Many of my posts are Nintendo related these days, but my first love, as far as old companies go, is Commodore.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 with a whopping THREE kilobytes of memory, and I also had access to Commodore PETs at my grade school. (By the by, PET stands for Personal Electronic Transactor, which may be the best computing acronym of all time.) When my VIC-20 broke, I took it to Crazy Eddie’s, a local electronics chain with ads destined for You Tube. For the cost of repair–$55 in Reagan dollars–they handed me a new Commodore 64 instead. In my memory, the clerk said something like, “Here ya go kid…”
The C64 is definitely my favorite computer to this day. I was at the right age to have plenty of time to fiddle with it. While I never used the C64 for anything “productive” per se, it was great for playing games, listening to SID music, and tinkering with graphics and programming. Add a modem to the mix and you could connect to Bulletin Board Systems via phone line and leave messages for like-minded nerds, as well as illicitly download new games to play.
I eventually upgraded to a Commodore Amiga, which played even fancier games and was a great machine for art, but never seemed to invite the same level of mischief as the C64 and its tempting “Ready” prompt.
2013 marks the machine’s 30th anniversary, so it’s as good a time as any to reopen the Commodore 64 section at Le Geek. Everything has been edited or rewritten, and even a few games have new marks (Forbidden Forest is better than I remembered…Zoom!, not so much.)
Without further ado, I present the Commodore 64.
Cheers,
Ben
Commodore 64 photo courtesy of www.theoldcomputer.com