Vintage tech: Looking back at the Commodore 64

by Alex Kidman | Thursday 5 January 2012

News this week that the Commodore 64 is turning 30 makes us feel old. Really old. So what was so special about it?

[It's the 30th anniversary of the Commodore 64 this week - news that has made more than a few of us here in the PC & Tech Authority office feel their age. In memory of the machine, we decided to repost this story below, first published in February 2010.]

What made the Commodore 64 so special? It wasn't Commodore's first machine, but for many a child of the 1980s, the Commodore 64 still holds a special place in their hearts

Just look at it. Is that not a thing of design beauty? Well, OK, no, not much.It's brown and... brown. Or in some later revisions, more grey and... grey.

It's a very 1980s style computer design, however, which is exactly what Commodore wanted and needed in the competitive market of the early to mid-1980s. The Commodore 64 was priced aggressively (for its time) and was a true mass-market computer well into the era where a computer in every home was a novelty idea, not a near reality.

By any measure, a wildly successful machine: the Commodore 64

The Commodore 64: the 64K limit led to wonderfully optimised game code. (Picture credit: Bill Bertram)

Key stats:
It's not terribly fast: The MOS 6510 processor at the heart of the Commodore 64 only just clocked in at over 1.02MHz, and that was only the NTSC version. The Australian PAL C64 did everything it had to do at a sedate (by today's standards) 0.985Mhz. To give that some perspective, the current crop of processors in, say, a slow plodding netbook tend to clock in one thousand six hundred times faster.

The sound chip was (and is) a revelation
The C64 may have been built and sold as cheaply as possible, but not every corner was one that was cut. Arguably the most enduring part of the Commodore 64's hardware design was the much loved SID sound chip, a sound synthesiser that not only started the digital composing career of folks such as Rob Hubbard but endured well past the sales life of the C64 into the music demo and mashup scenes of today.

Storage
Ask anyone who owned a C64 what you really needed for the C64 and the answer was invariably "patience". Tape loading software (whether a word processor or BC Bill) was a lengthy and often fraught with disaster affair. Or you could (as many did) just pop in the International Soccer cartridge into the back of the C64 for the millionth time.

The 1541 disk drive helped speed load times up a significant amount, but under-supply and the cheap nature of tapes meant that plenty of C64 software still sold on tape.

You can identify yourself as a true child of the 1980s if you can quickly (and without checking) remember how to turn the 170kb single sided floppies into double sided ones. Answer at the bottom for those who don't know.*

Why was it relevant?
Because by any significant measure, it was wildly successful. Only the Apple II sold in similar (but never quite as many) quantities, and the C64 was a lot less expensive to buy.

It's also where a lot of programmers and sound designers cut their teeth in early programming, and especially in optimising code. When you've only got 64K to play with, you make every bit count. This led to some wonderfully optimised code, and stellar games such as Wizball, The Last Ninja, Summer Games and International Karate, as well as some hopelessly optimistic releases that were never likely to be very good -- such as Street Fighter II.

What's it worth?
eBay listings for C64s tend to go for between $50-$200, depending on the condition of the machine and whether you want bundled games and critically the box and instructions.

If you're an iPhone owner, an officially licensed Commodore 64 emulator is available for $5.99, with game packs made available for purchase on a regular basis. Other emulators exist for PC, Mac and Linux platforms, although the legality of software on those is dubious at best.

The C64 lives on, on your iPhone (Picture credit: Alex Kidman)

* Single sided floppies for the C64 (and indeed many 5.25" disk systems of the day) could have their capacity doubled with application of a hole punch to the disk. No, we're not kidding. Who said hacking had to be software only?

Read our short histories of these other classic systems:

