Many people will not agree with the statement in this day and age of Gb Ram, GHz processors, Terabytes of HDDs and so forth but I am still convinced this is the case. No computer including the Apple and PC have had such a fundamental impact as the C-64 had. Apple II sold, the mackintosh sold but the C-64 flooded the market.
As a follow-up computer from the Vic 20 the Commodore 64 its price lead to a revolution in terms of Computers at the time. The computer was cheap enough for many kids or rather their parents to afford and millions of kids learned to programme computers like had never been seen before. Name even one other computer where the users in their teenage years could outdo the professional programmes in ingenuity to get more out of a machine than it was designed for.
– The Sound generator called SID was somehow re-programmed to produce music and even speech. -It was supposed to be impossible and had some simple sounds programmed into it from the beginning but the users found a wealth of ways to get sounds out of it. The computer thus had music when PC’s could only .. Beep. All C-64 Games and intro’s and so forth has a very characteristic sound in the music. A sample can be heard on the below link.
– Some users managed to re-programme the 1541 Disc- station as well as the cassette player to turbo-load files 10 -30 times faster than was conceived possible. Not through compressing files but actually redo the whole loader software.
Rather than using the intended language Basic kids learned assembler and started making computer programmes and games at a rate that was virtually impossible and the amount of Games on the market was endless in full color, with music and sequence loading to make them ever more complex while only using … 64 kb of Ram.
There must be atleast 2 generations of kids who learned the computer programming through the machine and who still work in the industry programming the modern day computers. When I then look through the gaming forums in various places I still also see 40 – 50 year old guys playing games still. Surely more advanced than in those days but the change was so dramatic for those guys that even today we are a huge number that continue to play computer games reminiscent of how the computer age in terms of the general kid started across the globe. I had already had a VIC-20 and a Spectravideo 318 while a friend of mine started out on the ZX81. Once i started summer work at a company we had the standard small PC that needed a floppy to boot up. Even a brick laptop that was large as a house in those days. Those with either an Amber or green single color screen with more or less bright characters as the latest inventions.
I still remember making a school-project report with a friend on the C-64 and wow we had access to an Epson Dot Matrix printer so we could print out our report and then manually paste in our diagrams and pictures somewhere on the page.
At the place where I was doing summer-work I sent a whole summer testing coded locks for door entry. Had to punch in the generic code test that all relays opened or closed and alarms would ring if there was errors and so forth. the process was fully manual. After having spent the whole summer pressing 10,000 of thousands of key presses I asked the company owner if I could not automate the process buy building an interface and making a programme to do the test.
He was very surprised and hmm said ok and how would I do that. I told him, give me 500 USD if I can show a finished product and please pay for the material I need in electronics. A few optocouplers and so forth. The rest of the components I could grab at work as we had just about anything else needed. And o by the way u need to buy a C-64 if I succeed so we have a computer for it in the office.
I went home and on weekends while being back in school made the design on the I/O port setup needed. As the LPT (parallel port) could be programmed for individual inputs or outputs of high and low signals and I had found a description of the same in a magazine I tested it out. I had already built a CW (morse code) keyer using only “Basic as the language” just for calling CQ CQ de SM7PKK for the cmputer in a similar way how difficult could it be.
After about a month I had written the full test program , again in Basic as I could not get my head around the assembler programming. press key 1, 2,3,4,5. In between check that each key beeps thus send ringer low. check if port x went low, if not print message on screen that relay is not working for opening door. I had to build in delays and whatever as it would go too fast for the system. So initially it was like same speed as I would press the buttons.
Then I took it to the office and showed the boss and he was amazed. We did some more testing and adjusted the timings as short as we could to speed up the process. He was happy and I had less keys to press and was 500 USD richer.
We used the system for about 7 years before he asked if I could not re-write the programme on a PC as the C-64 was by then obsolete and the unit we had ready for the scrapyard. As I did not have knowledge on programming PC’s I asked a friend to help me and we re-did the programme in C on a PC which lead to new complexities as PC’s had so many different processor speeds that we had to redo after the initial programming. That software system and the I/O ports for that was in use for another 10 years before the company stopped producing the product.