It looks a lot like a C64 breadbin, with an actual working keyboard, but inside there's an ARM and of course it outputs to HDMI and has USB ports for pendrives.
It's a good middle ground between "just an emulator on your laptop" and "a real C64 with all the inconveniences".
Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
Yeah the bug in the hardware for the disk drive was a bummer. It was supposed to be 4-5 times faster but due to the hardware bug it shipped with a slow workaround. Its kind of amazing that you allow it to ship like that.
A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so.
Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive...
We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.
That very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)
At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.
Who are you, and why are you writing my biography? Your journey was nearly identical to mine. I truly, sincerely feel like we went through a golden age, where amazing things were starting to become possible but you hard to work hard enough to get them that you couldn't help but learn something new along the way.
Yeah, if I were 10 now I'm not sure where I'd end up in terms of life/career, but it wouldn't look anything like my actual path, even adjusting for the obvious technological differences.
I'm fairly certain that computers to a 10 year old me in 2026 would be far less interesting than they were to actual 10 year old me in 1983. The mystery they had and seeking out the rare bits of written documentation at libraries, in tattered old used books, etc was like learning ancient, arcane magic knowledge and that was a lot of the allure.
Having instant access to most of the world's knowledge is objectively powerful, but just not nearly as fun.
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.
Not unusual in that era though, home computers were evolving ridiculously fast.
There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.
It's even a bit crazier than that: the Commodore Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, a bit less than three years after the C64, in july 1985.
A friend of mine, whose father was an art teacher, had an Amiga 1000 at home. Mind blown (I'm super lucky for later on another friend had an early SGI Indy at home for his stepfather was president of SGI Benelux). So I got to see and salivate on those mythic machines early on.
Of course I was stuck on the C64 until the Amiga 500, way more affordable, came out.
Still have my C128 and it was still working last time I cleaned it/tried it (when I was locked inside during Covid) and a few floppy disks were still reading fine (so I took a NOS --new old stock-- pack of 5"1/4 floppies and made a copy of Fast Hack'em and a copy of the Commando game): pure time capsule.
Fetched two C64s too: I know the PSU is tricky on the C64 and I don't know if those work or not. I've got floppy disk readers too.
But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
> But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
Feel that way every time I see a YT video on a "retro" computer I would have been able to play while having a beer legally (18 in the UK so 1998), it's then a shock to realise that was nearly 30 years ago.
> Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same.
So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
> And the games. So many games...
Still a gamer, there are three constants in my life, programming, reading and video games (roughly in that order).
> So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
That's the thing right? I love the missus (only met her at 38 y/o but it's been 15 years of love) and our daughter she's now 11 y/o. And it's perfect.
I just wish life would play in slow-mo. The same life, but in slow-mo.
It was an incredible time to live through as a young kid. There was a Cambrian explosion of computer designs - new systems coming out every month, each outdoing the previous ones. I remember rushing to the store each month to buy and devour the latest computer magazines. Felt like a time of endless possibilities. Only downside was I couldn't afford any of it except for a ZX81 (which was great in its own way).
And as a teen- going from making a MASH game using graphics characters on a trash-80 to color characters on a vic and getting my own PC for the first time, C64, and discovering sprites..
My grandfather worked for Sperry and we had circuit boards from Univacs in our basement when I was young. Then I bought an Atari 400 and B&W TV for the display when I was 11. Looking back it was pretty neat getting to see what came before, down in my basement. I don't think I ever had a tape drive for the Atari. I met some kids that had C64s (and modems) and that lured me over to the C64. The documentation for the C64 was so much better than anything I had for the Atari. I had BASIC for the Atari, but that was it. The C64 manual I had included assembly language programming, and the full schematics for the computer, so I was really able to learn everything about the system and explore all of it. It was so much fun.
What's crazy is that the much more advanced Amiga custom chips were manufactured at the same 5 micron feature size as the C64 chips. That's why the Amiga needed two custom chips for video (Agnus and Denise) instead of the one in C64 (VIC-II).
It was a good buy for folks who got in early to build software/games for it. Friend of family was building games in 1982/1983 and had some early clones of games out (pacman, centipede, frogger clones, etc) and... while there were a lot of early publishers, it was fairly cheap to do in the early days, and they made more than enough to justify the $595 price (multiple units, IIRC).
We ordered one of the first batch in Canada. $$$. They gave us a Vic20 loaner until it arrived. We didn't time it well but the family had a history of that. In fact, my accountant dad bought a Wang mainframe for a small fortune right before everyone was switching to ibm clone desktops.
