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Sep 10
My first computer was a Commodore Plus 4. It was quickly replaced by the Commodore 64, which was better supported.
More accurately, I suppose, I should call it The Family’s First Computer. My sister is about four years older than me, so the computer was more for her then me. She even dabbled in computer programming in high school before realizing it wasn’t her thing. It was, indeed, mine.
I remember all those hours spent in the 80s retyping in programs printed in magazines like COMPUTE!’S GAZETTE and ENTER and COMMODORE MAGAZINE. I remember fiddling with them to see how they worked and how they changed. I remember buying Jim Butterfield’s book on programming Machine Language Code for the Commodore 64 so I could learn to program more complicated things. I didn’t get all the concepts — I wasn’t even in high school yet and those were things best left till college — but I did a lot of things with it. I learned the concepts of algebra from computers. When it came time to do things like add x and y, the concepts weren’t foreign to me.
I used that computer until I graduated high school in 1994. I would type up and print out (on a wretchedly loud Commodore dot matrix printer) all my homework and school papers with it. All in all, that little $200 computer (or whatever the price was around Christmas of 1982) gave me 12 years. I can’t say that about any other computer I’ve ever used. I’m on computer #3 since 1995 right now.
Now, the prototype of that machine is going up for auction. You can see pictures of it at WIRED.
The most remarkable thing for me in the one picture is the monitor showing Quantum Link. That was the on-line service available only to Commodore users in the mid- to late 1980s. It eventually was bought by a smaller on-line company looking to expand its base of phone numbers and customers. Perhaps you’ve heard of AOL?
The modem was a 300/1200 fireball of speed in a large beige cartridge that plugged into the back of the C=64 unit. And for “only” $6/hour, you could post to message boards, create ASCII art, download programs, and more. The cheaper alternative was the web of local BBSes. The one I frequented most often I can still remember the phone number for (it ended 5956). I’ve forgotten the name of it already — the SysOp was Bacchus and the name was wine-related (”The Wine Cellar”?) — but I spent plenty of time dialed in there. And those systems only had one or two phone lines.
The Commodore 64 made one last big comeback for me in college. In my senior year, I took a course in computer graphics. For our final, we had to program something to show off our programming skills. I reprogrammed from scratch an old C=64 game I remembered playing for hours and hours. I think it was called “Rockfall.” Simple two dimensional game, but I got so into it that I also programmed a level editor for it.
Shortly after that, the C=64 finally met its doom in a massive attic-cleaning blitz. I took some final pictures of it and the box it came in, though. I still have some pictures I took of the computer sitting in the computer lab at school, but I’d have to scan those in.
Wow, this all started with a simple link to a WIRED story. Now look where we are. I’m about to get weepy. Jeez. Never underestimate the power of a boy’s first computer in this day and age.
Sep 10, 2003 @ 09:25:36
Back in 1988, in my sophomore year at college, two guys on my dormitory floor had C=64s. One was my roommate. Many potential study hours were wasted playing the games in his massive library, stored on over fifty 5.5 inch disks. Thank goodness those old Atari VCS joysticks were compatible and still relatively easy to find. Oddly enough, my roommate never used the computer for its intended purpose — schoolwork.
The other guy was the one we nicknamed “Curvebuster,” due to his uncanny and irritating ability to bust the curves on all of the Calculus and Chemistry exams. He had lost a roommate and lived in the room alone, spending countless early mornings going “online” and visiting something called the “internet,” where he would “chat” for hours with the guys on the network at Princeton and MIT and who knows where. I once watched, dumbfounded, as he typed words onto his screen and someone, somewhere, typed words in reply. I had bragged to him once that I had an Apple Macintosh at home (the first model from 1983), and he snorted “That’s nothing, when I go home for the summer, I’m getting rid of this C=64 and I’m getting an AMIGA.” I tried to buy the C=64 from him (because by then I had copied all of my roommates games) but he refused. Still have the disks, somewhere.
JLK
Sep 10, 2003 @ 13:56:49
I wanted an Amiga 500 so badly back then. I remember when they had AMIGA commercials on TV around Christmas time. I think it was 1989. Those things had HARD DRIVES! What a cool concept. In many ways, those computers were just as far ahead of their time as the C=64s were. Remember — BABYLON 5 did some of their first season special effects work on AMIGAs….
And the old 5.5″ floppy. It’s a relic of the past now, with the 3.25″ disc soon to follow, I’d imagine. I could probably do a lookback at the glory days of the 100 MB Zip Drive already, too, come to think of it. I just used one to transfer files from my mother’s old Win95 computer to her new Win2000, though. Came in handy.
I remember taking the large floppies and cutting an extra notch on the side so I could record to both sides.
Did you play a lot of those Epic Olympics games? Those were huge by me.
-Augie
Sep 10, 2003 @ 22:51:05
My first computer was a Vic 20. It’s still around here — somewhere — along with a couple of games.
Sep 12, 2003 @ 00:52:51
I started out with an Atari 800. That BASIC cartridge got a lot of use.