The Commodore Story: Gone but Not Forgotten

[Nighthawke1701]

Jack Trameil took "vendetta" to a new level. The ST series matched the Amiga in every way, which was a tall order, but never proved as popular. Commodore's computer heritage was just stronger than Atari's. What amazes me is how Atari basically thought consoles were dead and pretty much gave up after the 5200, then tried to play catch-up with the Jaguar during Japan's console invasion. A case study in mismanagement.

Commodore's mismanagement is also in several volumes too, especially in hardware development. The C-64 was an outstanding example of incomplete development of features and abilities. The SID chip was a hybrid that was ahead of its time, giving budding music artists a hint of what was to come. Even to this day, benders and hackers are taking the SID chip to higher levels with demos that take the system to it's ultimate limits. They are even stacking SID chips, taking the 3 voices to 6 or even 9 in come cases, with custom software and demos built for the multiple voices, setting even the most jaded of software musicians back in their chairs.

The 1541 had so many undeveloped features and potential, it's almost embarrassing to start there. And stuffing the transformer under the main logic board and drive mechanism, which in itself was a mess, a major design flaw. The 1541 floppy drive had its own processor, making it a computer in itself, but I do not know of any software that takes full advantage of that.

The 1581 3.5 Inch drive, massive for its time, overpriced and early teething issues, a BBS'ers and big data cruncher's wet dream with 800K storage. You could stack 4 of them together and pretty much have your entire library of software stored on dependable, durable hard case floppy disks.

 

[Lew Zealand]

The 1541 had so many undeveloped features and potential, it's almost embarrassing to start there. And stuffing the transformer under the main logic board and drive mechanism, which in itself was a mess, a major design flaw. The 1541 floppy drive had its own processor, making it a computer in itself, but I do not know of any software that takes full advantage of that.

After fixing the misaligned heads in our 1541 thanks to the internal transformer's excessive heat output, he would "refurb" nonworking 1541s for other people and eventually got a couple of extras for himself from people who were fed up. The 1541 was a design disaster.

 

[Mugsy]

I was firmly in the "Atari" camp.

I got my Atari 400 in early 1982 well before the C64 came out (and when it did, I didn't regret my purchase. the Atari was far superior. Faster, 16x as many colors (256), and 4-channel sound vs the 64's 3-channel SID chip.) I had intended to get a VIC-20, thinking it had 20k of ram... which in my young mind was my only judge of computer power. But when I learned the VIC only had 5k of ram while the Atari 400 (dead center of the store entrance running a fairly faithful rendition of Pac-Man that was drawing crowds of mall shoppers disappointed by the sad flickery VCS version) had 16k, I was sold, opting instead for the Atari despite costing $100 more than the VIC. The Atari was clearly the superior computer.

While the C64 had 64K of memory, it was still only able to access 48K of ram (plus 16 of OS/ROM) at any one time without having to resort to a trick called "bank switching" to swap in/out a 16K block of memory. And IIRC, the C64 used a "6509" cpu, not "6502". The C64's floppy disk drive was only slightly faster than their cassette data recorder (eventually, it was discovered you could DRAMATICALLY speed it up by disabling its "read/write verify" feature.)

Years later, still loyal to Atari, I moved up to the 520ST over the Amiga1000. It was a bizarre situation to be in because while Tramiel (the former Commodore founder) basically tried to produce a modern version of the C64 with fewer colors and only 3 sound channels, the inventor of the Amiga was the same guy who invented the Atari chipset (Jay Miner) with 4,096 colors & 4 channel sound. The ST was quite literally the successor to the C64 while the Amiga was quite literally the successor to the Atari 800 (I've always considered the fact the Amiga was more successful than the ST "vindication" that my choice of the Atari over a C64 was the right move.)

Those early days of computing were amazing to live through... starting back to when you had to build one yourself (Zenith "Heathkit" anyone?), obtain a copy of CP/M (the open-source precursor to DOS) at a "swap meet", find a manual for it lying on its side on an abandoned shelf of your local electronics store... was a "magical" time I haven't seen since and consider myself lucky to have been in the middle of.

 

[neeyik]

And IIRC, the C64 used a "6509" cpu, not "6502".

The 6510 actually; a derivative of the 6502 but since Commodore owned MOS Technology, they could easily make their own versions as required.

 

[nickp91]

I love that William Shatner was Commodore’s sales mascot

 

[isamuelson]