It's one of the more popular retro-computers, but cheap to get into, there are a lot of them around: it's still always cheaper than its original sticker price! I think I paid more for the replacement power supply (the original ones haven't aged well, and have been known to fry them).
Anybody know what happened to the C64 serial number registry? Last I had checked it, which was a long while ago, I had the second oldest serial numbered machine on it (excluding prototypes). But I just went to look and the registry seems to be gone.
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).
Grew up in that era, I always wanted a C64 (I had a Spectrum and as much as we'd argue about the relative merits on the playground, deep down us Speccy users knew the C64 was better).
I still occasionally consider buying one but then I remember it'll just sit on a shelf collecting dust, better someone who actually uses it gets one.
You have to consider the backdrop/time as well - back then there was no BigTech(TM), there wasn't social media/the pervasive backdrop of everything you do with tech been monetised or commoditised.
Fundamentally you felt like when you bought a computer/OS/Software you were the customer not the product.
Your Commodore 64/BBC Micro didn't do everything it could to gather all your data for targeted advertising, there was no algorithm trying to keep you angry so you'd buy more copies of Crash magazine.
While there will be kids out there having a blast with AI, I suspect the whole experience is flavoured differently because of the world we built for those kids.
I’ve installed my AI on my local hardware (that I own!) and play around with it there. So there is less of the “I’m the product” feeling for me.
Of course, I’m not using fable or the latest top of the line AI but neither was that the case with the C64. After all, it wasn’t exactly a mainframe!
But certainly, today’s renter’s economy discourages tinkering with devices since these are either not owned or intended to be resold when newer devices come out, so shouldn’t be altered.
I get what you mean but I think it's fundamentally different.
The folks back then had more control over the (limited) capabilities of the hardware, and in order not to just blindly type code from a magazine (which we all did) you had to develop a good understanding.
The folks with AI today have much better capabilities with (for most, anyway) much lesser understanding of what's going on.
Both are magic, but one is tinkering with spells, the other is figuring out how to ask a (slightly drunk) wizard to cast spells for you.
I used a saying that describes how common it is for individiuals to attribute their experience as something completely different from all that came before or after. Sorry for referencing something that clearly has no bearing here at all. Carry on.
I understand the saying, I'm arguing it cannot be used as a blanket dismissal instead of actually addressing the point. My comment did elaborate a bit after the sentence you quoted.
It's as irritating as those comments like "they said the same about calculators"... well, maybe AI is not like calculators? Or sex, for that matter.
Hey now! The C64 might have been technically better with sprites, etc, but the Spectrum was way more quirky and British.
Something about the scrappy underdog making awesome games despite the attribute clash, and having the terrible keyboard really set the vibe. Plus the Z80 processor was way more interesting than the 6502, and really set the speccy-folks up for the move to intel in later years.
Back in the day I don't think many would have switched from the Spectrum to the Commodore.
I'll always love the speccy because if it hadn't have existed I wouldn't have had a computer til the early 90's, family couldn't/wouldn't have spent C64 money on what was effectively a toy for noir_lord.
So in that respect it holds a special place in that my entire life/career changed the day I plugged it in.
On the other hand, I'd absolutely have traded it for a C64 if offered that trade even back then.
I never had a Commododore , but I had several other computers starting from around 1979.
From that era , from arount 1975 forward there where often SEVERAL NEW different computers released each year.
That include SBC Single board computer that was sold as the board , often without a power eupply or case
and S100 systems
and DIY hobbyiest build systems
I still have most of books and magazines from that era, most of my computers , got lost, I still have a few.
The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.
I love the game, but it was truly impossible back then (pirated, no manual, no idea what I had to do) and even today, with an emulator and every hint on the internet ;)
I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have.
Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!
Ahh, the Commodore 64. I never had one. I had a TI-99/4A with a Forth cartridge, while my friends had VIC-20s and C64s. Such an odd and wonderful time to be into computers.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
I probably used that machine for 15 years. It became a nice, distraction-free word processor (WordStar!!), a great machine for running Sierra games, and I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, and eventually ran DR-DOS, I believe. I almost blew it up once while making an ISA board to connect to some sensors. Replace quite a few caps on that weekend.
My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
This thread prompted me to go and find out what my first computer was -- I have vague memories of it.
Turns out, it was a Sega SC-3000H, back before Sega decided it was a console company. Also, interestingly, it was really only popular in NZ/Aus (I grew up in NZ).
