I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
the computer of my youth, reborn
Huge thanks to Paul Lefebvre for letting me guest post on Goto 10: Retro Computing & Gaming:
It’s my origin story! Seriously. This 8-bit computer shaped so much of my life, and it all began here:
And now, 42 years later, it has made its triumphant return:
If you’d rather listen to me read my article, you can do that, too, below:
I’ll also drop this into the podcast feed. Thank you as always for reading/listening!
Bringing back memories! Though for me it was a PCjr.
I loved this post, and I keep meaning to comment on it. I had a lot of Commodore friends, but my first magic box was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (and yes, my friends sneeringly call it a Trash-80). It was probably 1981? I already knew some BASIC programming when I got it because my grandfather, an electrical engineer for the Bell System, had purchased an earlier version of the TRS-80 for himself and taught me.
Anyway, soon I was testing the limits of its 4K memory and cassette drive, and writing POKE statements to directly access the fat pixels on the display. The first thing I ever had published was the program listing for my own two-player version of Othello, which appeared in the TRS-80 Microcomputer News in July 1982. I could not have been more chuffed!