Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 9th Dec 2007 21:44 UTC, submitted by Bobthearch
Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever. "There was something magical about the C64," says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden."
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Member since:
2006-06-20
I'm into computers thanks to the Commodore 64 my father bought back in 1986. I think the most impressive feature of the C64 was the SID 6581 chip. The sounds are awesome and none of the modern synthesizers can achieve the dirty, particular fat sounds of that little piece of hardware created 25 years ago. This was in part due to the fact that the engineers were trying to reach the chip design deadline and introduced many "bugs", smart approaches and so. In later revisions (such as the 6581-R4 and 8580) many things were fixed, but the classical filter sound of the original chip was lost. (Commodore128 users can say a lot about the weak 8580).
The Commodore 64 was designed to be a good computer, but it was designed to be CHEAP. If you analyze the computer architecture, you'll see e.g, that bizarre interactions between the VICII and 6510 CPU (for example the video chip would take over the system bus for DMA transfer thus halting the CPU for a very large number of cycles).
IMHO, the C64 is a piece of art of a nostalgic age where making a home computer was simply not assembling third-party components, but designing a cost/performance effective architecture from start. The Commodore 64 is an incredible piece of engineering.
Edited 2007-12-10 06:48