I have very clear memories of spending hours copying BASIC code of games, line-by-line from the monthly Sega magazine into the BASIC editor, playing it for 15 minutes, then everything dissapearing when I restarted it.
I was always envious of my friend who had a C64, but that Sega was a great little machine.
Yep, it was a "pre-MSX" like a couple of other machines like the Spectravideo SV-328... My first computer was a Casio PB100 (with the 1.5KB extension, so much memory! :D ), then the Sony HB75 (an MSX).
Similarly for me. My dad ought 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.
Some years latter we traveled to NY and bought an IBM PC XT with 20MB (yes, M), 640kb of RAM, a floppy and CGA monitor. At the time IBM had announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU and Compaq was already selling clones.
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.
> [...] 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.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
I 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.
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.
I still think that I'm young, but I currently reminisce about doing real work without an always-on internet connection (and using saved-to-disk HTML documentation, physical books, etc.), and I am looking forward to reminiscing about writing thousands of lines of code, debugging tricky issues, etcetera with my own fingers and brain instead of outsourcing to an LLM.
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.
Funny enough, I'm only in my early 30s and grew up with the Commodore 64. It was the basement computer that I could do whatever I wanted to, whereas the Windows computer (initially 3.1 and got upgraded all the way to 98) computer upstairs had to be shared and had more supervision. So I enjoyed writing a lot of code and trying things. I managed to have quite a collection of software and accessories just by asking around who still had stuff in the late 90s and early 00s in their basement for an 80s computer, and more did than you would expect.
That's amazing. I often thought that if I had kids, this is how I'd introduce computers to them. Give them a great C64 setup, the whole manual and when they can do something impressive, then they get a more powerful computer - an Amiga, lol.
Some of my fave C64 memories as a kid: listening to cassette tapes with stuff stored on them, punching in COMPUTE! Listings with MLX, discovering 6510 and learning the Merlin assembler, long runs in Moon Patrol, making sprites in Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, trying to understand how GEOS could possibly work, wearing out the spiral binding of the Programmer’s Reference Guide.
I credit the C64 for setting down the computing path - fondly recall hours spent using BASIC and making my own games. Managed to stick with it when my mates were all getting Amigas but then finally convinced my parents to fork out (some serious £ back then) on a PC...but it all started with the humble C64, fantastic machine.
Being behind Iron Curtain I sold (well, my parents, I was too young) my Atari 65 XE + tape reader (which I received as a gift in 1988) and got C64 (the original ovalish one) with 1541 in 1990, it was bundled together with a set of hundreds (pirated of course, that was the reality back then) of 5 1/4" discs with various software and games. It was like receiving internet in a package.
Entering incantations like: "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part).
Or playing with assembly with LDA, STA (or same for X and Y) was fun.
> "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part).
Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address).
Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot.
But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
Oh sure, but that was a hack. The rest of the market (even in 1982) had already moved on, c.f. the ROM on the 1978 Disk II card that could load and run a boot sector automatically. Having an "operator" was a design paradigm, and my point was that it was already antiquated even then.
I may be alone in this but I really grew to despise the C64. It represented frustration and failure to me. The basic was so limited, it did not provide access to the otherwise excellent video and sound hardware. Information pre internet was hard to come by, and I never discovered the assembler pathway. I wanted to do cool stuff with it but a kid in rural US had zero access to resources.
Oh damn that BASIC :) I remember as a kid going to the library and devouring all the microcomputer books and trying to enter their BASIC programs, only to find the C64 severely lacking. Everyone else's BASIC was better!
I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did.
I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid.
It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid.
I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.
I despised the limitations of the included BASIC but loved my C64. I also had a pirated Pascal and learned a bit with it (not much). It wasn't a good platform for programming, but it still made me fall in love with computers.
Getting my first PC XT clone with GW BASIC felt liberating, suddenly I could write graphical games with ease! But to this day I still love my C64, wherever it is now.
My dad bought our first C64 from a co-worker and it came with hundreds of disks, mostly pirated and other "scene" stuff.
I don't know if I'll ever get around to "ripping" those disks to sort through and possibly find anything worthy of sending to the Internet Archive. And this is also assuming they still have anything readable on them.
I agree completely, it was a tragedy that Commodore shipped with that one.
Even though I still have lots of original home / computer hardware including multiple versions of the C64 (working or still to be fixed..) I just ordered the Cyberpunk 2077 ornate "Commodore 77" so as to be able to play with it and potentially port over and adapt BBC basic adjacent basic like MMbasic (or make my own focused attempt at it).