The VIC-20

The Apple II

The Atari 400

The ZX Spectrum

The Amstrad CPC

The Nintendo Entertainment System

See more about: retro | commodore

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cjay253 25 February 2010	Loved my C64 - still do. The tape drive contributed to thinning hair and many tantrums but the disk drive worked well. Now have 2 C64's an original form and a late form. Nice keyboards. The disk mod didn't always work - data recorded on the reverse of some discs was not reliable. You could actually buy a "notcher" to punch the new notch reliably. Ahhh...nostalgia! Comment made about the PC Authority article: Vintage tech: Looking back at the Commodore 64? What made the Commodore 64 so special? It wasn't Commodore's first machine, but for many a child of the 1980s, the Commodore 64 still holds a special place in their hearts What do you think? Join the discussion.
zaphod6502 25 February 2010	I still have my 5.25" disk notching tool. I also have a fully working Commodore VIC-20 with 24K ram expansion cartridge. :)
Scadartus 25 February 2010	Nothing like waiting nearly 5 mins for the next mission of "Gunship" to load - I shudder to think how much time I spent finishing the game, and then doing it all again (several times!). I guess age has an impact on the way games manage to grab your attention.....or don't! I remember the notcher, a lovely Red device it was, much better than scissors ;)
et_tu_brute 25 February 2010	aaah memories... I was probably one of the few C64 owners who never played games on it. My employer only thought in terms of IBM main frames, so I created wonderful spreadsheets on Microsoft Multiplan, databases on Superbase 64 and word processing on Superwriter 64 which have since been migrated to my pc years ago via Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel, dBase III to MS Access, WordPerfect to MS Word and are still in use today.... It was a wonderful & productive tool that required some patience but the results are still in use nearly 30 years later and I still have my little blue disc doubling tool which use to cut little square notches on the 5.25" floppies.
dsagill 25 February 2010	I still have one. It was a magnificent machine for a 10 year old 35 odd years ago. You could learn to program in basic, do sound coding and graphics via peeks and pokes and add all sorts of goodies onto the expansion port via custom built veroboard frankensteins. Bloody fantastic. I double sided many disks, controlled parts of the house, hacked games and played the entire first 3 text versions of Zork on it. Along with Impossible Mission which ruled as an "action" game. It was a real ground breaker.
MikeTheBike 26 February 2010	I still have a Commodore SX64 portable(sic)in mint condition along with all of its manuals,etc. I believe I still have back problems associated with its portability(?) I also have about 20 games including an original Flight Simulator V1.2, word processing and database programs and a couple of joy sticks. Ahhh, the memories of poring over basic and the endless debugging line by line. Do you remember the PC Games magazines would include the code for games that you would type in and then go nuts trying to debug the code to get it to run. We have it so easy today - thankfully.
peterlc 27 February 2010	I made some of my first 'double sided' 5.25" disk mods using a Stanley knife and my first 3.5" double sided mod was done with a drill bit.
anteater 27 February 2010	Can anyone tell me the reason why we could alter the disks so simply to get double capacity. Were the disks alwys meant to be doulble layered but sold as single sided as a marketing ploy to force us to buy a new floppy sooner?
shuttles 27 February 2010	I started with a Vic 20, then went to a C64, but ended up with a C128. The 128 was the easiest PC to program I have ever owned. I gave it away eventually but I always regretted it.
smurftech 27 February 2010	Loved my C64, I had the second edition(pointy and grey) with a 1541(mates where in envy), still had to use tape for a few games, loved the fact then whenever we wanted to play "Howzat cricket" we had to load it from tape, so while it was loading we would play cricket for an hour in the backyard to come back inside to play cricket :P. I was so disappointed when I found that my dad had given it away to clean out some garage space :(.
timelord70 30 April 2010	I still have my original C64 and have managed to pick up about five more that people were throwing out about 10 years ago which I use for spare parts. Very handy when those damn IO controller chips unexpectedly stop working, rendering the joysticks unresponsive :-). But yes, still one of my fave gaming rigs of all time, and works surprisingly well on a 42" widescreen tv as well! @anteater: there were double sided double density disks you could buy as well. They cost a bit more, but they were tested to work on both sides, whereas the single sided double density ones were only tested on one side, but were made the same way as the dsdd ones.
Ekythump 5 January 2012	This brought a tear to my eye. I spent many happy ours with my brother playing games from tape and floppy, (and yes i even did the hole punching trick to double the size ) There were a lot of good games then. Spent hours on red baron and Blue Max.
Black&White 5 January 2012	Oh how i love my C64 and Blue Max game, flying around bombing tanks. I still have it and my (Freeze Frame) anyone remember them? for coping games and the reset switch i hand soldered onto the motherboard as they dident come with one only a on / off switch. Good times :-)
IrOS 5 January 2012	@anteater: A bit more about the double side thing. I never had a C64 (I was an Dream 6800 / Ohio Superboard guy) so I can only comment in general. The affordable disk drives of the day only had a read/write head on one side (top from memory), whereas proper double sided drives had a head on both sides of the disk. So that meant in order to write on the back side of the disk you had to turn it over. Turning it over was simple enough except the notch on the side was the write lock mechanism - open was write enabled, covered up was read-only. So it meant you had to cut a similar notch on the other side of the disk so you could then write to the back of it! Clever hey!
jasonwalls 6 January 2012	I remember getting my first modem. A Viatel 1200/75/300 baud modem. There was the Viatel operated by Telecom, system that used to charge a $1 per minute. It had bugger all content, but I was chatting to other kids around the world. And then there were the BBSes and the endless engaged tones. Manually dialing and flicking the switch when you heard that tone. It would take hours to download the latest _goodiez_. I would download a 300K file, and then there would be the endless disk swapping as I'd unarchive it and put it on tape for friends at school. Good times!
hrethric 6 January 2012	Bah, IrOS kind of beat me to it, but I created an account just to say this, so I'll say it anyway: Technically, all you had to do to read the other side of a disk was just flip it over. The notch was to enable writing on the second side. :) I've still got my C128, and I'm about to start using it to sharpen my coding chops. I even bought a USB adaptor which lets me hook my 1571 to my PC so that I can download Commodore software from the internet (or, someday, share the software I write with the internet).
photohounds 6 January 2012	You're missing the TRS-80. It brought computing down to many non expert users. One story goes that A Brit user thought his was stuffed, only to be told to replace the fuse (which in pommyland was in the plug). THAT'S a mass market device! Not studded as I typed at first :( . Edited by photohounds: 6/1/2012 10:54:44 PM
PeteC 9 January 2012	Do you guys remember tweaking the cassette tape's head with a screw driver when it was not loading the programs? :) Oh, joy!
fozzie1969 12 January 2012	Loved my C64 and played for many hours. Got a C16 first then upgraded to C64. The game that took many hours back then was Elite. Yes a knife was the way I used to notch the disk and got the odd cut finger too. I even brought the monitor so that I could play and watch TV at same time.
deancapp 14 January 2012	Actually, the VIC 20 came out before the 64 - bad research there . . . !
davidjons13 19 January 2012	I still accept a Commodore SX64 portable in excellent action forth with all of its manuals,etc.It was a arresting apparatus for a 10 year old 35 odd years ago. You could apprentice to affairs in basic, do complete coding and cartoon via peeks and pokes and add all sorts of aliment assimilate the amplification anchorage via custom congenital veroboard frankensteins.