If the headline above brings back memories, you probably once owned a Commodore 64 computer. On Monday, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, will celebrate the C64’s 25th anniversary. Computer pioneers will reflect on the “world’s best-selling single computer model“‘s achievements and contribution to the industry.
CNN, in a series of articles called Commodore 64: still loved after all these years waxed nostalgic over the little box.
Mixing the old and new, Hacked Gadgets Forum tells us about a Pocket Commodore 64 C64 emulator that runs on a Palm computer. It is way cool. There are C64 emelators for many other platforms available from other sources as well.
The Olsen family was an early adopter of the Commodore family of “personal computers”, starting with a VIC 20 that was hot rodded to have 32K of memory. We moved up to the newly introduced C64 when our daughter Erica was six years old. She immediately started programming in the Pilot (25 editing commands, 19 turtle graphics commands and 23 program commands) language. It must have had a positive effect on her as she is now a User Experience Designer for Second Life.
Our first printer was a model 33RO Teletype machine interfaced to the C64. Eventually we added two 1541 disk drives and a 300 baud modem, later replaced with higher speed models.
I actually hacked Phone Man, the Motor City Madman’s infamous “file sharing” program, to find its back door. That gave me instant access to every drive, on every machine, running the app that was connected to a phone line. I have kept that fact secret for over two decades now.
One of these days I need to bring up the old C64 from the basement, or what Peggy calls the Bob Olsen Memorial Computer Museum, and connect it to something.
Some other C64 memories are at My Commodore 64 Secret Life. Or, how about a timeline of C64 historical events.


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