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.
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!
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 :)
And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.
Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player we had was broken. When a replacement was obtained in the new-year I started playing games with my sisters, but I'd already been "forced" to play with BASIC and I never really stopped..
> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Dundee? :-D
There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them.
And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle.
The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.
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 don't know. IT is a bit different in that regard. As a doctor, even if the system is shit, you still help people directly. As an engineer, you build something tangible that can make people's lives easier. And so on. In IT, though, the impact often feels much more indirect. Most of the time you're optimizing processes or helping businesses become more efficient, rather than improving people's lives in a direct way. You're often several steps removed from the people who ultimately benefit from your work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just doesn't feel very meaningful to me.
I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.
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?
A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.
The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.
For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.
You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.
The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk
LOAD "*",8,1
The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.
The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.
I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.
It was the best-selling single model of home computer for a very long time (relatively speaking in a very fast-moving field) in an era where most new models ditched compatibility, and in some countries it totally dominated.
Where I grew up (Norway) you rarely if ever saw Apple's until the Mac, and only the occasional other brand like Amstrad or Spectrum.
In my primary school classes, almost everyone who had a home computer had a Commodore 64. As a result, it was easy to get (pirated) games.
The network effect was strong - having a different computer meant you might have nobody nearby to swap games with. I knew one person - vaguely - with an Amstrad, and one person I knew of at my school had a Texas Instruments machine, and one with a Spectrum, but there were half a dozen kids in my home room alone with Commodore 64's.
It was much more tribal for that reason. If you had a Commodore 64 or Amiga, chances were Atari was "the enemy" even when Jack Tramiel (who founded Commodore) was kicked out of Commodore and bought Atari, and Spectrum's were just laughed at.
Mac and PC's were seen as boring business computers.
It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.
For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.
(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)
Of the 1980s 8-bit computing era, the Commodore 64 was the "best value" for getting a lot of functionality for the price. It had 64k of RAM when some others only had 16k. It had a really good built-in sound chip with polyphonic sounds (makes it richer sounding for programming video games music and sound effects). Some other computers had cheaper chips with monophonic sound which makes simplistic beeps and tones. It outsold all the other computers like Apple II, Atari 400/800, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc. This meant it had a big ecosystem of 3rd-party add-ons.
The article talks about COMPUTE! magazine. They often had free games where they listed the source code in the magazine pages. The reader would then manually type in the code by hand into the computer and save it to floppy or tape drive. The magazine would have the same game ported to different computers so there would be separate source code listings for Commodore, Atari, etc. The Commodore 64 versions of the game would always end up being the best version to run because of the hardware advantages mentioned above.
For me, it was mainly the excellent game library plus a group of friends in the neighborhood who had them so we could swap games and copy them. I did very little programming on it, but did wind up as a reviewer for some small game publisher for while (no idea how I managed this) and, later on, my dad’s business partner gave us a 128 with a modem and I did the BBS thing for a while which was really fascinating at 12 or so.
The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.
It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.
The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.
The 6510 CPU was easy to programme in assembler and it was supported by a graphics chip VIC and a sound chip SID who both had some fun tricks up their sleeves (not like a graphics card, much much more simple).
For their time and the price they were quite capable and fun to use.
At the time personal computers didn’t do that much, lots of work places had no computers and libraries (in the uk at least) wouldn’t have had a computer you could use.
Commodore 64’s let you play games and do other stuff (write docs/print, make music, make art) they jump started a generation of us onto computers and what we could do with them.
No one realised at the time that eventually you can sit on the toilet and have a video conference with a thousand people so they were what they were, fun, useful things to have that matched the current time and place.
When windows came along we all built pc’s and learned how to use those, generally fighting with sound card drivers.
For many of us, it was our first computer. It was very simple to understand at every level and very hackable. I was very young when I used it, but I learned so much about the internals of computers.
Thank you. A lot of Western developers a couple generations older than me have fond memories of the Commodore 64, and now I can see why. Thanks for letting me know. Have a nice day.
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.
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!
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 :)
And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.
Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Aged 11, going through the ring-bound orange manual just after Christmas, because the cassette-player we had was broken. When a replacement was obtained in the new-year I started playing games with my sisters, but I'd already been "forced" to play with BASIC and I never really stopped..
> Speccy for me too, and most of the local people I knew.
Dundee? :-D
There's a theory made popular by Chris van der Kuyl (his dad Tony owned an Apple II, the first home computer I ever used - I played the Lemonade Stand game on it in his kitchen) that the reason Dundee is that everyone had a ZX Spectrum and so anyone with any talent got good at programming them.
And why did everyone have a ZX Spectrum in Dundee? Because they were made in the Timex factory just off the Kingsway (the building is still there, it's a furniture factory now), and everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" a Spectrum for them, bypassing the usual supply chain hassle.
