My parents were too cheap for the C64 and I got the VIC20 instead.
Major bummer. In 20 columns.
I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
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Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#42I 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 p…
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! :)
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#43My 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!
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#44My 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.
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? Bec…
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.)
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#46I 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 p…
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...
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#47There 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 a…
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.
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#48I 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?
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#49I 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 ar…
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.
Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
#50My 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...