Month: July 2025

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV6SF492hNU.

A marvelous thing I learned today from one of my favorite tech pundits.

But:

Dear John,

This is going to sound like an old man barking across his front lawn at passersby, and it is precisely that.

I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours.

That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my.

I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as brief a form as I can — why it captured so many hearts during the 8-bit era.

The best machines of those days assisted young whippersnappers like me to program our own video games with wonderful color, sound, and graphics.

Prior to the ’64, I had a VIC-20 (which came out in 1980).

Even then, I could compare one of my favorite home video games between the VIC-20 and the Apple II version, and I know which one I preferred.

I cut my teeth programming and reverse engineering video games on the VIC-20. But even though it could present games better than an Apple II, it was seriously limited for its time: not just for its 22-character wide display or its 3.5K of available RAM; more pertinently, it lacked support for sprite graphics, which Atari first brought to home programmers with the Atari 800 and 400 in 1979 as “Player-Missile Graphics.” Player-Missile Graphics had an obtuse implementation that took a lot of creative work to harness. When Commodore introduced the ’64, its sprite graphics were the most approachable implementation of sprites at that time (and really only the third implementation), and made for some incredible graphical capabilities that were unparalleled.

(In addition, the 6581 SID chip gave programmers access to a genuine digital synthesizer, which enabled us to make all sorts of neat things happen, in games or otherwise.)

The Ataris had support for 256 different colors, which was astounding back in that time period, but they could only use those colors in their 160×192 resolution mode; only two colors could be displayed in their 320×192 high resolution mode. While the Commodore 64 only supported 16 colors, it had the ability to use all of them at all times; there was a clever way to use them all even in its high resolution 320×200 mode, which made many games appear much nicer than on the ’64 any other system at the time.

The Apple II of the era (not the IIc or IIgs) had a maximum 280×192 resolution with only 6 colors, no sprites, and no synthesizer chip. To the young game programmers of my generation, that made it…well…suck was the word. You could make better-looking and better-sounding games on a Commodore 64 than on any other machine of that era, and that’s what made it so important to us, and so much better than any competing product of the era.

Because of the weird mix of capabilities of that Commodore computer, the world wound up with this incredibly interesting operating system as well.

Of course, this was later ported to the Apple II, but what a thing it was to have this in our little hands in 1986, and what a marvel of programming it was for its day. There was so much very interesting software made for the Commodore 64, mostly due to its capabilities.

Back to “cheap-feeling and inelegant”: Surely an Apple II felt more substantial than a Commodore 64? Well, it was certainly heavier, but the keyboard actually felt cheaper (and the Bell callout on the G key made it seem like a throwback to the PDP-11 terminal I used a few years prior to my VIC-20) and plasticky-er. To make matters worse, the original Apple II did not have a curved rake like the ’64 did, which made it less ideal for typing. It did make a better sound, though.

Here’s the crux:

Commodore 64 fans were the original “Think Different” crowd. We knew that IBM PCs were junk. They didn’t even have the Apple II’s 6 colors (they had four!…or was it four…) or fun programming accessibility. They had no sprites. They had almost no sound. They were no fun, at all. And they still aren’t. In the overall hierarchy of the day, it was Commodore/Atari, then Apple, then IBM. Kids of the day — programming kids of the day — adored the ’64 because it was a more thoughtful and downright fun machine to use and to program. We also thought it was adorable, well-designed, and less “corporate”* than any Apple II or IBM PC. I know more people who leapt from a Commodore 64 to a Mac than I do who came from an Apple II. There’s a reason for that.

Then the Amiga came out, proving that we were right to adore Commodore.

I have no idea if this can add to your perspective on the ’64, but I hope it does. It was a lovable machine, in the very same way the Mac became two long years later.

(And yes, I bought a Commodore 64 Ultimate: BASIC Beige.)

