I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".

When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC and so on.

[1] yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.

I am curious how many of you other C64 greybeards got exposed to a language called COMAL (not a typo) on the C64 back in the day?

I could probably write a blog post with the opposite title, sth. like "My life got ruined by the Commodore C64". Equally hyperbolic, the narrative would go something like this: I was the exact same child/teen as the guy from the other blog, but the problem from 2026 me is that I got lured into IT through games and BASIC, and now I so wish I had chosen a different career. Alas, it's all I know how to do, and at this point in my life, changing careers is not a viable option.

So, thanks C64!

I still love you, though...

I can't describe that mystery feeling when getting bunch of random cassette tapes from my cousins with a giant catalog of programs on them, some demos, some games, some wild stuff and just casually browsing them. All I had was a title if I was lucky. Then the fun stuff of calibrating the tape head :) Great memories.

I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.

It was fun, but primitive, when I learned Pascal at university I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments!

I grew up with a C64, and the story resonated with me. Not as much about getting pirates games to run, but more trying to play the latest games on our old 386 which came after the C64.

A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.

I wanted an Apple II so badly and thought I was getting the short-end-of-the-stick with a C64 but I am so happy (to this day) that my first machine at home was C64.

I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).

Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain). In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)

My parents were too cheap for the C64 and I got the VIC20 instead.

Major bummer. In 20 columns.

s/Commodore 64/Apple IIe/

My first machine was an Oric 1, I was 8 years old, it was 1982 - Never looked back ^_^

I'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?

> These games didn’t come with any instructions, so figuring out how to play them was often a bigger challenge than the game itself.

Ah yes, the "special compilations" on TDK D90s swapped in the playground ;-)

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