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” character, which was also the Intellivision mascot, from the game Night Stalker.

But the Commodore 64 was my first “real” computer. I had wanted a Commodore since a day in the very early 1980s when I was visiting a local Sears with my mother, and we came across an electronics department. I don’t recall now if the computer I saw was a VIC-20 or a C64, but I very vividly remember the dreams it inspired: I was going to use one to create a Star Wars video game in which you piloted a small spaceship down the side of a Star Destroyer, fighting enemies along the way. What I imagined would remain technologically impossible for perhaps the next 15 years. And it would, of course, remain beyond my own capabilities for, well, forever. But I left the store with a lot of documentation that day, and I read and re-read it until I could get my own Commodore.

As a real computer, the C64 was a standalone unit in a single piece, with an integrated keyboard and a variety of expansion ports. Notably, it booted into a BASIC interpreter, so you could execute individual commands or write programs that could be run together. Coming off the ECS, I didn’t have a way to save my programs to cassette, and I couldn’t afford a Commodore 1541 disk drive at first. And so I used to print my programs out on a tiny Commodore printer/plotter that used adding machine paper, and then I’d have to type them in again when I turned on the C64 again. Finally, a friend was nice enough to buy me the Commodore cassette recorder for my birthday, and I did eventually get a disk drive too.

One of the more notable things about the C64—and this was probably true of most computers of its era—was its user guide, which was very well written and contained basic information about creating BASIC programs, including how one might use the PEEK and POKE commands to inspect and change specific memory locations and create and animate the system’s hardware-based sprites, a key differentiator and advantage over other platforms. (The C64’s SID chip was another big advantage, but I never did much with sound.)

In 1985, I got a part-time job at Toys R Us because it was located on my drive to college (art school) and I could see they were advertising for help. I needed to work at night because of school, and that worked out fine, and I was your basic entry-level idiot, walking around the store with a cart full of abandoned or returned items to restock. One night, someone from customer service used the intercom to ask someone on the floor to help someone in the store’s computer aisle, so I headed over. And then spent the next two hours talking to people there who needed help. A manager witnessed this and assigned me to this area of the store permanently.

I dropped out of art school after my first and only year because I could see it was a path toward never having a good career, but because I had missed the normal enrollment period at the University of Massachusetts, I had to go to school part-time, and at night. And so I ended up working days at Toys R Us, where I ran the computer department. A few notable things happened while I was there: Toys R Us received an incredible shipment of Atari ST computers and then, within a week, sent them all back because of some corporate dispute; and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) happened, reviving the videogame industry for good.

But I also had one major impact on Toys R Us: at some point, we got new glass displays cases in for the computers, videogames, and electronics, and though they had internal lights and were wired with electricity, the setup plan called for us to simply arrange items in there as they had been before, disconnected from each other. I thought that was stupid, and so I took it upon myself to connect it all to power and display a monitor above each computer or video game unit. Then, I would run whatever game demos on each. In one case, we ran simulated baseball games all day, which I thought was particularly effective.

A few days later, the regional director—I remember his name was Ken—came in and saw what I had done with the display cabinets. He loved it and had every Toys R Us in his region switch to this more interesting design. (I later met my eventual wife at Toys R Us too, as she worked there during her college break over the 1986-1987 holiday season.)

While at Toys R Us, I was able to really beef up my disk-based Commodore 64 game collection. And I also “returned” my original C64 and 1541 disk drive and replaced them with the newer Commodore 64C and 1541C disk drives, which were both styled like the more expensive Commodore 128. I could do this, and at no cost, because Toys R Us had a no-questions-asked return policy, and if you returned something, even after years of obvious use, you’d get full price for it. So it was a simple swap and replace.

In 1986, I was 19 and was driving up to New Hampshire with two friends. We stopped at a convenience store to stock up on foods and drinks, and I picked up a copy of Run magazine, which covered the most popular home computer system. I recall reading it in the back seat and being struck by the fact that the new stories were months old because of the publishing schedule. That bothered me: surely there was a way to make the news timelier. (There would be, but the World Wide Web as we now know it was still 10 years away.)

During this time, I also honed my self-taught BASIC skills. The C64 had a fairly limited version of BASIC, and I was quite jealous of the more advanced BASIC my friend Dave had on his C-128, a computer I couldn’t afford. But there was a cartridge called Super Expander 64 that expanded the C64’s built-in BASIC to something that was roughly the same as what was available on the C128. Which I know because I could go into retail stores and quickly program animated graphics displays on their Commodore 128s. Dave and I also created animated Christmas displays, complete with falling snow and blinking lights, for display at Toys R Us over the holidays. Perhaps an early form of declarative programming, since I wrote them in BASIC. Hm.

When I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1987 to go back to college full-time, this time at the University of New Mexico, I took my C64C, 1541C disk drive, my beloved Epyx 500xj Joystick Controller, an Okimate-20 color printer, and my then-voluminous collection of game and application disks with me. And that same friend Dave gave me a 300 baud Commodore modem so we could keep in touch.

But it ended badly: our house burned down over the Christmas holiday, I lost all of that hardware in the fire, and I ended up coming back to Boston before the school year ended.

But before disaster struck, I had one more major C64 milestone.

That year, I worked for an incredible “bookstore” called Page One Books which also had a CD music collection and a neat electronics area with computer software. CDs were new to me, but I also had my first hands-on experience with a Macintosh—and MacPaint, especially—there because they had hardware there so people could try the software before buying.

While I was there, I purchased a software add-on for the C64C there called GEOS that turned the lowly Commodore into a Mac-like computer. You could even get a mouse for it, though the first version was joystick-based and terrible.

GEOS was slow. But it also had some advantages over the Mac, including its support of color. And you could use this software to create early desktop publishing-type documents, as you could on the Mac. These were capabilities that should never have been possible on such a computer. But it worked.

When I returned home from Albuquerque, I was computer-less. And I really wanted to get an Amiga, of course, as it was the new Commodore platform. But the Amiga was very expensive, and the local dealer did not offer any financing. So I ended up getting an Apple IIGS, in part because it was sort of Amiga-like but really because the dealership offered financing. I spent over $3000 on the thing, and then another $2000, easily, trying to make it more like the Amiga.

Eventually, I gave up, sold the whole thing, and bought a used Amiga 500. Which is another story.

To me, the Commodore 64 represents an era lost, a time of hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers, when learning how to program a computer was just as important, if not more important, than running prebuilt applications and games. Yes, it was a game machine, too. In fact, the C64 was a better gaming machine than virtually any console that was available in the 1980s; only the NES surpassed it graphically. But it was really a time of infinite possibilities, a time when things seemed to improve constantly.

It was also a time of great focus: it was possible to master the Commodore 64, and other home computer systems of that era, I bet, in ways that are simply no longer possible today. Indeed, even the Amiga, with its more complex architecture and programming models, was dauntingly complex for the day. Even the Raspberry Pi, arguably the spiritual successor to those computers of the 1980s, is much more complex. I miss those days, for sure, and not just for the youth. I miss it for the anything-is-possible nature of computing at that time. It was an incredible time to be alive.