Commodore 64 still loved after all these years

CNN ^ | 7 December 2007 | By Peggy Mihelich

[meowmeow]

Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.

Millions of Commmodore 64s were sold in the 1980s.

"There was something magical about the C64," says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden.

He remembers the day he first laid eyes on his machine back in 1984.

"My father brought it home together with a tape deck, a disk drive, a printer, and a couple of games...I used to sneak home during lunch to play [on it] with my friends."

[Tribune7]

bump

[meowmeow]

Yes - a very simple one with maybe only a dozen command options. I think the computer was a Tandy? Or something that began with T.

[HeadOn]

OK, Bill - remind me. I don’t recall that...

[HeadOn]

Tandy would work. Or maybe a TRS-80 (Tandy/Radio Shack) There was also a Sinclair build-it-yourself a friend of mine built. IIRC, Sinclair was associated or produced by TIMEX.

[ECM]

C64=the greatest game machine ever made!!

[paltz]

[Billthedrill]

That was the secret word in Adventure that...well, it did a lot of stuff, mostly transporting you to unpleasant places but sometimes solving your problem.

"You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all alike..." AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

[WOBBLY BOB]

T80? aka “trash 80”

[Dumpster Baby]

I still have a couple of C64’s, a 64C, a C128, and several VIC-20’s, all in working condition. Lots of Atari’s also. I wish I had the room to set some of them up.

[Mr. Silverback]

My first computer...wrote BASIC code for it when I was only 13. Also, the first money I ever spent from a real paycheck was money I'd saved for three weeks to buy a disk drive for the Commodore. My kids can't believe that a disk drive that held less than my key ring jump drive required a case the size of a shoe box.

Imagine what their kids will be amazed by!

[Mr. Silverback]

Gunship...man, I loved playing Gunship. I was a stone cold killer—Did the primary and secondary missions every time and then went looking for targets of opportunity on the way back to base. Of course, I like Battlefront and the other military/military sci-fi shooters that are out these days. Last year at Christmas, my 8 year old killed me with a rocket launcher in Halo, and I whacked my nephew with an M-1 sniper-style in Medal of Honor Pacific.

Good times...good times.

[SE Mom]

I absolutely loved the graphics we could do with Graphics Magic..and the BBS’s in my area were a blast.

The golden years indeed..

[Army Air Corps]

The Discovery Channel has been airing a series this week on teh rise and evolution of computer games. The series starts with Pong and ends with modern 3-D battle sims. So many fuzzy memories.

[HeadOn]

Ah! I hated those passages. And even more, I hated those passages.

[HeadOn]

Are they worth anything? We’ve got a couple of C64s in the attic, and I’ve thought about selling them. I think one works, and the other could be spare parts...

[Dumpster Baby]

They're worth a little bit to collectors of such things, but that's about all. After a collector gets an armload of them they don't want any more. If someone offered me another C64 system at this point for $20 I wouldn't pay it. One day about 11 or 12 years ago I took the trash out to the dumpster and found a complete Atari 800 system in the dumpster. I dug it out and it worked fine. Today I occasionally see someone set their whole PC computer system out on the curb, and nobody touches it for a couple of weeks sometimes.

I read years ago that when the new C64 hit the market there were hundreds of thousands of the older VIC20 computers piled up in the warehouses, and nobody wanted them. They all got scrapped.

There's mountains of old electronics thrown out every year and only a small percentage of it has any value to any one, either as scrap or as a collector's item.

[Publius6961]

My daughter learned to type with a "space invaders" kind of typing tutor when she was 6, on a Commodore 64.

When she got to high school, the teacher couldn't believe she could type 80wpm and could skip typing class! (Tested her three times).

[NMR Guy]

Or play them online

[Publius6961]

OK I gotta ask... What would you use for monitors? If I remember right, they used oddball connectors.

[Publius6961]

You can download it for free from here...

Can I assume those will run on a PC?
Or are we talking strictly Commodores?