The Planet Bar in Lochee probably shifted more units than John Menzies ever did.
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.
So, thanks C64!
I still love you, though...
Sounds like the normal mid-life crisis. :-P Would probably hit you with every other job too.
If you grew up with a Commodore your mid life is way past.
I don't know. IT is a bit different in that regard. As a doctor, even if the system is shit, you still help people directly. As an engineer, you build something tangible that can make people's lives easier. And so on. In IT, though, the impact often feels much more indirect. Most of the time you're optimizing processes or helping businesses become more efficient, rather than improving people's lives in a direct way. You're often several steps removed from the people who ultimately benefit from your work. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just doesn't feel very meaningful to me.
I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.
Find an IT-related problem facing the whole world right now and fix it.
For example phone enshittification. Make your own phone that isn't shit.
My first machine was an Oric 1, I was 8 years old, it was 1982 - Never looked back ^_^
> These games didn’t come with any instructions, so figuring out how to play them was often a bigger challenge than the game itself.
Ah yes, the "special compilations" on TDK D90s swapped in the playground ;-)
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?
A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.
The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.
For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.
You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.
The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk
The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have any games you want to play? It usually starts from there. This generation of Commodore computers has an excellent beginner's programming guide [0] in the box. Want to change the colors on the screen, or make a sound? The manual shows you what values to POKE into memory to make that happen.The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Users_Guide_1982_Co...
[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...
[2] https://archive.org/details/commodore-1541-disk-drive-users-...
I'm looking through the user guide (0 link), and it's pretty interesting. It's fascinating how the structure is laid out in a way that lets you grasp how everything works all at once.
It was the best-selling single model of home computer for a very long time (relatively speaking in a very fast-moving field) in an era where most new models ditched compatibility, and in some countries it totally dominated.
Where I grew up (Norway) you rarely if ever saw Apple's until the Mac, and only the occasional other brand like Amstrad or Spectrum.
In my primary school classes, almost everyone who had a home computer had a Commodore 64. As a result, it was easy to get (pirated) games.
The network effect was strong - having a different computer meant you might have nobody nearby to swap games with. I knew one person - vaguely - with an Amstrad, and one person I knew of at my school had a Texas Instruments machine, and one with a Spectrum, but there were half a dozen kids in my home room alone with Commodore 64's.
It was much more tribal for that reason. If you had a Commodore 64 or Amiga, chances were Atari was "the enemy" even when Jack Tramiel (who founded Commodore) was kicked out of Commodore and bought Atari, and Spectrum's were just laughed at.
Mac and PC's were seen as boring business computers.
It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.
For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.
(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)
Of the 1980s 8-bit computing era, the Commodore 64 was the "best value" for getting a lot of functionality for the price. It had 64k of RAM when some others only had 16k. It had a really good built-in sound chip with polyphonic sounds (makes it richer sounding for programming video games music and sound effects). Some other computers had cheaper chips with monophonic sound which makes simplistic beeps and tones. It outsold all the other computers like Apple II, Atari 400/800, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc. This meant it had a big ecosystem of 3rd-party add-ons.
The article talks about COMPUTE! magazine. They often had free games where they listed the source code in the magazine pages. The reader would then manually type in the code by hand into the computer and save it to floppy or tape drive. The magazine would have the same game ported to different computers so there would be separate source code listings for Commodore, Atari, etc. The Commodore 64 versions of the game would always end up being the best version to run because of the hardware advantages mentioned above.
https://www.google.com/search?q=compute%21+magazine+program+...
For me, it was mainly the excellent game library plus a group of friends in the neighborhood who had them so we could swap games and copy them. I did very little programming on it, but did wind up as a reviewer for some small game publisher for while (no idea how I managed this) and, later on, my dad’s business partner gave us a 128 with a modem and I did the BBS thing for a while which was really fascinating at 12 or so.
The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.
It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.
The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.
The 6510 CPU was easy to programme in assembler and it was supported by a graphics chip VIC and a sound chip SID who both had some fun tricks up their sleeves (not like a graphics card, much much more simple). For their time and the price they were quite capable and fun to use.
At the time personal computers didn’t do that much, lots of work places had no computers and libraries (in the uk at least) wouldn’t have had a computer you could use.
Commodore 64’s let you play games and do other stuff (write docs/print, make music, make art) they jump started a generation of us onto computers and what we could do with them.
No one realised at the time that eventually you can sit on the toilet and have a video conference with a thousand people so they were what they were, fun, useful things to have that matched the current time and place.
When windows came along we all built pc’s and learned how to use those, generally fighting with sound card drivers.
For many of us, it was our first computer. It was very simple to understand at every level and very hackable. I was very young when I used it, but I learned so much about the internals of computers.
Thank you. A lot of Western developers a couple generations older than me have fond memories of the Commodore 64, and now I can see why. Thanks for letting me know. Have a nice day.