It's a semi open FPGA platform and latest one here is still not MiSTer grade on many fronts but should give enough freedom at least to have my own bespoke ROM replacement come up on init.
The goal would exactly be that of eventually getting rid of the builtin basic for recreational biking of the mind with our young padawan...
I also own a MiSTer and the community's well done BBC core already largely gets us to where I want us to be but the platform chiefly lacks the SID as well as the nature of a dedicated device.
Booting into "C64 BBC basic" is a must; I hope to book some time for this project next year at the very latest.
The User's Guide had a single bitmap mode example, but POKEs needed for hardware sprites and sound were adequately covered. Joystick polling in BASIC is a fool's errand however.
I recall joystick PEEKs being fine as long as you used port 2. Port 1 was muxed with the keyboard port and would type characters (2's and left arrows from what I remember).
I was in nearly the same boat, not quite rural, but close enough that I was one of a couple of "computer kids" in the whole school. I got my hands on the "Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide"[0] and it was literally life-changing. It simultaneously demystified computers for me ("oh, this is how it knows where to draw my sprite, and here's how to go from a hand-drawn picture to a pixel grid to a list of hex values") and made them more magical ("I can create an entire universe with my brain and hands").
Yeah, the BASIC sucked. I'm glad it sucked just enough to make me want to learn more on my own.
My C64 came with a Super Snapshot. It had a button on the cartridge that would freeze the running program and provide options like editing the memory, modify machine code, persist current state to disk, etc.
I would type programs in BASIC and then examine the machine code that it got compiled to. I learned a lot more than I would have without the cartridge.
Young me is envious. I downloaded or typed in, I forget which, some monitor program[0] that I used a lot, but loading it was far more manual than what you described and was basically impossible to load while another machine code (i.e. non-BASIC) program was running.
I still learned so much from typing short programs into it. I talked my parents into buying me an assembler so that I could make changes without re-typing a whole program.
I started with the VIC-20, and I'm now 62. After years of resisting the draw to turn my hobby into a career, I started working as a software developer almost 30 years ago. I feared that I might lose the joy, but (for the most part) it's still there.
Back when writing 500 lines of code by simply typing it line by line from the "handover" booklet the C64 shipped with. Then running it and it magically made a frog-game appear where you hit "space" and the tongue of the frog needs to catch a fly. Then forgot to save on the 5,25'' disk and everything was gone. Good times :)
I got my C64 (actually C64C) when I was 7, switched to a PC five years later just as I mastered BASIC and was starting to learn assembly.
To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.
Ah, that was the first one I owned. The little 1520 4 color pen plotter you could get was incredible. Printed on receipt paper. It was also eventually my bridge to the BBS world via the 300 baud vicmodem.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 32.0 ms ] threadThen as now it’s memory that matters.
https://retrogames.biz/products/thec64/
It looks a lot like a C64 breadbin, with an actual working keyboard, but inside there's an ARM and of course it outputs to HDMI and has USB ports for pendrives.
It's a good middle ground between "just an emulator on your laptop" and "a real C64 with all the inconveniences".
Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.
Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).
Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.
Long, strange trip.
A friend's father had an incredible stereo-stack, full Nakamishi stuff. We tried hard to copy C64 tapes of commercial games using his stereo gear but got nowhere: I was maybe 12 years old or so.
Eventually noticed (through a window) the neighbors also had a C64, but with a floppy disk drive: so my mom pushed us to dare go ring the bell next door and present ourselves and ask for help. They showed next day at our place with... Their 1541 floppy disk drive and 200 floppies. They explained my mom it'd be much easier if she were to buy me a floppy disk drive...
We're still friends to this day and exchange Telegram messages on a near daily basis.
At 15 in 1980, I couldn't afford a computer - but I could afford the books and manuals. So like Ada Lovelace before me, I did all my programming in my head.
I'm fairly certain that computers to a 10 year old me in 2026 would be far less interesting than they were to actual 10 year old me in 1983. The mystery they had and seeking out the rare bits of written documentation at libraries, in tattered old used books, etc was like learning ancient, arcane magic knowledge and that was a lot of the allure.
Having instant access to most of the world's knowledge is objectively powerful, but just not nearly as fun.
Plenty of computer magazines from that era on archive.org. Try Byte or Compute!.
There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.
