POP quiz: What was the best-selling computer ever? If you guessed the original Apple Macintosh, the IBM PC, or even the old Apple II, you’d probably be off by a few million units. The correct answer is the Commodore 64. During its production run from 1982 to 1993, Commodore sold about 30 million of these computers.
I was fortunate to own a C64 in those heady pre-IBM PC days. My brother and I decided to trade up our old VIC-20 and plunk in a few thousand pesos more to buy the new machine from Computershoppe, a store owned by Paul Aquino.
More than anything else, the C64 got me hooked on computers.
By today’s standards, the C64 was primitive. It used an 8-bit MOS 6510 processor running at 1MHz and had 64K of RAM. The default storage device was a cassette drive, and an optional floppy drive, the 1541, was big, temperamental and slow. The C64 had no hard disk. Nor did it have a monitor. You just plugged the keyboard into a TV and you were good to go.
In contrast, today’s Pentium 4 systems use 32-bit processors running at over 1GHz (that’s a thousand times faster) and typically have 256MB of RAM or more. Hard disks today give you almost instant access to gigabytes of programs and data.
Still, the C64 was a trailblazer 20 years ago. It was the first computer to incorporate a synthesizer chip for high-quality sound, and its built-in graphics system was way ahead of most systems at the time.
Best of all, the C64 was priced attractively—$595 when it was introduced, and $200 when Commodore hit its stride in manufacturing.
Some of the best games I’ve played were on the C64. The Ultima III fantasy, with its wonderful medieval music and mystical story line, and a sci-fi trading game called M.U.L.E. come to mind. But the C64 was more than a game machine—it was a programmable computer.
Its operating system was a version of the programming language BASIC, which made it very easy to write your own programs. There were also commercial applications. I remember writing my early assignments as a reporter for Business Day using a word processor called Paperclip.
Remarkably, the C64 also gave me my first experience with a graphical user interface. A program called GEOS transformed the C64 into a Mac-like system, complete with desktop icons and fancy fonts. I put GEOS to good use, turning out a newsletter called Scumbag—for a local user group that we proudly called SCUM, short for Society of Commodore Users of Manila.
Production of the C64 ended in 1993, and the company went under the following year. Still, there are features about the C64 that I wish some of today’s PCs would emulate.
Because the operating system was hardwired into the computer, the C64 was ready to run the moment you switched it on. I long for those simpler days when I have to wait minutes for a Windows, Linux or Mac PC to boot up.
Clearly aimed at home users, the C64 was extremely easy to set up and use. There was no need to install any software or device drivers. There were no missing DLL files, fonts or drivers to worry about. You just loaded software into memory to start working or playing.
Now these are features that I wish didn’t go out of style.
