Technologies Time Forgot: The Vic-20 and the Commodore 64

"The Commodore 64 deserved more respect..."

Jon Bernstein writes: I probably don't deserve to write silicon.com's eulogy to the Commodore 64 because I have a shameful secret. A secret, nearly 20 years later, I only now dare tell. I'd had my C64 - a Spectrum replacement - for just a couple of months when in an after school session playing a tennis sim it all went wrong. I can't even remember the name of the game but I do remember losing a vital point in the third set and, more embarrassingly, I do remember losing the plot. In a fit of McEnroe-esque rage I slammed my fists against the beige and bulky keyboard. My Commodore 64 was no more. Having nagged my mum to buy me the thing I couldn't now tell her that I'd had an expensive accident. Instead I pretended I was still using it, disappearing into my bedroom for hours on end. The lying was easy; after all I'd previously pretended that I was using it for schoolwork. (She still doesn't know, so if you don't mind can we keep this between us?) The Commodore 64 deserved more respect. First shipped in 1982 it weighed in with 64K RAM, 20K ROM, a 1MHz CPU and sound and graphics that blew you away (then not now, obviously). Although it took the Amiga for Commodore to create the world's first multimedia home computer, the C64 was heading in the right direction. As for the keyboard, it didn't seem so beige or bulky back then. This was 'state of the art' 1980s-style. That's not to say it didn't have its problems. According to Project64.com, the unofficial chronicler of the C64, about a quarter of the machines originally shipped didn't work. Only later did the company reduce defects to a more tolerable four to five per cent. A number of 'old skool' commentators in the UK have made that point that to own a Commodore was to support a US goliath against the plucky Brits beavering away at Sinclair Labs. That's not how I remember it. For my teenage mates and me the Spectrum and the C64 demanded equal playground respect. Did we know that Commodore was founded in 1954 by Jack Tramiel, a Polish Jew who'd survived six years at Auschwitz and other concentration camps? Did we care that Commodore would ship some 22 million C64s turning it into a billion dollar company giant in the process? Did we feel guilty not lobbying our mums and dads hard enough to buy British? Not a bit of it. For us the only thing that mattered were games, games, games. Still, the history of Commodore is incredible. After the C64, the firm had one last big success with the Amiga before things started to unravel. It remained profitable until the late 1980s but a refusal to build IBM-compatible PCs probably sealed its fate. When the company finally liquidated its assets in 1994, Byte magazine wrote: "Commodore deserves a eulogy, because its role as an industry pioneer has been largely forgotten or ignored by revisionist historians who claim that everything started with Apple or IBM." For another personal account of the C64 from silicon.com reader Andy Walmsley click here:
http://www.silicon.com/a50950 Next week: the Dragon 32