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?
> If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98.
Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.
It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:
10 PRINT "RetroTechie was here ";
20 GOTO 10
And the store's machine would show your name scrolling until the next kid came along. Color, sound, games & machine code were next.
For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).
I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.
Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...
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.
> 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.
Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?
Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.
I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).
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 :)
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.
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 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).
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 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 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.
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.
Fun nostalgic read (also Korean). I grew up an Atari kid, having spent many hours in arcades and eventually getting an Atari 400 included BASIC, and Asteroids cartridge. No storage not even cassette.
I had friends that had Ataris of course, but also some that had C64s and even a TI-99/4A. The thing in my circle was that the C64 and TI folk were more users and the Atari kids were more hackers, not that there were very many of each at the time. I learned BASIC, machine/assembly, and got into coding and engineering. (One of our pastimes was cracking games just to see how it was protected and see if we could. We'd show off any success amongst ourselves but never distributed as that wasn't the fun part.) I get the feeling that I probably worked for some C64 kids as adults that always seemed to have more of a product or business sense about them than the Atari kids.
1977; I was with my Mum visiting one of her friends. Bored out of my mind I poked around her living room and peeked underneath a cover, expecting to see a typewriter - it was a teletype terminal with the earcup telephone/modem receptacle, a stream of z-paper folds neatly piled up like some holy sacrament, with which my Mums friend was learning computing. She taught me a few commands, which I still remember and use today .. "ls" .. "cd" .. "cc" .. and she showed me a few lines of this 'new powerful language' she was learning, C. It was the first time I saw a printf(), and the precise moment I learned the real difference betweeen a \r and an \n and what it meant to the paper scroll, rolling underneath endlessly.
1978; I travelled with my Dad to a distant outback town to visit one of his clients. While I waited for them to conclude business, a big box arrived, and the client interrupted my Dad to unpack it, with great enthusiasm. We stood by while the styrofoam was spread around the office in a flurry of unpacking and cardboard ripping chaos. The client swept all the paper nonsense off a spare desk onto the floor and promptly plonked down a brand new Commodore Pet. He poked at it a few times, promptly disclaimed "I have no idea what to do with this thing, I just know I need it <chuckle chuckle>..." Dad and the client left me alone for an hour, and I spent my time typing every single weird character I could, learning how the shift and Commodore keys worked, eventually drawing a weird maze on the screen, which I recognized much later on in my youth as what could have been the beginnings of an RPG-like map.
1980; I was a bit delinquent at a local posh college, supposed to be applying myself to my homework; instead, I followed my fellow classmates with excitement, at the end of the school day, to the local "Computer Age" shop, which had just opened up in our local neighborhood (Claremont, Perth, Western Australia) .. and there, touched my first Apple II, and then Atari 800, computers. I spent so much time after school in that shop, learning BASIC on both systems, that the salesman eventually gave me my first 5.4" floppy disc, to save all the work on in between visits. I still have that floppy, buried in the depths of some book I also value highly. Somewhere.
1982; My regular jaunts around the shopping district of Subiaco took me to every single newsstand in the suburb, and then the Tandy store, and then to my mates place, who had just gotten himself a C64 - which, much to my dismay, couldn't read the code off my Apple II 5.4" floppy, nor would it allow me to just type it all in and RUN it without a hefty serving of pokes. Nevertheless, for a little while (before my mate started getting games in the mail from his British cousins), he and I would spend our weekends porting BASIC listings from the endless magazine piles we'd collected, to the C64 - my first serious cross-platform porting project, an activity and set of experiences which led to MUCH greater success a few years later in my career.
1983; my Dad had finally agreed to get me my first computer, but it was not without great conditions - I had to work at least 4 hours every weekend with him, carting rubbish and bricks and detritous around various building sites he had his hands on, and .. we had to drive to Melbourne (from Perth) to get it, since it would be an opportunity for some quality family time vacation, as well as providing a considerable discount, since my Dad knew the computer importer who was bringing the machines to Australia. And so it was, after a 4 day trip across the Nullabor Plain, I was loaded up with an Oric-1 and a couple of cassette tapes, which I promptly plugged into every single cheap television set I could find on the way back home. Somewhere out there on the Nullabor, was a hotel TV with "Ready" burned into its screen. That was me. That was the end of quality family time on the Nullabor plain too - nobody in my family ha...
Holy cow!! Tech has been like a coiling vine around the trunk of your life, and what a life it's been. The C64 was just one of your many computer branches. :)
I can relate much to the author's experience. I am also a Korean immigrant, with parents who owned a retail business, who grew up in the NYC area with a Commodore 64. I also majored in the liberal arts at an Ivy League school.
