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Commodore 64 Turning 25

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After twenty five years, the Commodore 64 is still loved by many. You know, it seems like just yesterday that they were all the rage, doesn’t it? Hard to believe it has been a quarter of a century. Thanks to everyone that sent this one in.

On Monday, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, will celebrate the C64's 25th anniversary. Computer pioneers will reflect on the C64's achievements and contribution to the industry. Jack Tramiel, the founder and CEO of Commodore, will attend, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and William C. Lowe, father of the IBM PC.
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The C64 is so awesome :D I still remember the day my dad bought one back in 1984 when I was 7 years old. Had a ton of fun with that one.
 
I was rather young when we had one. I read the article earlier today and ended up calling my dad to find out what computer it was that we had when I was about 4 or 5. He told me it was the Commodore 128.... now I am looking into buying one.

If anyone knows a good place to buy a Commodore 128, or 64 I guess, please let me know. I really want one for sentimental reasons. :D
 
Dam, this makes me feel old.... i remember having a vic 20 when i was 12. Tape drive and such, then moved to the C64. Good times!
 
I still have two original Commodore 64s, 1 1541 floppy, 1 Enhancer 2000 floppy and the 256KB memory expansion. I can't find my FastLoad Cartridge. :( At least my GEOS floppies still work over 20 years later. :cool:

I even made my own AV cables because the RF modulator output was awful. I miss the simple old days.
 
My favorite games were Telengard and Beachhead. Had to use the cassette tape drive to load them too. Took about 30-45 minutes from what I remember.

If I remember correctly, there was some kind of exploit for Beachhead that allowed me to get more points by starting out in hard and then quitting and then playing on easy setting.

Another exploit on Telenguard was to go down to level 50 and put the dragon to sleep with a level 2 spell and you would jump a couple of levels in rank.

I tried this with a vampire and it never worked: "The Vampire listens with deaf ears..."

Fun times. My dad has all this stuff in storage. He's a pack rat....
 
Its been so long since ive fired up my Ole commie 64 , Im almost ready to do so right now! my rig consisted of the c64 , with 1541 drive , 1581 drive , and a 175 meg harddrive with fastload cartrige .. man was the fastload card sweet! . I used to run a bbs called Final Genocide for the the group "Chromance" yes im formaly of Chromance. "Deviant/chromance"
OH yes did I mention when I fisrt got my c64 it came with a 300 baud Mastermodem was that thing sweet at the time. That thing wasnt cheap man , probably paid like 300 bucks for that thing.. Maybe I should be like thanking my parents cause they bought it all ..and man that 1541 HD was like 300 or 500 bucks at that time .. certainly wasnt a cheap system. Thank you mom and dad!! Or should I be thanking them? My pirate days started with the C64 should I say more ! I need not..

thanks..

D3viant/chromance.
 
pxc said:
I still have two original Commodore 64s, 1 1541 floppy, 1 Enhancer 2000 floppy and the 256KB memory expansion. I can't find my FastLoad Cartridge. :( At least my GEOS floppies still work over 20 years later. :cool:

I even made my own AV cables because the RF modulator output was awful. I miss the simple old days.
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My commie 64 is dead,but we still have it.My grandmother bought it for me,and the extras.Never had a HD though.God I feel old reading this stuff. :eek:

Big 40 is almost upon me. :p
 
im turning 35 this week, my parents bought me a c128 for my 8th grade graduation and i was like this sucks what a lame gift i dont want this.. what a whiny bitch.. turns out it was the best fucking gift ever, i loved it.. and started my life of geekdom.. :p
 
Hi,

hail the C64. I got one for my Birthday in 84. I was 7 at the time. The C64 was the big thing at the time in the hood. The original internet was sneaker net for us. We would shareware before it was probably known as shareware. Never had the modem but a friend did. I think he was able to work it once or twice but never got anywhere with it. It was pretty expensive for the call to view BBSs .

Let's see. I had the standard Monitor, 5.25 disk drive and ink pen printer at first. We got a dot matrix printer shortly after. There were always an abundance of games to be played. I liked Airborne Ranger and F15 myself.