A friend of mine, whose father was an art teacher, had an Amiga 1000 at home. Mind blown (I'm super lucky for later on another friend had an early SGI Indy at home for his stepfather was president of SGI Benelux). So I got to see and salivate on those mythic machines early on.
Of course I was stuck on the C64 until the Amiga 500, way more affordable, came out.
Still have my C128 and it was still working last time I cleaned it/tried it (when I was locked inside during Covid) and a few floppy disks were still reading fine (so I took a NOS --new old stock-- pack of 5"1/4 floppies and made a copy of Fast Hack'em and a copy of the Commando game): pure time capsule.
Fetched two C64s too: I know the PSU is tricky on the C64 and I don't know if those work or not. I've got floppy disk readers too.
But reading that headline is bittersweet: I was nine in 1982, I'm now 53. Where have all those years gone? Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same but... It's still bittersweet to think about my mates and I learning to code on those 8-bit machines. And the games. So many games...
Yep. 10 here. A lot of the same feelings.
Feel that way every time I see a YT video on a "retro" computer I would have been able to play while having a beer legally (18 in the UK so 1998), it's then a shock to realise that was nearly 30 years ago.
> Don't get me wrong, I had a great life (so far) and I'd replay it just the same.
So would I and I didn't have a great life but if I alter the past I don't meet my missus/have my family so as much as it did suck, I'm happy now and don't want to change anything.
> And the games. So many games...
Still a gamer, there are three constants in my life, programming, reading and video games (roughly in that order).
That's the thing right? I love the missus (only met her at 38 y/o but it's been 15 years of love) and our daughter she's now 11 y/o. And it's perfect.
I just wish life would play in slow-mo. The same life, but in slow-mo.
DOOM on C64 with variable height floor/ceilings
https://kweepa.itch.io/doom64
And my favorite, Quake on C64
https://kweepa.itch.io/quake64
I can't remember how you switched to 64 mode anymore though. i remember switching to CP/M mode and being utterly lost.
It's firmly lodged in my fingers still.
I still occasionally consider buying one but then I remember it'll just sit on a shelf collecting dust, better someone who actually uses it gets one.
The magic in the air in those days will never be replicated.
You say it “magic”, it wasn’t “better” or “different” or “worse”, it was a kind of magic that happens when tech is new and folks experiment.
I’m sure many will look back in 40 years and say the same about AI - we’re living through the magical age of AI.
Just as we did when we got our C64’s back in the day ;)
You have to consider the backdrop/time as well - back then there was no BigTech(TM), there wasn't social media/the pervasive backdrop of everything you do with tech been monetised or commoditised.
Fundamentally you felt like when you bought a computer/OS/Software you were the customer not the product.
Your Commodore 64/BBC Micro didn't do everything it could to gather all your data for targeted advertising, there was no algorithm trying to keep you angry so you'd buy more copies of Crash magazine.
While there will be kids out there having a blast with AI, I suspect the whole experience is flavoured differently because of the world we built for those kids.
Of course, I’m not using fable or the latest top of the line AI but neither was that the case with the C64. After all, it wasn’t exactly a mainframe!
But certainly, today’s renter’s economy discourages tinkering with devices since these are either not owned or intended to be resold when newer devices come out, so shouldn’t be altered.
The folks back then had more control over the (limited) capabilities of the hardware, and in order not to just blindly type code from a magazine (which we all did) you had to develop a good understanding.
The folks with AI today have much better capabilities with (for most, anyway) much lesser understanding of what's going on.
Both are magic, but one is tinkering with spells, the other is figuring out how to ask a (slightly drunk) wizard to cast spells for you.
Well, every generation thinks they invented sex, right? Who knows what wild things they may learn to invent? Maybe even Skynet!
It's as irritating as those comments like "they said the same about calculators"... well, maybe AI is not like calculators? Or sex, for that matter.
Something about the scrappy underdog making awesome games despite the attribute clash, and having the terrible keyboard really set the vibe. Plus the Z80 processor was way more interesting than the 6502, and really set the speccy-folks up for the move to intel in later years.
Back in the day I don't think many would have switched from the Spectrum to the Commodore.
So in that respect it holds a special place in that my entire life/career changed the day I plugged it in.
On the other hand, I'd absolutely have traded it for a C64 if offered that trade even back then.
Ah, who am I kidding? Of course c64 was better…
The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.
I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have.
Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!
... however (say what you will but chuckie egg wasnt on the commodore)
It was originally written for the ZX Spectrum, but there was a C64 port too.
