I Never Expected to Write Three Posts About the 8-Bit Era

🎹 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.