Commodore 64 C64

I remember seeing the Amiga bouncing ball demo and being amazed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A The Amiga was the second computer that I ever owned. The first was a C64 that I bought freshman year. (My father bought a TRS-80 before that.)

Sometimes I feel privileged for being in the generation that learnt to program BASIC on a C64 and it was the coolest thing around at the time. Being that much closer to the metal is a whole different experience of learning what a computer is and can do. Is that even possible now? Probably not. Years ago I tried to get my kids interested in playing with their own Raspberry Pi when they came out that they could do whatever they wanted with on the side to little effect. Not even the idea of setting it one up as their own Minecraft server (they were heavily into it at the time) piqued their interest. Oh well.

I love the Commodore 64. I still have a working "portable" C64 that I turn on from time to time and play around with. So what’s remarkable isn’t that a 1541 can run BASIC or process data internally, but that constraints and packaging decisions (cost-cut bit-banging, slow serial link) shaped a design that was, in practice, more distributed than a lot of modern “smart peripherals.” That’s both a lesson and a reminder: simple external interfaces often mask surprisingly rich internal behavior.

I picked up a Commodore 64 that came with the guidebook/developer manual and it’s honestly inspiring. The fact that it comes with the complete assembly language, circuit diagrams, and BASIC language reference is something you just don’t see today. Being able to write whatever in whichever places in memory makes it more of a tool fostering creative expression. Honestly, before reading through those manuals I never really needed to consider having to implement multiplication in terms of addition instructions. Even though those are basic properties of arithmetic, it’s easy to take for granted.

If I had a kid (I'm too old for that now), I would absolutely buy a working Commodore 64 for the kid as their first computer, complete with the fantastic manual that came with it. When they understand how it works, then they can have a tablet and a modern computer. The C64 manual has instructions for BASIC programming, as well as how to program the peripheral chips to make sounds and graphics. And then in the back it goes into assembly language including documentation for all the opcodes, and then in the very back of the manual were the full schematics for the computer. I think it's still an amazing resource for anyone wanting to learn how computers work. It literally changed my life. Before I got the C64 when I was 15 years old, I had an Atari 400 and then Atari 600. There was very little available to me in the way of documentation for the Atari for anything beyond BASIC programming, and I found that very limiting. The C64 and its manual opened up a whole other world to me. I taught myself assembly programming in about a week. I got into BBSs, and eventually into the "demoscene" where I got to use all the assembly programming I learned. This built the foundation for the rest of my computing life and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

You know, I decided which Catholic high school to attend after I put my fingers on the keyboards of their brand-new C64 machines. [The other Catholic school only had PET systems at the time.] I learned how to type there, and the rest was history. I owned a VIC20 already, and Dad purchased peripherals such as the 1541 and the 1701. It wasn’t until 3-4 years ago when I began to study history, Irish history in particular, and recognized that the model numbers weren’t chosen arbitrarily or accidentally, but indeed they correlated perfectly to the most ignominious dates in the history of the UK, when anti-Catholic laws were passed and the Irish were stomped into submission. It makes weird sense in retrospect. I mean, nobody ever taught Irish history in school because we are Americans now, and the whole Reformation thing is water under the bridge. And the superior general has a distinctly posh RP accent. Much like the “bitten apple” and its rainbow colors and the $666 price tag, these signs and symbols were hidden in plain sight, as harbingers and warning signs of future troubles. We were all working for the construction crew on a modern Tower of Babel. Literally.

My first program was in BASIC. I was 6, and had other things to do before I got back on that journey, but the next one was in PHP. By conventional wisdom and common proverbs, my mind should've been mutilated beyond any hope of recovery. (And maybe it is, who knows.) But this conventional wisdom tends to ignore the barrier to entry. The C64 not only booted straight into BASIC, it also came with a book, and that first program that I copied from the book was not some silly "hello world" or a fizzbuzz, it was a piano. It demonstrated to me, that a computer is a means of expressing yourself creatively, and it did so in a form that was digestible to a 6yro. The best first language is the one that comes pre-installed on your computer, with enough example code to get you hooked. (Which is why the iPad / Swift Playgrounds fills me with both hope and dread. But, considering where I came from, mostly hope.)

I have no nostalgia for noisy PC fans and hard disks. One thing that was cool though, was way back in the C64 days. If the SID chip's volume wasn't set to zero, then background sounds would come out of the speaker that were directly related to what the computer was doing. It was neat because it kind of sounded like an ethereal pipe organ. But you could "hear" basic things like complex computations vs. a short loop. I think disk drive data transfers were recognizable, but it's been a while.

I would say no because it seemed to me at the time that people understood the damage the PET’s killer poke could cause was more theoretical than actual. I took it more as a kind of lesson that software could sometimes break out of the normal execution model it runs in, sometimes in very unexpected ways and with possibly significant consequences. (I was just a kid, so probably my mother lead me there. She was an experienced systems architect, or whatever they called it at the time, and had plenty of practical experience with machines that were a lot more raw than the PET.) I liked the PET, and while it had a better basic, monitor, and character set, it was lacking a graphics capability like the Apple ][. That’s what reduced PET sales. E.g., a C64 was basically a PET plus graphics & sound (w/enough memory to use them) and sold like gangbusters.