The Commodore 64 Phenomenon – My C64 8-bit Childhood Memories…

If you would indulge me, I’d like you to picture the scene….

It is December 24 1982, and Santa, via his very important messengers going by the names of Mum and Dad, were sick and tired of the previous three months of the pleading by a 9 year-old boy and his slightly older 11 year-old brother for the amazing new tech that had just been released.

Santa gave in, and the next morning the two boys were told that for the first time (and as it turned out, the last) they would be getting a joint present to be used and shared equally by both. The present? A vision in varying hues of beigey grey, a modern triumph of technology, evidence indeed that ordinary, normal people, could summon and hold an actual piece of the future. A Commodore 64.

There are many people who can, and given the right encouragement (or someone who’ll listen) will extol the many virtues of the 8-bit MosTech 6510 CPU running at a mighty 1MHz.

The SID chip which gave you not one, not two, but three channels of sound with waveform emulation (sawtooth, triangle, square, noise).

The slow, but entertaining tape drive (people of a certain age have been known to get an inexplicable sense of nostalgia when hearing sounds like a mouse frantically scrabbling against a concrete wall whilst blowing a tiny dog whistle!).

And last, but not least, its mighty 64KB (that’s Kilobytes, or about half a million times smaller than a decent system now) which dwarfed competitors like the Sinclair Spectrum which only had 16K to offer. Unless you were posh, then it was 48K.

As in most things, Commie one, Speccy nil. It wasn’t that the Spectrum was bad, far from it. It just wasn’t as good as the C64. But then, as far as the lads (and about 14 million others) were concerned, nothing was.

Now, a useable computer with the power, speed and memory of a current day lightswitch doesn’t sound like a lot, but those were the days where developers actually developed, rather than playing jigsaw with lots of other people’s code blocks, where every POKE and every PEEK counted. Commodore managed to squeeze a full version of BASIC onto the system, as well as early games like Choplifter, which could run entirely from the 64K memory.

I don’t want to labour the point, but in today’s terms, that would be like trying to park a tank on a beermat. 64K may have been huge then, it’s minuscule now.

Anyway, I digress, The older brother tried valiantly to get more time to play his favourite games; starting off with Seawolf and Radar Rat Race, then later on the likes of Paradroid, Boulderdash and the game that is forever linked with the phrase…

Another Visitor? Stay Awhile. Stay Forever…

Impossible Mission (C64)

For those under the age of 45, that’s Impossible Mission. An amazing platform game with (for the time) flashy graphics, great sound and compelling gameplay.

But the nine year old was obsessed. BASIC (Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was addictive, and basic although as a programming language, surprisingly powerful. By his tenth, then eleventh birthday he found himself progressing from repeatedly printing his name on screen with two lines of code (Hello World for narcissists) through designing the 8×8 pixel sprites and moving them across the screen, to directly addressing memory locations, PEEKing at their contents then POKE-ing new data into them. It culminated in a 24 hour programming session to force MosTech to scroll text smoothly up the screen in a convincing emulation of the Star Wars text. Not particularly impressive for how it looked, but impressive nonetheless. Three months earlier he was talking (well, writing) to a Commodore tech who told him that to do that in BASIC was not possible. The challenge was duly accepted, but his poor father was almost murdered that day when an excited child dragged him to his bedroom to see what he’d done and was rewarded for his efforts by “Is that it?”.

You’ve probably guessed it by now, that younger lad was me, and I am forever grateful to my brother for bowing out gracefully in the face of an obsessed ten year old and writing off his part of the Christmas present. My brother is now a doctor. I look after the IT infrastructure, software and strategy for a group of 6 companies, which never would have happened without the C64. Most IT professionals cite MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 as their introduction, but not me. I go back to the good old days when computing was exciting, technologies were still being decided on (anyone remember the dedicated MIDI soundcards?) and we all felt like trailblazers. C was a programming language for lazy people who couldn’t be bothered to learn assembly, and every single pixel on a screen was deliberately placed and definitely meant to be there.

It is a real risk to start sounding like an old codger, but the C64 was really the evolutionary common ancestor for all games developed since the early 90s. There were thousands of games released for it. It usurped the dedicated games consoles for just being better at games and survived almost 14 years in basically the same form before being discontinued.