The monitor is still in action in the my dad's garage. He watches TV on it. The C64 is upstairs in the attic. A few years ago, my dad bought another one for about 20 bucks. Came with more games, 2 C64s, another monitor, and 3 DDs. Not bad for a garage sale :)

I have not played with a C64 in ages. The last time i fired out up it was in 2002. With this article, I might have to drive over to my parents to get the old dog out and play in honor of the 25 year celebration.

Load "*",8,1
shaggy
 
aah the old days, the computer that started it all

I remember my very first basic "program"
10 print "*hello*";
20 goto 10

My favorite games were commando (which once I played for 2 days without loosing a life and not using a single grenade) and beach head 2.

I still have 3 or 4 in my mother's basement, last time I tried them they worked. Unfortunately all my discs are ruined because of humidity.

Too bad it was the last successful computer that commodore ever made.
 
The C64 was my introduction to computers.If I remember right,it came along after the big video game collapse,and it really filled the void for gamers after the fall of Atari and other early consoles before Nintendo appeared on the scene.
 
I remember playing Zork on the c64, along with blue max, and about 50 other games. I used to subscribe to family computing in the 80's, just so I could see the cheesy basic code issued in every mag. It was like a text based game just loading the game.

Load "*" ,8,1

Run

You are in a dimly lit commodore with 64's all around you...

You can still look up a bunch of stuff on lemon 64.
 
I remember my first C64 (of several over the years), and countless hours of dabbling with anything and everything I could possibly get my grubby little teenage hands on at the time in the early 80s.

One thing I love telling folks was that, using the original Commodore 300 baud modem and a special piece of software <hint, hint>, myself and a very small group of others were actually overclocking the modems to operate at 450 baud. Seriously.

I was the first person in the US to connect to CompuServe years past at 450 baud - and their modems actually let me connect at that speed AND it worked flawlessly. Those were the days when VIDTEX ruled for connecting, when TurboTape (from Compute's Gazette magazine) actually allowed the normally slow as molasses tape drive to actually outperform the vaunted 1541 by leaps and bounds, when staying up all night long was just the beginning of my now decades old natural insomniac nature, and a whole host of other things.

It truly was a great time for computers.

It's early, but Happy Birthday C64... may future generations embrace the past as much as those that actually lived it and made the future happen.

And yeah, Amiga ftw! Best personal computer ever made, even today... there will never ever be anything else like it. :D
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Huh, I guess the Amiga's dont count then huh ?
Click to expand...

No the Amiga doesn't count, yes it was an amazing computer and well ahead of its time, I had an Amiga 1000, 2000 and a 4000 and love them. But it was no where near the C-64 in terms of success.
 
LOAD "*" ,8,1
ftw!!!



I remember playing test drive 2, the original sid myers pirates game, f-15 strike eagle, and many other games back in the day...wow. that makes me feel much older now...
 
C64, gah... what a POS... Sure once you loaded an app it ran great, and some great games came out for it. But they should take the idiot that wrote the floppy drive OS out back and perform a mercy killing.
Everytime it needed to go to the disk for anything, whirr, chunk, grind, whirr for minutes, and what do you get more often than not, a disk error to try again... Remembering how long it took to load that tiny and silly, but incredibly fun MULE, just makes me shudder.

Apple's and even the archaic 8" floppies from any other company beat it hands down.
 
CyclopsSlayer said:
C64, gah... what a POS... Sure once you loaded an app it ran great, and some great games came out for it. But they should take the idiot that wrote the floppy drive OS out back and perform a mercy killing.
Click to expand...
:D

The 1541 floppy transfer rate was was a few hundred bytes per second. I had one and an Enhancer 2000 drive that bragged about being 50% faster. The FastLoad-type cartridges and programs raised that to a couple of KB/s, which was really bearable since the programs were so small.

Remember the tape days? The screen would blank out while it read? LOL

How about that program called Drive Music? It moved the floppy head to make different frequencies and it sounded like music playing back. The grinding sound could be put to better use. :p

Back in the day (when I was in high school) I used to submit programs and articles to the Commodore magazines. I had one published, but the payment was pretty cheesy. And who remembers Commodares from Ahoy! magazine? That was my favorite one before they stopped publishing. :(
 
Stoly said:
No the Amiga doesn't count, yes it was an amazing computer and well ahead of its time, I had an Amiga 1000, 2000 and a 4000 and love them. But it was no where near the C-64 in terms of success.
Click to expand...