Apple ][+ and //e were what I learned to program on. I never used the older Apples where it was strictly cassette tapes or later, you boot into the ROM and then boot your disk. I was spoiled by the auto-boot drives on my ][+ (and later //e). When a friend of mine was gushing over his C64, I had to go take a look. The booting was slow, loading programs was slower, until he showed me this great program you booted first that speed up the loading of games, etc. I shook my head, thinking how fast and easy AppleDOS booted up to the command prompt and how fast games could load. Even though both ran on a 6502 processor, I just loved the more openness of the Apple computer. Easy to open it up, add expansion cards (had an 80 column 64K card in my //e for a total of 128k of memory, then added another 128K card later, then a Z80 card) and I was running Aztec C compiler with a Unix-like OS to program in (cc, vi, etc) and then running and programming in CP/M on my Z80. I learned Applesoft BASIC first, then assembler using the built-in mini-assembler and then finally got the Orca Macro assembler before moving on to C via Aztec C compiler. It's what fueled my desire to go into programming and 30+ years later, I'm still programming to this day, and my love of computers has grown every single year. Did I not like the C64? Not for me. But I do realize it did allow those that could not afford an Apple computer to still get involved with computers and that is always a good thing. So even though I didn't like the C64, it's still a marvel of a computer that came at an affordable price to get more computers into the hands of people, including young children. So thanks Commodore. You, along with so many other companies, helped shape the IT industry and many careers, like mine. That is always a good thing.

 

[Angga B]

Let me guess, this time it will be Best Buy who will sell "reborned" Commodore? #lel

 

[kieranbunny]

The Amiga was fantastic. Graphically it was far ahead of IBM. They used amigas to do thegraphics in Farscape. I wish I still had mine I loved that thing!

 

[amghwk]

Articles like this make me emotional. Those days... they'll never come back. Amiga, DOS, C64, Atari... so different from the the crazy modern world of mobile gaming and teenager-and-millenial-friendly games - pubg, fortnite, call of duty and other BS. Not to mention the crazy race for the obscene prices of graphics cards... beautiful but empty.

I'm a harsh critic of Techspot when clickbaits are obvious, but also ready to applause for articles that are truly useful and substantial.

 

[plambert2015]

When I had my C64, I thought I was a fanatic in delving into it and trying to learn all I could, such as the various low-level hardware tricks. I even had a couple of programs published in magazines. However, later I learned that I was merely a tyro. The real fanatics are those who can put sprites in not just the top and bottom borders, but the left and right borders as well... you know, those who not only care about how many cycles it takes to draw each raster line, but crucially depend on it in their code.

What I've always wondered is why none of these people sent their programs to magazines, like I did -- there was tons of money to be made, as in hundreds of dollars per article! Sure, it's chump change now for the amount of work done (probably way less than a euro per hour), but to us kids it was huge at the time.

 

[bobstoned]

When I had my C64, I thought I was a fanatic in delving into it and trying to learn all I could, such as the various low-level hardware tricks. I even had a couple of programs published in magazines. However, later I learned that I was merely a tyro. The real fanatics are those who can put sprites in not just the top and bottom borders, but the left and right borders as well... you know, those who not only care about how many cycles it takes to draw each raster line, but crucially depend on it in their code.

What I've always wondered is why none of these people sent their programs to magazines, like I did -- there was tons of money to be made, as in hundreds of dollars per article! Sure, it's chump change now for the amount of work done (probably way less than a euro per hour), but to us kids it was huge at the time.

The big software houses and top coders at that time kept a lot of these tricks secret, because they were worth a ton of money, a competitive advantage. It was only since the enthusiast and cracker scene became more prominent that these techniques got out into the open. Some of the home-brew stuff done later would have made you a millionaire back then, but that's the gift of hind-sight, decades of acquired knowledge, unlimited time and PC based productivity tools. You still need to be at a near genius coding level, to create a quality game on a C64, utilising these methods. It's still incredibly hard.
What I'd have given to have access to what we have now, when I was coding assembler in the early eighties ! I marvel at the amount of time still devoted to creating new games for the C64 and other older machines, wish I could find the time now.

 

[isamuelson]

The C-64 was a great machine and a serious competitor to the Apple, Apple ][ and Apple ][e. It's only drawback was it's lack of ability to grow, but still ... a great machine.

Agreed. C-64 was good for those that didn't want to or couldn't afford the price of the Apple computers. But that's what I grew up on, but still, without the C-64 as well, how many kids would have had a computer to work with at such an affordable price? Even though I loved my Apple ][+ and //e, C-64 still helped garner a larger generation of future programmers along with what Apple provided and eventually the IBM PC. However, I do know when I started to learn how to program an IBM PC, I missed the old days of simplicity that came with the Apple computer (built in monitor to do machine code programming if you so desired, the built-in mini-assembler in certain Apple machines, etc). Programming, including efficient programming via machine language/assember, was right there. No software needed to purchase. It was built into the machine. You can't beat the simplicity of that. It's how I learned assembler language programming. When I got to college, we had to take a VAX Macro assembler programming course as a required course. For me, it was a breeze because I was familiar with thinking in assembler. It definitely made you break down your code and think it out where today's high-level languages doesn't promote that out of the box. Without my Apple, I don't think I would be where I am today as as a programmer. And I'm sure many of those who had C-64s feel the same way.

 

[NoahD]

I had the Vic-20, C64 and finally Amiga 500. Great machines for it's day. The only reason I moved away from the Amiga is that I couldn't stand the flicker interlace screens. And the anti-flicker solutions for it were too expensive so I went to the PC.

 

[TechrevMX]

I had the commodore 64, that was great!!! that was my introduction to computing systems!!!