never forget 53280 and 53281.
Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain). In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)
And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.
Yep. My father build a ZX Spectrum clone for me somewhere around 1991. Few years later he also got Commodore 64 as a gift from German engineers he was working with.
I think both of these machines are really good for learning BASIC: much fewer distractions, you type commands and computer does something.
Still counts! Poor, eager, young, and a bit geeky: C64 was made for those that fell into this category.
Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
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..
> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
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.
I grew up in Yorkshire, though I'm half-Scottish there's no link to Dundee!
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.)
> 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.
Speccy guy back in the day here, but these days I love Linux, and you know Linus cut his teeth on the QL, right?
I feel like storage has improved slightly since microdrives were state of the art too...
I can't describe that mystery feeling when getting bunch of random cassette tapes from my cousins with a giant catalog of programs on them, some demos, some games, some wild stuff and just casually browsing them. All I had was a title if I was lucky. Then the fun stuff of calibrating the tape head :) Great memories.
Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.
Loved the ads. Such memories.
I wanted an Apple II so badly and thought I was getting the short-end-of-the-stick with a C64 but I am so happy (to this day) that my first machine at home was C64.
I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).
If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).
I grew up with a C64, and the story resonated with me. Not as much about getting pirates games to run, but more trying to play the latest games on our old 386 which came after the C64.
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
I am curious how many of you other C64 greybeards got exposed to a language called COMAL (not a typo) on the C64 back in the day?
It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.
s/Commodore 64/Apple IIe/
My parents were too cheap for the C64 and I got the VIC20 instead.
Major bummer. In 20 columns.
I just got lucky that the price fell so precipitously, and so quickly. The drop outpaced my teenage patience!
Yeah, this was '83. They went into the store and saw both on the shelf, and the C64 was "too much" so I got what I got. I think a year later the price on the C64 just made the VIC20 totally pointless.
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.
Any Vic 20 users?
My first machine was an Oric 1, I was 8 years old, it was 1982 - Never looked back ^_^
I started on a TI-99/4A. I've met TI greybeards who've never heard of it and didn't know TI even made a personal computer...
I'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?
The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk
The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.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-...
>While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks.
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.
There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command).
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.
Booting directly into a programming language REPL (in ~2 seconds, I might add) was a great signal that the C64 was ultimately for programming, even if all you do with it is games.
I kind of wish for a modern PC that booted in 2 seconds, directly into Python or something.
I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.
Of the 1980s 8-bit computing era, the Commodore 64 was the "best value" for getting a lot of functionality for the price. It had 64k of RAM when some others only had 16k. It had a really good built-in sound chip with polyphonic sounds (makes it richer sounding for programming video games music and sound effects). Some other computers had cheaper chips with monophonic sound which makes simplistic beeps and tones. It outsold all the other computers like Apple II, Atari 400/800, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc. This meant it had a big ecosystem of 3rd-party add-ons.
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 was the best-selling single model of home computer for a very long time (relatively speaking in a very fast-moving field) in an era where most new models ditched compatibility, and in some countries it totally dominated.
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.
It boots into BASIC which makes it really easy to learn BASIC. It feels like a programmable computer even to kids who know nothing about programming, as the only way to get anywhere is to type a command. So it's very easy to start. You can also practice typing straight away, or do colorful 'ASCII art' (actually what people call 'ANSI art' - drawing using colorful text blocks).
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.
In addition to other comments, Windows 95 came more than a decade after the Commodore 64. The IBM PC at that time cost roughly three -four times as much in my memory, Apple II was almost as much. The Commodore quickly got a large game library , better than competitors. It was a golden age for smaller scale games not requiring the massive teams of the modern AAA photorealistic or open world games - this was during maybe the height of the arcade video game craze when some kids like me would spend oodles of quarters at convenience stores and video arcades. Eventually many of us would switch to Windows 3.1/95/98 for work.
A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.
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.
For me, it was mainly the excellent game library plus a group of friends in the neighborhood who had them so we could swap games and copy them. I did very little programming on it, but did wind up as a reviewer for some small game publisher for while (no idea how I managed this) and, later on, my dad’s business partner gave us a 128 with a modem and I did the BBS thing for a while which was really fascinating at 12 or so.
8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.
It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.
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)
At the time personal computers didn’t do that much, lots of work places had no computers and libraries (in the uk at least) wouldn’t have had a computer you could use.
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.
For many of us, it was our first computer. It was very simple to understand at every level and very hackable. I was very young when I used it, but I learned so much about the internals of computers.
Thank you. A lot of Western developers a couple generations older than me have fond memories of the Commodore 64, and now I can see why. Thanks for letting me know. Have a nice day.
The 6510 CPU was easy to programme in assembler and it was supported by a graphics chip VIC and a sound chip SID who both had some fun tricks up their sleeves (not like a graphics card, much much more simple). For their time and the price they were quite capable and fun to use.
The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.
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.
> These games didn’t come with any instructions, so figuring out how to play them was often a bigger challenge than the game itself.
Ah yes, the "special compilations" on TDK D90s swapped in the playground ;-)
Wait, pirate game mixtapes? Awesome!
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