I have had a c64 and a few amigas and I can tell you that the amigas were more successful, you may think that the c64 was, thats your perogative but the amigas was the best computer to come out of commdore, end of.

Only geeky fuks who thought by having a c64 back in the early 80's made them a hacker think they were that successful.

In my opinion, yes they were good but waiting 30 minutes for a game to load since i never had a 5-1/4 drive was a nightmare and so was a game failing to load right at the very end of the loading sequence due to the tape or tapedeck.

The amiga's couldnt of came quick enough if you ask me, and yes amigas do count, both are made by commodore and in my opinion amigas were more successful to the extent that they are still used today in some degree, and I dont mean for game playing, and when the amigas were released is when the home gaming explosion really took off and look where we are now due to home game developers making games in their bedrooms and starting game companies back then, all that thanks to the amigas.

We have alot to thank the Amiga's to thank for, much more than the c64's.

Thats my opinion anyway.
 
Let me just add that the atari ST's also played as vital a role as the amigas did, so it would be unfair to leave them out, but i cannot edit my original post, so a double post will have to suffice.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
I have had a c64 and a few amigas and I can tell you that the amigas were more successful, you may think that the c64 was, thats your perogative but the amigas was the best computer to come out of commdore, end of.
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Commodore purchased Amiga when it was nearly finished. It was not designed by Commodore at all. Ars Technica has an interesting series on the history of the Amiga. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amiga-history-4-commodore-years.ars Part 5 should explore the quick decline.

You can reframe success any way you want to, but if you had bothered to click the news link in the first post you could see what the topic of this thread was about.
From 1982-1993, 17 million C64s were sold. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the Commodore 64 as the best-selling single computer model.

The computer featured 64 kilobytes of memory (a lot for 1982), a huge index of games, a sophisticated sound chip, and a relatively parent-friendly price -- $595.
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I bought my C64 in late 1984 for $80 at a Best parking lot sale to replace my lame C16 (stripped down version of the Commodore Plus-4). :cool:

Amiga's problem IMO is that the Mac had started to mature and Commodore's terrible management could not take advantage of that to cast Amiga as superior (which it was) and sell the things. Other than games and low cost video processing niches, the Amiga never really found widespread success like the C64 did.

Maybe you weren't into computers in the early 1980s, but the Commodore 64, Atari 400/800 and Apple II series were the popular home computers. So don't dismiss them. Of course Amiga was the most advanced computer Commodore sold, since it was also the last one they sold in the company's original form (the new Commodore and Amiga companies are not the same). I still have an Amiga 500, but the C64/C16 is where I cut my programming teeth like many others from the same generation.
 
I am not saying that the C64 was a piece of shit, I went from spectrum 48k with rubber keys, to a spectrum 128k+ to vic 20 then to the 64, I enjoyed my time with the c64 but I didnt enjoy my time with it was much as I did with the amigas I owned.

Infact to be honest I fucking hated the c64 because it was a pain in the ass to get games to run on the tape deck, the first tape deck I had was faulty and chewed up alot of games, no big deal, but waiting 30-60 minutes for a game to load wasnt my thing especially for it to fuk up at the very end and you ended up waiting 45mins to 1 hour for a game that wasnt going to play.

I fuked around with basic on it and did things that were printed on magazines but I never truly got into liking the c64 as much as I did my amigas, ok the amigas were more powerful and games were better but on my c64 it was problem after problem and in one case I brought it back to Tandy ( the place I purchased it from ) to get looked at and they kept it for a month or 2 and when i kept enquiring about when I was getting it back they replied, its lost in germany, the company that they sent it to get fixed had misplaced it or something or another, so I got it back about 2-3 months later, so maybe that is one of the reason I didnt think much of the c64, the fact of the tandy fiasco and the fact that because it was forever fucking me about.

The vic 20 performed better to me than the c64, maybe cuz I got a fluff one but I was only 13 or so and didnt know that much about computers at the time except from what I had learnt previously from my laughable spectrums and my vic20, all in all I got more gratification and use from my amigas than I ever did from my c64 and had years of great use from my amigas, regardless of who actually designed the thing, it was sold under the commodre brand thus it was commodore's
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
I have had a c64 and a few amigas and I can tell you that the amigas were more successful, you may think that the c64 was, thats your perogative but the amigas was the best computer to come out of commdore, end of.

