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?

The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk

    LOAD "*",8,1

The Programmers' Reference Guide [1] has a good introduction to assembly and machine language, if you want to go deeper.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Users_Guide_1982_Co...

[1] https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...

[2] https://archive.org/details/commodore-1541-disk-drive-users-...

Of the 1980s 8-bit computing era, the Commodore 64 was the "best value" for getting a lot of functionality for the price. It had 64k of RAM when some others only had 16k. It had a really good built-in sound chip with polyphonic sounds (makes it richer sounding for programming video games music and sound effects). Some other computers had cheaper chips with monophonic sound which makes simplistic beeps and tones. It outsold all the other computers like Apple II, Atari 400/800, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc. This meant it had a big ecosystem of 3rd-party add-ons.

The article talks about COMPUTE! magazine. They often had free games where they listed the source code in the magazine pages. The reader would then manually type in the code by hand into the computer and save it to floppy or tape drive. The magazine would have the same game ported to different computers so there would be separate source code listings for Commodore, Atari, etc. The Commodore 64 versions of the game would always end up being the best version to run because of the hardware advantages mentioned above.

https://www.google.com/search?q=compute%21+magazine+program+...

It was the best-selling single model of home computer for a very long time (relatively speaking in a very fast-moving field) in an era where most new models ditched compatibility, and in some countries it totally dominated.

Where I grew up (Norway) you rarely if ever saw Apple's until the Mac, and only the occasional other brand like Amstrad or Spectrum.

In my primary school classes, almost everyone who had a home computer had a Commodore 64. As a result, it was easy to get (pirated) games.

The network effect was strong - having a different computer meant you might have nobody nearby to swap games with. I knew one person - vaguely - with an Amstrad, and one person I knew of at my school had a Texas Instruments machine, and one with a Spectrum, but there were half a dozen kids in my home room alone with Commodore 64's.

It was much more tribal for that reason. If you had a Commodore 64 or Amiga, chances were Atari was "the enemy" even when Jack Tramiel (who founded Commodore) was kicked out of Commodore and bought Atari, and Spectrum's were just laughed at.

Mac and PC's were seen as boring business computers.

It boots into BASIC which makes it really easy to learn BASIC. It feels like a programmable computer even to kids who know nothing about programming, as the only way to get anywhere is to type a command. So it's very easy to start. You can also practice typing straight away, or do colorful 'ASCII art' (actually what people call 'ANSI art' - drawing using colorful text blocks).

OTOH with Windows 95 it's not really clear how to make a program or do something creative. So I'd argue C64 or similar might be a better choices that W95 PC for kids under 15 y.o.

A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.

The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.

For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.

You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.

For me, it was mainly the excellent game library plus a group of friends in the neighborhood who had them so we could swap games and copy them. I did very little programming on it, but did wind up as a reviewer for some small game publisher for while (no idea how I managed this) and, later on, my dad’s business partner gave us a 128 with a modem and I did the BBS thing for a while which was really fascinating at 12 or so.

> If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98.

Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.

It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:

  10 PRINT "RetroTechie was here    ";
  20 GOTO 10

For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).

I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.

Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...

It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.

For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.

(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)

At the time personal computers didn’t do that much, lots of work places had no computers and libraries (in the uk at least) wouldn’t have had a computer you could use.

Commodore 64’s let you play games and do other stuff (write docs/print, make music, make art) they jump started a generation of us onto computers and what we could do with them.

No one realised at the time that eventually you can sit on the toilet and have a video conference with a thousand people so they were what they were, fun, useful things to have that matched the current time and place.

When windows came along we all built pc’s and learned how to use those, generally fighting with sound card drivers.

For many of us, it was our first computer. It was very simple to understand at every level and very hackable. I was very young when I used it, but I learned so much about the internals of computers.

In addition to other comments, Windows 95 came more than a decade after the Commodore 64. The IBM PC at that time cost roughly three -four times as much in my memory, Apple II was almost as much. The Commodore quickly got a large game library , better than competitors. It was a golden age for smaller scale games not requiring the massive teams of the modern AAA photorealistic or open world games - this was during maybe the height of the arcade video game craze when some kids like me would spend oodles of quarters at convenience stores and video arcades. Eventually many of us would switch to Windows 3.1/95/98 for work.

The 6510 CPU was easy to programme in assembler and it was supported by a graphics chip VIC and a sound chip SID who both had some fun tricks up their sleeves (not like a graphics card, much much more simple). For their time and the price they were quite capable and fun to use.

8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.

The C64 was very similar in performance capabilities to the NES, and they share some chipset lineage.

It really was a time of a step change for multimedia software.

The C64 was the first modern, affordable, multipurpose consumer computer with decent sound and graphics (and tons of software, including desktop publishing, business stuff, etc.)-- the NES was the first console doing the same, with of course more of a focus on games. Many of which people still play today.