Article URL: https://www.goto10retro.com/p/i-owe-my-life-to-the-commodore-64 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945260 Points: 61 # Comments: 40

Enjoy this article by Sung J. Woo. It may focus on the Commodore 64, but I think it applies to most of us that were around in the 80s. — Paul The slogan was on the back page of Compute!, a magazine I often bought from the video game store of the strip mall where my parents operated a gift shop. The advert displayed a trio of competing personal computers on the top half of the page, the Apple IIe, the Tandy TRS-80 III, and the IBM PC, the cost of each machine near a thousand dollars or well above it. The bottom half starred a family of three staring at a computer monitor showing the planet Saturn: mother on the left, father on the right, and the son in the middle with his fingers over the brownie-brown keyboard. “The Commodore 64. Under $600,” the final lines of the ad read. “You can’t buy a better computer at twice the price.” I sighed, heavily. Six hundred was cheaper than a grand, but it was still six hundred. As a twelve-year-old boy who got paid five bucks a day for helping out the family business, it might as well have been a million dollars. A month later, I bought the October 1983 issue. Same exact ad on the back, except one enormous difference: “The Commodore 64. Under $300.” Two months later, it dropped under two hundred, an eye-catching $199, at our neighborhood Toys R Us, just in time for Christmas. My family and I did not celebrate Christmas traditionally, as we were entirely too busy. For many retailers, Christmas is where the majority of sales happen for the entire year, and we were no exception. The whole month was crazy, but in a good way – at the end of the holiday season, my father would stack the bills on the living room coffee table, and it was like something out of a movie, literal pillars of paper currency. If there was any hope of having my own hands hover over a computer keyboard, this was the moment to seize, right after the new year began, before the household belt tightened again. Did I ever seize the hell out of it! The excuse was that I had moved up to middle school, sixth grade, and a computer would enhance my future education. Did my parents buy my story? Possibly, because they bought the computer, plus the Datasette for another seventy dollars. It didn’t take long for my ruse to be exposed, when weeks later, I spent my life savings and forked over thirty dollars for Pooyan, a video game where I played an arrow-slinging mother pig who shot down wolves floating down from the sky on balloons. When my dad saw me unplug the joystick from my Atari 2600 and plug it into my Commodore, he knew he’d been had. Except this wasn’t true at all. This 8-bit computer with 64 kilobytes of random access memory – to give you an idea how microscopic that is in our now very modern times, my Google Pixel smartphone has a quarter of a million times more space in its silicon brain. This breadbin-shaped plastic box, this fully-functional personal computer that a lower middle class family like ours could afford – if my father were still alive, I’d tell him that the Commodore 64 he and my mother bought for me more than forty years ago has given me a life worth living. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but holding down a job that pays the bills is as essential as essential can get, and I wouldn’t be a Lead Application Developer for a Fortune 500 company if I hadn’t grasped the rudiments of computing from my C64, and not in the way most people might imagine. I never learned beyond the basics of BASIC, the programming language that came with the computer. Instead, what made me the coder that I am today are the pirated games I played. These games didn’t come with any instructions, so figuring out how to play them was often a bigger challenge than the game itself. That tenacious act of discovery, of trying and failing and eventually succeeding, over and over again, would become my full-cycle programming bedrock. Who would’ve thought unearthing all the keystrokes for Micro-League Baseball would one day lead to developing RESTful web services?