When it released, it cost $595 (back then, not in today's money), considering the price dropped to just $229 the following year, that was not a good buy when it came out.
But if you pre-ordered, you got a tape drive, which was, like, a $75 value!
Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
101–110 of 186 posts
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#102I 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.
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!
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#103I owe my entire identity to this little machine. First laid my eyes on it in 1983, then unexpectedly got it from my uncle in 1984. It immediately opened my eyes to this new world of computer technology and sucked me right in.
Between games and writing first code in Basic, something magical was happening. Over the years it defined how I think, and ultimately who I am. Thank you C64 and thanks to everyone who worked on it
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*Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
a modem hand cut from copper clad, plugged into the user port, and hooked up to pirate radio, that connected to another country. Whenever I see people on HN talking about the insane levels of abstraction and indirection the tech industry has built for itself, I remember the crazy things we used to do with little more than bare wires and curiosity. People on HN complain that they can't get work done because their 48-i…
Dade Murphy, is that you?
Did you and Angelina Jolie really get it on?
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#105The C64 was a tremendously hackable machine—you had so much control. And, IIRC, the clock was something like 900Khz but that still allowed (with the help of VIC and SID) all kinds of incredible effects in assembly. I'm grateful my parents bought us one.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#106I had a C16 as my first computer followed by a C128. But for the latter the majority of time was spent in C64 mode. So I basically had a C64 in a nicer casing. Lovely times
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly for me. My dad bought a fully expanded TI-99/4A from a friend who was selling it to buy a C64. On the TI, I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played Parsec, BurgerTime, and others. Cartridges were super expensive in my home country. A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had alre…
My first PC was an XT Clone I suspect around the same time, One of these https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/15452/Olivetti-PC1-P... I adored that thing (coming from a ZX Speccy it felt like a proper computer), I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe77esw9-nU (PC1 booting into a game)…
One can build a really close approximation with 86box; in fact, you can build an original 5150.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#108I 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.
>there was no hacking around allowed
You fool! That was to encourage latent hackers to emerge into the world.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#109Greetings, fellow old people.
> 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.
Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
POKE 1,0 would mess up the bank switching of addresses above $A000 and switch on the Datasette motor. Probably not what you wanted. I guess you meant POKE 646,1 (white text on black screen).
I memory serves me the sequence turns the screen black and POKE 1,0 hangs it. At least that is what I intended, maybe it was POKE 0,1?
Ah, yeah, POKE 1,0 might plausibly have caused a hang. Sorry!