Commodore 64, a Love Story (Premium)

This week does not mark the 40th anniversary of the Commodore 64, but I’ve seen some headlines to that effect, and what the heck, it’s close enough. 40 years ago this year, Commodore changed the world, and while this PC is most certainly not the “highest-selling single computer model of all time,” as alleged by the Guinness Book of World Records, it is more probably “the most popular home computer of all time,” as claimed by ex-Commodorian Bil Herd. It is also the first “real” computer I ever owned, and it left a lasting mark on me.

If you’re interested in the history of Commodore or the Commodore 64 specifically, this isn’t it. But I have some good sources to turn to. My favorite, because it was written at the time, is called The Home Computer Wars: An Insider's True Account of Commodore and Jack Tramiel. Written by another ex-Commodorian, Michael S. Tomczyk, this book is incredible, but out of print. But Tomczyk, who is a sweetheart of a man, sent me (and many others) a signed copy in recent years.

And much more recently, Brian Bagnall has written what can only be described as the definitive and best-researched history of Commodore across three books (soon to be four): Commodore: A Company on the Edge, Commodore: The Amiga Years, and Commodore: The Final Years, all of which I can highly recommend.

What all those books get right is that Commodore won the home computer wars of the 1980s, beating Apple, Atari, Texas Instruments, and many others, and it did so largely on the success of the Commodore 64. (What the later Bagnall books also get right is that Commodore squandered that lead with several poorly designed follow-ups like the Commodore 16 and Plus-4, and then bungled the Amiga, a platform that should have beaten the IBM PC/Windows and the Mac handily. It boggles the mind to think about what the future could have been.)

No, here I’d like to focus on my own Commodore 64 experiences and explain, if possible, what this machine meant to me, and how it influenced me going forward.

The Commodore 64, oddly, was my second computer. The first, and this is what will always win me any “my first computer” contest, was the Entertainment Computer System (ECS) for the Mattel Intellivision. This add-on turned the Intellivision video game console into a computer of sorts, with a external keyboard and, optionally, a piano keyboard too. It was styled like the Intellivision II, but since I had the original gold and brown Intellivision, the two made an odd pair. (I wasn’t able to get the ECS until Mattel had already killed it, so I obtained it for just $50.)

The ECS is worth quickly remembering because it did have one key innovation: you could plug in any Intellivision game cartridge and then access any of its resources, like player sprites, in your own BASIC programs. Which I wrote and saved to cassette tape using my Radio Shack tape recorder. I was particularly fond of the articulated “running man” chara...