As managing editor of In yet another sign that I'm getting older, CNN has a fun story today about the Commodore 64, a personal computer introduced -- yes, really -- 25 years ago.
The "Guinness Book of World Records" lists the Commodore 64 is the best-selling single computer model, according to CNN's report. From 1982-83, some 17 million were sold. The 64-kilobyte marvel sold for $595.
"It may have not been the most sophisticated computer, but it did have a lot of personality and it was lovable and remains loveable," said Harry McCracken, vice president and editor-in-chief of PC World magazine. "It was the right machine for the time."
I never had a Commodore 64, but I do have (somewhat mixed) memories of another PC of that era, the TRS-80. We had a TRS-80 with its super-unsophisticated cassette tape-drive, at my high school, way back in the 1970s. We used to to do sophisticated things, like count to infinity and play games. Later, at one of my newspaper jobs, we had more sophisticated models of what we called the "Trash 80," which we used for a few years as word processors.
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., will celebrate the Commodore 64's 25th anniversary on Dec. 10. If you're feeling nostalgic for dinosaurs like the Commodore 64 and the TRS-80, check out PC World's feature, "Five things we don't miss about old-school computing."
Comments (2)
If you consider the Sinclair ZX80 (introduced 1980) and ZX81 (introduced 1981) models as personal computers, then they date even further back. Interesting details of the performance and applications with these machines can be found on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80
and on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX81
These machines were really lightweight. Later "portable" DOS machines became really cumbersome as they grew in capacity, using so much power that they had no batteries, yet were extremely heavy compare with today's laptops, palmtops, etc. And you sometimes had to adjust the screen contrast on the monochrome screens between different programs, using complex key combinations, in order to see all of the display.
And in term of software, Harvard Graphics launched commercial DOS presentation software not long after those early machines, already in 1986:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics
What DOS software of those days could and could not do can easily form the subject of yet another blog however. You could run many of these programs on a 1.44MB floppy, some with a 0.72MB or even a 0.35MB floppy. The 2.88MB floppy never had a chance to get widely established, however.
It has taken development of the USB stick to make modern programs equally portable as the little but still quite effective DOS programs, although the floppies could not also be read by all of the other PCs, even if they were also running on DOS too.
Posted by David Vink | December 9, 2007 7:57 PM
Posted on December 9, 2007 19:57
Don,
It's funny (and timely) that I came across this post about the Commodore PET 64 - we just put up a short video on searching for PET and in search results on Google(TM), comes up the Commodore Pet 64 which brought me back in time...
My brother had one and he'd anxiously arrive home from school, pop in a 60 minute cassette tape and return after dinner to play pong.
http://www.ides.com/modplas/2007/week19.asp
Thanks for the memory!
Posted by Nathan Potter | December 13, 2007 6:24 PM
Posted on December 13, 2007 18:24