Only geeky fuks who thought by having a c64 back in the early 80's made them a hacker think they were that successful.

In my opinion, yes they were good but waiting 30 minutes for a game to load since i never had a 5-1/4 drive was a nightmare and so was a game failing to load right at the very end of the loading sequence due to the tape or tapedeck.

The amiga's couldnt of came quick enough if you ask me, and yes amigas do count, both are made by commodore and in my opinion amigas were more successful to the extent that they are still used today in some degree, and I dont mean for game playing, and when the amigas were released is when the home gaming explosion really took off and look where we are now due to home game developers making games in their bedrooms and starting game companies back then, all that thanks to the amigas.



Thats my opinion anyway.
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I agree the Amiga was best thing that came out from commodore, but unfortunately that doesn't make it a success. At least not compared to the C-64

Do you have any idea how many C-64 were sold world wide even after 93? how many amigas were sold during its lifetime?

The C-64 outsold apple for years, did the Amiga outsold the mac?

Now, who was more successful?
 
The C64 made it acceptable to love Commies. ;)

I loved that machine...Best game library around, graphics, speech/audio, you could use a color TV with it, and it didn't cost an arm and a leg to own.

How many of us spent hours playing classics like Blue Max, Impossible Mission, Archon, Toy Bizarre, and the list goes on (it seems like forever). Which reminds me, I really need to reinstall that emulator....
 
I have been meaning to scan this old photo of my C64 setup for a while now. This topic gave me the extra incentive to do it.

c64-128002.jpg


Commodore c64
Commodore c128
Commodore 1541 drive
Commodore 1802 monitor
Commodore SFD1001 drive (running a BBS on the C64)
Commodore MPS-801 Printer
IEEE Controler for the SFD1001
Wico Bat
Wico 3 way
19 inch TV
RC Cola
Cheesy 1970's drapes
Cheesy poster
Unmade bed

=

Good times
 
pxc said:
:D
Remember the tape days? The screen would blank out while it read? LOL
Click to expand...

LOL yeah... I think I have been around too long.

Comps I have owned:

IMSAI 8080 > ProcessorTechnology SOL > Apple II > C64 > Apple IIe > Apple IIc+ > Mac+ > Mac IIc > Mac G5 > PC in one flavor or another (333MHz to current 2.4GHz DualCore)

First 3 had Tape drives, Mac+ was the first with a Harddrive (20Meg, how was I ever going to fill all that space up...)

IMSAI, 360$ for a 16K memory expansion back in 1977... 16K, /shudder
 
d3viant said:
Its been so long since ive fired up my Ole commie 64 , Im almost ready to do so right now! my rig consisted of the c64 , with 1541 drive , 1581 drive , and a 175 meg harddrive with fastload cartrige .. man was the fastload card sweet! . I used to run a bbs called Final Genocide for the the group "Chromance" yes im formaly of Chromance. "Deviant/chromance"
OH yes did I mention when I fisrt got my c64 it came with a 300 baud Mastermodem was that thing sweet at the time. That thing wasnt cheap man , probably paid like 300 bucks for that thing.. Maybe I should be like thanking my parents cause they bought it all ..and man that 1541 HD was like 300 or 500 bucks at that time .. certainly wasnt a cheap system. Thank you mom and dad!! Or should I be thanking them? My pirate days started with the C64 should I say more ! I need not..

thanks..

D3viant/chromance.
Click to expand...


Look who I ran into..... PM me when you get this.
 
CyclopsSlayer said:
LOL yeah... I think I have been around too long.

Comps I have owned:

IMSAI 8080 > ProcessorTechnology SOL > Apple II > C64 > Apple IIe > Apple IIc+ > Mac+ > Mac IIc > Mac G5 > PC in one flavor or another (333MHz to current 2.4GHz DualCore)

First 3 had Tape drives, Mac+ was the first with a Harddrive (20Meg, how was I ever going to fill all that space up...)

IMSAI, 360$ for a 16K memory expansion back in 1977... 16K, /shudder
Click to expand...


I can sympathize! I still have my 27yr old Samsung 555. :D
 
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