Fond memories, indeed! I remember that this was the first computer we ever had. I seem to recall that we got it for something like $100 from a toy store in the mall around 1982/1983. They toy store stood where the Blair Outlet now stands, by OfficeMax.
Yup, I remember using cassette tapes for storage. A few times, I got confused about which tapes had music and which had computer stuff. Unpleasant to listen to! I did play around with keying songs from books I had for learning piano into the music program. Gad, what a geek!
Mom kept it for quite a while after I moved out. For a while, she was running Geos, which was a sort of GUI interface for the C64. (Think Windows 2.X or so, but for a C64.) I think that my uncle Paul had a Vic 20, which was the predecessor.
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.
Millions of Commodore 64s were sold in the 1980s.
"There was something magical about the C64," says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden.
He remembers the day he first laid eyes on his machine back in 1984.
"My father brought it home together with a tape deck, a disk drive, a printer, and a couple of games...I used to sneak home during lunch to play [on it] with my friends."
Learn about the components of the C64 system »
Wallstrom is the webmaster and designer for C64.com, a Web site dedicated to preserving the games, demos, pictures, magazines and memories of the Commodore 64.
My first computer was C64 too... gosh how I loved it! Later we upgraded to the C128 and my mom let me have the C64 in my bedroom. I thought I was the coolest kid ever (now these darn kids have laptops and cellphones and everything and think nothing of it, LOL).
When I was still at Behrend, I saw some parts to a C64 laying in the hallway outside one of the computer labs. It was the one and only time in my life that I was tempted to steal something. I didn't of course, but I sure wish I'd tracked down someone in the lab to see if it was just junk they were throwing out or something. *sigh*
Oh! And that toy store was "Children's Palace". I loved it because it had castle-like turrets on the outside, and when you went in, the area between the double set of glass doors would echo if you yelled (I was a kid, what can I say).
Yes! That's it. I seem to recall that Children's Palace had a panda bear as their logo. I don't thik that they were around for long.