Happy Birthday Commodore 64, and Macintosh!

I feel old. Very old. A few weeks back I read a story celebrating 25 years of the Commodore 64. That dull beige little box with a processor speed of 1Mhz represented a turning point for me, the point at which a 13 year old Pete went from gamer to programmer. I had spent the entire summer studying Assembler relentlessly and after much persuading I managed to convince my Dad to buy me a copy of Machine Lightning, the then state of the art in disk based assemblers for Commodore’s baby.

I often look back on those times with a gnawing sense of loss. They were heady days. Almost every month I’d learn of someone pushing a computer to unprecedented new levels and then try to figure out how to do the same myself. It was a time when more than 4 channels of sound from a piece of music on a computer was a breakthrough. I remember the first time I ran up a game with a kicking Rob Hubbard soundtrack, hooking my computer up to my cheap ass stereo to get the music as loud as possible. In hindsight it sounded utter crap, and my Dad let me know that every time I tried to push the volume knob beyond 10. To me though it was incredible, a technological breakthrough, something to be celebrated!

I remember breaking the hardware limit of 8 simultaneous sprites on screen at once, by writing interrupt code that was tied to the actual horizontal position of the screen refresh. It was an optical illusion in many ways, since the little machine really could only display 8 sprites and all we were doing at the time was redisplaying those 8 sprites as the screen refreshed from top to bottom. The very idea that a machine was fast enough to actually figure out where the refresh was happening many times a second and then do something in response was surreal.

The Commodore 64 really marked the birth of the gaming industry as it exists today. There had been numerous home computers and games consoles both before and after that little box, but it was the Commodore, Sinclair/Timex and Apple II that really caused an industry to explode. Gone were the days of scouring classified ads in the back of nerdy computer monthlies for games – now you could actually go into a store and buy one. 9.99 as I recall, for a tape that more often than not I’d have to return because my crappy tape player wouldn’t load the game.

That little machine is the reason I’m here today, sitting on my couch banging out words to post in my blog. Without it I don’t know what I’d be doing with my life right now (but it would probably be something healthier, I’d weigh a little less and I’d probably have a few more friends). Everything I see around me today I know I have because of the time I spent with the Commodore 64.

Today is another anniversary in tech as well. Today, 24 years ago, Apple released the Macintosh. Of course we didn’t have an “Internet” in 1984 and so it would be some considerable time later before I’d get to see the infamous 1984 commercial, or Steve’s legendary launch keynote. I do remember reading about the machine though, probably in PC World magazine, and I do vividly remember going to a monthly computer club meeting and being in awe of some guy that actually showed up with one. I couldn’t get anywhere near it to use it, but what I saw left me breathless. Windows, icons, a mouse. It was like a video game, but for being productive. And the graphics! Hi-Resolution graphics for a user interface, graphics that even rivaled the stuff we were doing in games, and this wasn’t a game at all.

It’s funny – I spent a few minutes yesterday arguing semantics with a young programmer about why Ruby was not compiled, and what the difference between an interpreter and a compiler is. It struck me that there’s a whole generation that will never know the thrill of the discoveries we made back in the 80’s, a whole generation of programmers that don’t know Assembler, and who have never actually measured out the clock cycles of a machine against their lines of code to try to squeeze in some routine in a finite micro second of time between screen refreshes. I think I started to feel really old when I realized that, and today’s anniversary of the Mac, this year’s anniversary of the CBM 64 just serve to reinforce the feeling.

Still, I wouldn’t have it anyway. There’s no way I would want to have missed the thrill of being part of a revolution.