Commodore 64, my old friend

Have you ever thought about how much we use the innerweb, a modern technological tool, for satiating our hunger for nostalgia? You really need not click much further before you stumble onto sites that allow you to find a lost love, look up information on childhood tv shows, or even listen to your favorite song dating back to 8th grade year. Aside from corresponding with family, catching up on news stories, and ridding my inbox of pleas from financially displaced Nigerians, I spend a lot of my online time looking for information on people or things that were around long before there ever was an internet.

My recent walk down memory lane led me back to that old chestnut, the Commodore 64.

My first real introduction to personal computing came at a time when War Games was showing on HBO and Hall and Oates' Private Eyes was playing on Atlanta's Top 40 radio station, Power 99. Ronald Reagan was president, and the Tonight Show starred Johnny Carson. I knew people who greased up Rubik's Cubes with Vaseline in order to more quickly come up with the solution. Sadly, Ronald Reagan , Johnny Carson and Power 99 are now dead. The Rubik's Cube still lives on thanks to some partnered marketing between Target stores and Dustin Hoffman's expected box office flop, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, a.k.a. Willy Ishtar and the Toy Factory. We still got Vaseline too. I was 12 years old at the time. The year was 1984. How Orwellian!

While my family boasted a personal computer at this time, we wouldn't get an actual monitor for another two or three years. In the meantime, our Commodore was hooked up to an old black and white television set. A disk drive was another luxury we did without, instead making do with a tape drive that used standard audio cassettes to store data. Often I'd wait for almost an hour for a program to fully load from one of those tapes. Sometimes it worked; other times my patience was rewarded with that daunting message LOAD ERROR followed by a READY prompt and a blinking cursor. In other words, no program.

Each month we got a copy of Compute's Gazette and it was from the back pages of one issue that I ordered my first modem. 300 baud and that was big time back in the day, kids. With a modem the Commodore 64 served as a portal into the world beyond where you could find bootlegged software, MIDI music and my first introduction to cyber pr0n, much of which consisted of naughty pictures made up of ASCII characters. Mind you, this was back in the day before we had cool terms like pr0n or even cyber for that matter.

BBS's (or bulletin board services for those not in the know) were community run. Some guy who was geekier and more computer savvy than you dedicated one of his terminals to man the calls coming in from people throughout the area. Members exchanged messages, programs and text files. Because it tied up the phone line, the middle of the night was the best time to log on. I dreaded call waiting because an incoming call would bump you off right in the middle of a huge file transfer.

Fast forward to modern times and the innerweb is riddled with sites dedicated to everything dealing with the Commodore, from the synthetic tinny music it produced to the pixellated pictures featured in the most popular games. Some people still have one of the old terminals around and use it to run a model train layout or operate an amateur radio. You can even download an emulator that turns your bells and whistles Y2K compliant machine into a replica of a Commodore 64.

Careful with this last one though. This isn't the first time I've fallen prey to the Commodore 64 nostalgia, and the last time I took a stroll down this stretch of memory lane, I downloaded a similar program onto a work computer that wouldn't terminate. Like something from a Dr. Who episode my IBM classroom computer refused to display anything other than the welcome screen from a Commodore 64. I even tried turning the computer on and off a few times. Same thing. I was stuck in 1984.

I eventually had to confess my misdoings to the technology coordinator who in turn had to get a guy from the county level to come in and fix my computer. The guy who fixed it looked like he was probably too young to have ever seen a Commodore 64. He made the repair in a matter of 20 seconds and I felt stupid. Oh well, I was back to downloading non-work-related software that afternoon.

The Commodore came from a golden age and a quick perusal of eBay shows that for a mere $25 you can get one of the original antiques complete with a disk drive, a modem, a joystick and lots of software to boot. Or for $35 you can get a tshirt that says Commodore 64 whiz kid. I gotta confess that although the Commodore held a fond place in my heart for many years, I wouldn't want to go back to the days of only 64K ram and 38911 basic bytes free whatever that meant. I like my high-speed innerweb and streaming video.

I might get that Commodore 64 whiz kid tshirt though.