Commodore 64

[harnesslover]

I admit it, I was a Commodore 64 addict when I was younger..

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/12/07/c64/index.html

[RaceBookJoe]

Hey, you are showing your age haha. Dont forget about the TRS-80, with those big 5 1/4 " flippys. It is truly amazing how for technology progressed.

[kitts]

I had an Atari 800 with a CARTRIDGE input.

[harnesslover]

Hey, you are showing your age haha. Dont forget about the TRS-80, with those big 5 1/4 " flippys. It is truly amazing how for technology progressed.

I remember the TR80, where they had the baseball game where you pulled the stick back and let it go.. classic

Floppys?!?!? Those were for the rich people, I had the tape recorder for years..

And was I the only one that bought the computer magazine, flipped to the back, spent 3 hours typing in 700 lines of programming only to see a ball bounce on the screen?

[GaryG]

It had a mickey mouse word processor called Paper Clip with a 40 column screen format.

[gillenr]

I added dual, double-sided 5.25" floppy drives to my CoCo for $500!

[JustRalph]

The commodore could have been the best thing down the pipe. It was in its day. The owners of the company absconded with all the money.........and I think they are still looking for them..........

[Tom]

I bought a used Commadore that came with a bunch of Sartin tapes. It was rally a good computer fot the day. Probably as good as VISTA! :rolleyes::bang:

I had a CoCo, too - my "word processer" had a choice - all caps or all lower case. If youpulled the cartridge out before the computer shut down, it would burnit out! Ipaid $500 for it and a couple years laters, saw one at Radio Shack on a clearance table for $19.99!

And of course, I had a Tandy 1000 - "Tandy....it's a Dandy!"

[PaceAdvantage]

I never had a C64 or an Apple. I had basically everything else at that time.....Tandy (8086 running at 8mhz.....8mhz!!!!), TI 99/4A (Bill Cosby), Timex Sinclair (remember THAT one?), Atari 800xl (awesome gaming machine for that time).....

[mrharness]

I never had a C64 or an Apple. I had basically everything else at that time.....Tandy (8086 running at 8mhz.....8mhz!!!!), TI 99/4A (Bill Cosby), Timex Sinclair (remember THAT one?), Atari 800xl (awesome gaming machine for that time).....

Yup! Had a Timex Sinclair...and still have one or two around that I think might still work. I kept buying used ones, the membrane keyboards kept cracking, I used them so much. 16K (with optional module). LOL

[headhawg]

I was a huge Atari fan back in the day. We used to refer to the C64 as the "Commode-door 64". :)

Owned a Atari 130XE personally, but used to play games on my brother's 800. Had a whole 48KB of ram. I remember an instructor coming into the college computer lab and bragging about his new Mac with 256K ram. A friend of mine turned to me and said incredulously, "What are you going to do with 256K????" :D

However, Commodore did turn things around with the Amiga. Phenomenal machine. The best computer I ever owned. And Just Ralph has it right about the crooks at Commodore: Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali. Ran the company into the ground. They didn't understand people's passion/loyalty to a computer and basically their business model was that computers=toasters=televisions -- if we could sell the product and make money we will.

The other poor decision that was made at Commodore was to compete with IBM clones for the corporate market. They didn't want to butt heads with Apple for the education market and they didn't want the Amiga to be known as a game machine. People would never use their computers for games or entertainment, would they? :bang:

[equicom]

The problem for the Amiga was the growing popularity of dedicated gaming consoles. Considering that the Amiga didn't really do much else (not the fault of the computer, but of the stranglehold that IBM and Microsoft had - well, still have to a large extent - on the computer market, especially at the business end of town) than play games, but lacked a lot of the convenience features of a dedicated console, it would eventually have become extinct anyway if it did not grow and adapt to the market, plus their price (at the time) was too high compared to other systems such as Acorn or Oak computers (RISC rox).

The Amiga is not totally extinct. You can still buy them! Plus there is much more software available now for them than there ever was when they were sold retail!

Besides, what geek could resist owning a computer with a name that translates to "girl friend". With what has happened to the Internet since graphical browsers were introduced in the early 90's, this name would be more appropriate than ever for the computers of many people!

[tupper]

The Amiga is not totally extinct. You can still buy them! Plus there is much more software available now for them than there ever was when they were sold retail!

Amiga OS4.0 for Classic Amigas was released a few days ago: http://www.acube-systems.com/eng/news.php?id=18

[headhawg]

The problem for the Amiga was the growing popularity of dedicated gaming consoles. Considering that the Amiga didn't really do much else (not the fault of the computer, but of the stranglehold that IBM and Microsoft had - well, still have to a large extent - on the computer market, especially at the business end of town) than play games, but lacked a lot of the convenience features of a dedicated console, it would eventually have become extinct anyway if it did not grow and adapt to the market, plus their price (at the time) was too high compared to other systems such as Acorn or Oak computers (RISC rox).I've already stated what the problem was for the Amiga -- a bad business model and crooks at the upper executive level. (If I recall correctly, some of the company's meetings were held in the Cayman Islands.) The Amiga 1000 was heralded as the next best thing by many in the industry when it was introduced. It completely blew away any PC or Mac.

And gaming consoles did not kill the PC game market (if fact it grew tremendously), so what makes you think that it would have had a greater affect on the Amiga market?

If the Amiga had enough units sold there was no reason that it couldn't run the software that was "popular" back then. In fact there were Amiga versions of Word Perfect and other productivity apps. Spreadsheets are not that tricky. And to address your comment about not growing and adapting to the market... Well, what long-term successful product/company doesn't have to do that?? (Insert a M$ joke here.)

The Amiga even had the proverbial "killer app" -- the Video Toaster produced by NewTek. For about $10K you could do what Silicon Graphics stations could do, and they cost $100,000!!! Now it might look primitive by today's standards, but the graphics for 1st season of Babylon 5 were done with the Toaster.

[Boats]

Tonight the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is having Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, Apple's Steve Wozniak discuss the C64.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/10/BUHDTQDRE.DTL&type=tech

This is the computer I wrote my first handicapping program on. I would pack it up and take it to Mike Levine's handicapping contests. Where, by the way, in May 1983 I tied for 2nd palce in the consisitency division out of 600 players and won $7,500.