I managed to put together a decent Space Invaders clone in Forth that beat their Commodore BASIC version. I considered this an important victory and still have bragging rights when I see one of them.
Eventually my parents realized that, despite the disk drives and accessories we'd accumulated, the TI probably wasn't the horse to keep betting on. One trip to Radio Shack later, I had a decked-out original Tandy 1000.
I kept both machines until my last move, when a neighbor's kid spotted them and wanted to play with them.
That seemed right. Time to put them back in young hands and let someone else figure out what the hell they could make them do.
My other machine(s) went from Windows 3.11 -> Windows 95 -> Linux, but that Tandy 1000 had a near-permanent spot for quite a while.
Turns out, it was a Sega SC-3000H, back before Sega decided it was a console company. Also, interestingly, it was really only popular in NZ/Aus (I grew up in NZ).
I have very clear memories of spending hours copying BASIC code of games, line-by-line from the monthly Sega magazine into the BASIC editor, playing it for 15 minutes, then everything dissapearing when I restarted it.
I was always envious of my friend who had a C64, but that Sega was a great little machine.
Some years latter we traveled to NY and bought an IBM PC XT with 20MB (yes, M), 640kb of RAM, a floppy and CGA monitor. At the time IBM had announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU and Compaq was already selling clones.
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) - that instantly takes me back more than 30 years.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
ZX Spectrum in 1982 cost $200 ($692 today) for 16 KB model and had a 48K model for 40% more.
It was the difference between affordable and unaffordable for many people.
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!
Arab countries & Europe's Eastern block each have their own computing histories that's very different from the usual US-centric tale.
You fool! That was to encourage latent hackers to emerge into the world.
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.
Did you ever get into the "demo scene"?
Entering incantations like: "LOAD .... 8,1" (I don't remember the middle part). Or playing with assembly with LDA, STA (or same for X and Y) was fun.
Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address).
Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot.
But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
I wanted to get into assembler as a kid, I'd read about assembly in computer magazines and wanted an assembler cartridge one year for Christmas, but that was a hard thing to find back in the day, so I kinda never did.
I did get the Simon's BASIC cartridge though -- that added a heap of stuff! I remember writing some massive (for me at least, being a kid) programs at the time -- games that I would spend weeks on but never finish; I fondly remember the 'big' projects I had as a kid.
It's funny this is at the top of HN right now. Since going nearly full agentic at work, I'm actually finding I've got the urge brewing in the back of my mind to go right back to the beginning and do hobby programming on a small system again, now that I'm not using up all my 'writing code' energy in my day job anymore. I'd love to go back and re-take my path and pick up on all the little things I never understood as a kid.
I've got the C64 Ultimate.... don't know if I see myself typing on that keyboard layout though.
Getting my first PC XT clone with GW BASIC felt liberating, suddenly I could write graphical games with ease! But to this day I still love my C64, wherever it is now.
I don't know if I'll ever get around to "ripping" those disks to sort through and possibly find anything worthy of sending to the Internet Archive. And this is also assuming they still have anything readable on them.
Even though I still have lots of original home / computer hardware including multiple versions of the C64 (working or still to be fixed..) I just ordered the Cyberpunk 2077 ornate "Commodore 77" so as to be able to play with it and potentially port over and adapt BBC basic adjacent basic like MMbasic (or make my own focused attempt at it).
It's a semi open FPGA platform and latest one here is still not MiSTer grade on many fronts but should give enough freedom at least to have my own bespoke ROM replacement come up on init.
The goal would exactly be that of eventually getting rid of the builtin basic for recreational biking of the mind with our young padawan...
I also own a MiSTer and the community's well done BBC core already largely gets us to where I want us to be but the platform chiefly lacks the SID as well as the nature of a dedicated device.
Booting into "C64 BBC basic" is a must; I hope to book some time for this project next year at the very latest.
https://commodore.net/store/commodore64/?shape=Breadbin&colo...
https://mmbasic.com/overview.html
Yeah, the BASIC sucked. I'm glad it sucked just enough to make me want to learn more on my own.
[0] https://archive.org/details/c64-programmer-ref
My C64 came with a Super Snapshot. It had a button on the cartridge that would freeze the running program and provide options like editing the memory, modify machine code, persist current state to disk, etc.
I would type programs in BASIC and then examine the machine code that it got compiled to. I learned a lot more than I would have without the cartridge.
I still learned so much from typing short programs into it. I talked my parents into buying me an assembler so that I could make changes without re-typing a whole program.
[0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor
To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.
Happy birthday, C64!