Drew Saur on the Commodore 64

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV6SF492hNU.

A marvelous thing I learned today from one of my favorite tech pundits.

But:

Dear John,

This is going to sound like an old man barking across his front lawn at passersby, and it is precisely that.

I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours.

That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my.

I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as brief a form as I can — why it captured so many hearts during the 8-bit era.

The best machines of those days assisted young whippersnappers like me to program our own video games with wonderful color, sound, and graphics.

Prior to the ’64, I had a VIC-20 (which came out in 1980).

Even then, I could compare one of my favorite home video games between the VIC-20 and the Apple II version, and I know which one I preferred.

I cut my teeth programming and reverse engineering video games on the VIC-20. But even though it could present games better than an Apple II, it was seriously limited for its time: not just for its 22-character wide display or its 3.5K of available RAM; more pertinently, it lacked support for sprite graphics, which Atari first brought to home programmers with the Atari 800 and 400 in 1979 as “Player-Missile Graphics.” Player-Missile Graphics had an obtuse implementation that took a lot of creative work to harness. When Commodore introduced the ’64, its sprite graphics were the most approachable implementation of sprites at that time (and really only the second implementation), and made for some incredible graphical capabilities that were unparalleled.

(In addition, the 6581 SID chip gave programmers access to a genuine digital synthesizer, which enabled us to make all sorts of neat things happen, in games or otherwise.)

The Ataris had support for 256 different colors, which was astounding back in that time period, but they could only use those colors in their 160×192 resolution mode; only two colors could be displayed in their 320×192 high resolution mode. While the Commodore 64 only supported 16 colors, it had the ability to use all of them at all times; there was a clever way to use them all even in its high resolution 320×200 mode, which made many games appear much nicer than on the ’64 any other system at the time.

The Apple II of the era (not the IIc or IIgs) had a maximum 280×192 resolution with only 6 colors, no sprites, and no synthesizer chip. To the young game programmers of my generation, that made it…well…suck was the word. You could make better-looking and better-sounding games on a Commodore 64 than on any other machine of that era, and that’s what made it so important to us, and so much better than any competing product of the era.

Because of the weird mix of capabilities of that Commodore computer, the world wound up with this incredibly interesting operating system as well.

Of course, this was later ported to the Apple II, but what a thing it was to have this in our little hands in 1986, and what a marvel of programming it was for its day. There was so much very interesting software made for the Commodore 64, mostly due to its capabilities.

Back to “cheap-feeling and inelegant”: Surely an Apple II felt more substantial than a Commodore 64? Well, it was certainly heavier, but the keyboard actually felt cheaper (and the Bell callout on the G key made it seem like a throwback to the PDP-11 terminal I used a few years prior to my VIC-20) and plasticky-er. To make matters worse, the original Apple II did not have a curved rake like the ’64 did, which made it less ideal for typing. It did make a better sound, though.

Here’s the crux:

Commodore 64 fans were the original “Think Different” crowd. We knew that IBM PCs were junk. They didn’t even have the Apple II’s 6 colors (they had four!…or was it four…) or fun programming accessibility. They had no sprites. They had almost no sound. They were no fun, at all. And they still aren’t. In the overall hierarchy of the day, it was Commodore/Atari, then Apple, then IBM. Kids of the day — programming kids of the day — adored the ’64 because it was a more thoughtful and downright fun machine to use and to program. We also thought it was adorable, well-designed, and less “corporate” than any Apple II or IBM PC. I know more people who leapt from a Commodore 64 to a Mac than I do who came from an Apple II. There’s a reason for that.

Then the Amiga came out, proving that we were right to adore Commodore.

I have no idea if this can add to your perspective on the ’64, but I hope it does. It was a lovable machine, in the very same way the Mac became two long years later.