I have been into computing for many years and far longer than some people have been alive. When I first got into it there were only mainframes and punch cards. The cards were programmed by punching holes into them in the correct positions and then the cards were fed into the computer to load the program. It was awkward and time consuming, because it was not that easy to find mistakes and because of this programmers sometimes had to program cards many times over. It is unbelievable how far we have come in this area. When the first usable home computers came out it was like a miracle happened. The highlight for me came with the Commodore 64. What made this stand out was not only its ease of use since it could be programmed with a simple basic language, but also the fact it had the same amount of memory as the mainframe being used by General Motors at the time which was 64 kb of ram. This machine went on to become the biggest selling computer of all time. In its time it was selling over 2 million units every year.

One of the things I remember is how relatively few parts failed in the early days. This is not to say we didn’t have failing parts. Let me give you an example. I have had two ViewSonic monitors and both failed in just over a year. They were flat screens and modern. This is why I will never buy another ViewSonic. I am still using a Commodore monitor made for the Commodore 64. It is a composite monitor and connected to game machines my grandchildren play and it is still running perfectly. We are talking about a monitor which is over 30 years old. One of the devices which did fail a lot were joysticks. They did take a beating however so I can understand this. The same was true for mouses. Yes mouses is the plural of a computer mouse, it isn’t mice. They had a ball inside them and had to be run on a mouse pad. As you used them dirt from the pad would build up around the ball forcing you to have to take it apart and clean it and sometimes it just wouldn’t work anymore for various reasons.

I remember one accessory which made me very excited. It was just an ordinary tape recorder but it could be attached to my Commodore 64 and programs I wrote could be saved on it to be loaded again into the computer. It was the forerunner of the disk drives. In the old days tape drives were also used on the mainframes and huge tape drives would whirl until they saved their programs and then whirl again as they were looking for where the programs were that were going to be loaded into the computer. The problem with tape drives was everything on them was sequential. This meant you had to pass through everything stored in front of what you wanted to get to it. Think of a straight road with several cities on it. You might have to pass through some of them to get where you were going.

One of the accessories for the Commodore 64 was a modem. It would allow you to use your telephone line to connect to websites which were more like FTP sites. The modem was painfully slow, so slow you might have to leave it running all night just to download a small program. Even then there was a problem, because it would disconnect many times and you would have to start your download over. It makes me wonder why we ever downloaded anything now that I think about it. As time went by Commodore introduced a floppy drive to replace the tape drive. It took a 5 1/4 inch floppy. It wasn’t very fast because Commodore hadn’t updated their serial bus from their previous computer the Vic 20. It also had other problems in aligning itself. Some say the drive mechanism was faulty, unlike the Commodore 64 itself which seemed to be almost indestructible.

While the computer had an advertised 64 kb of memory, some of it was used up by the operating system so there was only 39,000 bites plus left for user programs. This was still far more than other computers of the day such as the Texas Instrument TI-99/4 which only had a total combined memory of 16,245 bytes.
One of the big deals was being able to attach a printer to the computer. A printer with a few pins would print text which was not exactly crisp. We thought it was great. There were other printers however made by people like Okidata which could actually print in color. They used multicolor ribbons. Commodore eventually repackaged the Okimate 10 color printer as the Commodore MCS 820 dot matrix printer. As years went by and I had an Amiga computer I acquired one of the first inkjet printers. It was a very heavy machine which used rather large dots of inks. It was not very good at graphics, but it did have one feature I would like to see on inkjet printers today. You could push on a tiny air pump which would clear the path for the ink so it wouldn’t clog and always work.

There were expansion modules which plugged into your Commodore 64. An example was the Commodore 1700 Ram expansion. This gave you an additional amount of 245 kilobytes of memory. One module was called the Magic Voice. It had external sound ports and was for speech synthesis. The cartridge allowed your computer to not only talk, but allowed some game cartridges to talk as the game played. Some of the other cartridges expanded sound and allowed you to play on a music keyboard.

The Commodore 64 was no doubt the breakthrough computer of its day and reigned supreme for several years until Commodore produced the Amiga computer the best computer of its day. If it wasn’t for bad company management and poor timing in the release of new products, the Commodore Corporation would still be in business today.