The same with ‘proper’ uses… You could do spreadsheets, rudimentary word processing, data analytics (albeit slowly) and everything you can do today, just a bit more deliberately. Compare a PC today with an 8 core 2.4GHz CPU, 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Is it really half a million times better than the Commodore? Or faster? I’d bet on the fact you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who would say yes to that one!

Commodore 64
Release Year	1982
CPU	MOS Technology 6510 @ 1.023 MHz (PAL) / 1.02 MHz (NTSC)
RAM	64 KB
Graphics	VIC-II (320×200 resolution, 16 colours, hardware sprites)
Sound	SID 6581/8580 (3 channels, ADSR envelope, filters)
Storage	Cassette tape (Datasette), 5.25″ floppy disk (1541), cartridges
Operating System	Commodore BASIC 2.0 with KERNAL
Display Output	RF, composite video
Ports	2 joystick ports, cartridge port, serial port, user port, cassette port

The C64 was a great machine. Yes it outplayed consoles at their own game for almost ten years. Yes it was the grandaddy of modern gaming, the second best selling computer of all time (narrowly and relatively recently pipped at the post by the Raspberry Pi), the de-facto machine used by budding coders to cut their teeth for their future careers, and the setter of standards that were later built on for the Commodore Amiga and (controversially and arguably) the Atari ST.

However, the most important thing was the feeling it gave… You were part of the vanguard of tech, playing a key role in the pincer movement closing in on old thinking and you definitely watched Judith Hann every Thursday on Tomorrow’s World.

I, and I think many other Commodore veterans, still have that sense of wonder at technology which, with the best will in the world, the generations who grew up since the 90s with its Intel processors, PCs and CD-ROMS can never truly have. I was listening to a few people the other day complaining that their machine couldn’t play 1920×1080 games at 60 frames per second. I couldn’t resist, and had to point out that they were complaining that their machine had an issue calculating and rendering one hundred and twenty five million bytes of information every second. Not too shabby. The C64 did 320×200 at 15 frames a second, which bearing in mind this was at the same time as the Falklands War and reverse charge calling, I think is even more impressive.

It also does make me feel a little sad, as those days were the days where tech companies were run by geeks who realised they may need someone to look after the boring bits (sales, marketing, accounts etc), whereas the pendulum seems to have swung the other way, with the sales, marketing and accounts guys realising they need a few geeks to do the clever stuff. Say what you like about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but they definitely started out in the first camp. Put Bill in a suit and Steve in a black jumper, they were still obviously the kids at school who played with tech and would snigger if someone suggested that they actually talk to a girl.

I can thank the Commodore 64 (and, in lesser part but still importantly, other machines at that time from Atari, and Messrs Sinclair and Sugar) for my ‘healthy’ cynicism today and reluctance to drink too much from the ever-flowing fountain of KoolAid. When you had such limited resources that you had to worry about if you really needed that particular pixel in that particular sprite, or if you could make your code 10% smaller to fit in memory, you wrote efficient code not out of some desire to follow some convention or framework, but out of necessity and the realisation that if you didn’t, things just woudn’t work. It is rumoured that around 25% of the codebase for Windows is ‘appendix code’ (not used any more, and if it is, noone knows how or why) and if you look at the old standards and libraries for things like NTFS, RDP and memory management, I suspect the rumours aren’t that far from the truth. Bloatware was not a thing then, simply because it couldn’t be.

The closest thing I think that has more recently got the attitude of daring to ask why things are done a certain way, and challenging the norm, has been the Open Source movement. Looking at the demographics of the FOSS and Linux world, I like to think that maybe, just maybe Mr Stallman and Mr Torvalds got this attitude and vision from their own Commodore 64s.

Whatever the answer to that is, and to the endless and sometimes tribal arguments of C64 vs Spectrum, followed by Amiga vs Atari ST, I do know one thing for sure. If it wasn’t for the Commodore 64, my life would have taken a very different route, both professionally and in my hobbies. And I rather like my life. So for that, if nothing else, I will stay eternally grateful to my breadbin, the Commodore 64.

NOTE: Thank you so much to the Retro Computer Museum in Leicester for allowing James Woodcock to take images of the Commodore 64.