Commodore 64 (C64) was the most popular home computer in the days when you connected your computer to the TV set. This most popular home computer just turns 40 years old.
Commodore C64: The Most Popular Home Computer Ever Turns 40 article tells that this year marks the anniversary of the most popular selling home computer ever, the Commodore 64, which made its debut in 1982. “Note that I am saying “home computer” and not personal computer (PC) because back then the term PC was not yet in use for home computer users.”
Happy Birthday Commodore 64, with Bil Herd
The Commodore 64 is the best-selling home computer of all time — it’s the box that launched a million geeks. In this video Bil Herd walks us through the evolution of 8-bit home computers at his old employer Commodore in the late 1970′s to 1980′s.
The 6502 is at the heart of many of the home computers of the era starting with Atari, Apple, BBC Micro, and of course Commodore. Commodore, under the reins of its founder Jack Tramiel, purchased MOS technologies and became a computer company that owned a chip fabrication plant. Commodore eyed to calculator market, but soon Commodore found itself in the position of being a computer company that could make its own (custom) IC’s, or chips. The VIC-20 was Commodore’s “TI Killer”.
Some amazing chips were combined into a demo and shown to Jack Tramiel, and the decision was made to produce the Commodore C64. The C64 became Commodore’s “Apple Killer” as it was targeted at the market shared with the Apple II. The C64 is listed in the Guinness Book or World Records as the most popular home computer ever sold at 27 million units (although numbers that suggest that somewhat fewer units were sold in actuality). Commodore’s founder Jack Tramiel stated famously that we made “computers for the masses not the classes” with emphasis on selling the hardware at a fair price which would open the door to massive software sales.
I have 10 years ago made a post The Commodore 64 is 30. Read some history from that post and post comments.
66 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://youtu.be/7SPr5S0eEYM?si=thPjH40B9P28gjdX
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/making-the-commodore-sx-64-mini/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Games That Defined The Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is one of the most successful gaming computers ever, and these are the games that helped define it.
https://www.denofgeek.com/games/the-games-that-defined-the-commodore-64/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The first LowSpec Processor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2ZBp9O0mk
For years, an ongoing battle is fought by a group of Engineers to make a product that their industry thought impossible: a processor so cheap it could change the world.
But to make it happen they would have to struggle in ways they could have never expected.
#6502 #mos6502 #mos
0:00 Intro
0:40 An unlikely hero
2:42 Motorola
6:11 Leaving Motorola
7:49 MOS semiconductors
10:07 WesCon
13:12 Trial by Lawsuit
15:14 Commodore
17:29 The Personal Computer
20:00 Apple Computers
23:09 RadioShack
25:26 The Revolution of 1977
Tomi Engdahl says:
6502 VS 6809 VS Z80 CPU Performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5mwMwwM-R0
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Datassette_Encoding
Tomi Engdahl says:
Commodore 64 claimed to outperform IBM’s quantum system — sarcastic researchers say 1 MHz computer is faster, more efficient, and decently accurate
News
By Mark Tyson published 2 days ago
‘Qommodore 64′ born from 2,500 lines of MOS 6502 assembly code.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/quantum-computing/commodore-64-outperforms-ibms-quantum-systems-1-mhz-computer-said-to-be-faster-more-efficient-and-decently-accurate
A paper released during the SIGBOVIK 2024 conference details an attempt to simulate the IBM ‘quantum utility’ experiment on a Commodore 64. The idea might seem preposterous – pitting a 40-year-old home computer against a device powered by 127-Qubit ‘Eagle’ quantum processing unit (QPU). However, the anonymous researcher(s) conclude that the ‘Qommodore 64’ performed faster, and more efficiently, than IBM’s pride-and-joy, while being “decently accurate on this problem.”
At the beginning of the paper, the researchers admit that their ‘Qommodore 64’ project is “a joke,” but, sadly for IBM, its proof of quantum utility was also built upon shaky foundations, and the Qommodore 64 team came up with some convincing-looking benchmarks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/29/you-can-use-visual-studio-code-to-write-commodore-64-assembly/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/04/anniversary-30-years-ago-today-commodore-died
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/30117/how-reliable-is-the-floppy-content-listing-information-on-a-c64
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/using-kick-assembler-and-vs-code-to-write-c64-assembler/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/a-c64-sid-replacement-with-built-in-games/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Commodore 64 music with basic
https://youtu.be/ly5BhGOt2vE?si=yEjgUjYwY3FpgVsL
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/11/are-crt-tvs-important-for-retro-gaming/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using AI To Help With Assembly
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/using-ai-to-help-with-assembly/
Although generative AI and large language models have been pushed as direct replacements for certain kinds of workers, plenty of businesses actually doing this have found that using this new technology can cause more problems than it solves when it is given free reign over tasks. While this might not be true indefinitely, the real use case for these tools right now is as a kind of assistant to certain kinds of work. For this they can be incredibly powerful as [Ricardo] demonstrates here, using Amazon Q to help with game development on the Commodore 64.
Back to the future: Writing 6502 assembler with Amazon Q Developer
In this short post I have some fun with Amazon Q Developer and get it to write code that runs on my virtual Commodore 64
https://community.aws/content/2oEqDGCIsQwoPrL3wjoSReyHnan/back-to-the-future-writing-6502-assembler-with-amazon-q-developer
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/12/15/documented-source-code-for-elite-on-the-c64-bbc-micro-and-others/