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. But my computer background got me hired into tech investment banking out of college, and has shaped every aspect of my life and career. just today I debugged a bash script that is part of the workflow for my one-person business.
Hello my Korean brother! Thanks so much for sharing your story, too. I started out as an engineer (materials science) then switched to English my sophomore year after realizing I couldn't imagine doing that for another three years.
But now look at us, we're like safecrackers in movies who try to go straight but end up in front of the vault again. :)
28 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 50.5 ms ] threadOuch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.
It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:
And the store's machine would show your name scrolling until the next kid came along. Color, sound, games & machine code were next.For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).
I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.
Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...
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.
Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?
Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.
I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).
So, thanks C64!
I still love you, though...
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!
Ah yes, the "special compilations" on TDK D90s swapped in the playground ;-)
I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
Major bummer. In 20 columns.
Loved the ads. Such memories.
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 had friends that had Ataris of course, but also some that had C64s and even a TI-99/4A. The thing in my circle was that the C64 and TI folk were more users and the Atari kids were more hackers, not that there were very many of each at the time. I learned BASIC, machine/assembly, and got into coding and engineering. (One of our pastimes was cracking games just to see how it was protected and see if we could. We'd show off any success amongst ourselves but never distributed as that wasn't the fun part.) I get the feeling that I probably worked for some C64 kids as adults that always seemed to have more of a product or business sense about them than the Atari kids.
1978; I travelled with my Dad to a distant outback town to visit one of his clients. While I waited for them to conclude business, a big box arrived, and the client interrupted my Dad to unpack it, with great enthusiasm. We stood by while the styrofoam was spread around the office in a flurry of unpacking and cardboard ripping chaos. The client swept all the paper nonsense off a spare desk onto the floor and promptly plonked down a brand new Commodore Pet. He poked at it a few times, promptly disclaimed "I have no idea what to do with this thing, I just know I need it <chuckle chuckle>..." Dad and the client left me alone for an hour, and I spent my time typing every single weird character I could, learning how the shift and Commodore keys worked, eventually drawing a weird maze on the screen, which I recognized much later on in my youth as what could have been the beginnings of an RPG-like map.
1980; I was a bit delinquent at a local posh college, supposed to be applying myself to my homework; instead, I followed my fellow classmates with excitement, at the end of the school day, to the local "Computer Age" shop, which had just opened up in our local neighborhood (Claremont, Perth, Western Australia) .. and there, touched my first Apple II, and then Atari 800, computers. I spent so much time after school in that shop, learning BASIC on both systems, that the salesman eventually gave me my first 5.4" floppy disc, to save all the work on in between visits. I still have that floppy, buried in the depths of some book I also value highly. Somewhere.
1982; My regular jaunts around the shopping district of Subiaco took me to every single newsstand in the suburb, and then the Tandy store, and then to my mates place, who had just gotten himself a C64 - which, much to my dismay, couldn't read the code off my Apple II 5.4" floppy, nor would it allow me to just type it all in and RUN it without a hefty serving of pokes. Nevertheless, for a little while (before my mate started getting games in the mail from his British cousins), he and I would spend our weekends porting BASIC listings from the endless magazine piles we'd collected, to the C64 - my first serious cross-platform porting project, an activity and set of experiences which led to MUCH greater success a few years later in my career.
1983; my Dad had finally agreed to get me my first computer, but it was not without great conditions - I had to work at least 4 hours every weekend with him, carting rubbish and bricks and detritous around various building sites he had his hands on, and .. we had to drive to Melbourne (from Perth) to get it, since it would be an opportunity for some quality family time vacation, as well as providing a considerable discount, since my Dad knew the computer importer who was bringing the machines to Australia. And so it was, after a 4 day trip across the Nullabor Plain, I was loaded up with an Oric-1 and a couple of cassette tapes, which I promptly plugged into every single cheap television set I could find on the way back home. Somewhere out there on the Nullabor, was a hotel TV with "Ready" burned into its screen. That was me. That was the end of quality family time on the Nullabor plain too - nobody in my family ha...
I consider it a blessing that I grew up with computers. We both came of age about the same time, even ..
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. But my computer background got me hired into tech investment banking out of college, and has shaped every aspect of my life and career. just today I debugged a bash script that is part of the workflow for my one-person business.
Thank you, Commodore.
But now look at us, we're like safecrackers in movies who try to go straight but end up in front of the vault again. :)