* Jason Snell took issue with my choice of language here, and I understand. I’m a couple/few years older than Snell and Gruber. To my cohort in my neck of the woods (which was Long Island at the time), Apple IIs were primarily “institutional” computers purchased by schools and libraries. They were perceived as trying to compete with IBM. IBM PC people respected Apple II people much more than Atari or Commodore people, who they disdained. To us back in the day, that was corporate. I recognize that this is only one old man’s reminiscence, and there is no right or wrong here.

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vQpW9XRiyM.

John Gruber had a great post earlier this year about Macintosh System 1.0 with a link to Kevin Fox’s marvelous scan of the original Macintosh user manual.

With all of the recent reminiscence of the early 8-bit era, I am reminded of the early user manuals that came with those machines. My VIC-20 came with a spiral-bound book called “Personal Computing on the VIC-20: A Friendly Computer Guide.” I still have it, along with a large collection of other 8-bit memorabilia.

The manual had lucid writing like this:

And let us not forget magazines like Compute!, Compute!’s Gazette, inCider and Antic.

Old man again: How lucky we were to have this kind of instruction! I miss this kind of writing.

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO1HC8pHZw0.

Yes, a third post.

John Gruber and Jason Snell on the most recent episode of “The Talk Show.”

This was a fun episode, of course. It prompts a few more thoughts, however:

First: The assertion that one of the reasons Commodore was able to ship the C-64 so economically was because it shared one keyboard globally: This is close to true (in a few places around the world, there were aftermarket mods), but there was in fact a Japanese version which, frankly, even I never learned about until well past the era.

Second: The assertion that people chose the Apple II over Commodores or Ataris as a matter of “means.”

My particular Commodore and Atari friends were children in families of means. We didn’t choose our Commodores for cost. (I’m not saying this is a universal truth; I am only sharing my own experience.) Our fathers were all well-paid engineers at defense electronics firms on Long Island making all manner of systems to support Grumman aircraft during the Cold War. My own father proudly worked on things like the Lunar Lander, IFF and JTIDS.

Many of our dads, like my own (whose boss was quite an engineer!) were active IEEE members and the geeks of their own generation. Our fathers generally didn’t care about using our home computers as much as we did (they had crazy cool stuff at the office that we loved to gawk at during open house days once per year), but they did encourage and condition us to look underneath the hood at the technical capabilities of everything we bought. So, look we did, and what we found were the distinguishing technical capabilities I wrote about before. In case you might doubt that hardware engineers of the day were fascinated with Commodore, here’s something to chew on.

Speaking of children with smart parents of the Cold War, back when I was CTO of a pretty cool .com that went the way of many others, there was a period when I did a bit of work with Linus Torvalds, whose uncle was an investor in our company. During an introductory dinner I shared with Linus and Tove, we shared stories of our youth and how we started programming, and I was quite surprised to learn that he, too, started his serious programming on a VIC-20. That seems to be a well-known thing these days, but back then, it was a real moment for me. What a fun dinner that was!

The ’64 was amazing in all the right ways my particular cohort cared about, and we enjoyed the upsides and cleverly compensated for the downsides, which was what everyone found pleasure doing back then anyway.

Which leads me to my third reflection of that era: hardware. Somehow, in much of the recent discussion John’s post stirred in me and others, there hasn’t been much talk of MOS Technology and the fact that Commodore owned them during the most substantial chunk of the 8-bit era. While 6502s were really inexpensive processors (let’s not forget that even Steve Wozniak tallied this into the Apple II design), Commodore, owning CMOS, was somewhat like the Apple of today, controlling the best of the major chip designs of that era, and this certainly had an impact on their ability to deliver their own hardware at more reasonable costs…and to design specialized chips to work alongside their workhorse processor, like the VIC-II and SID chips.

Reflecting on this, the Commodore of 1982 and the Apple of the current era are really the only two personal computer manufacturers who created hardware centered on their very own silicon.

There are so many reasons to admire both Commodore and Apple! I think that’s something for the ages.

For the readers of my regular content: There’s more coming soon to bring a conclusion to the mysterious “Thought Exercise” series I began last year. Please check back soon.