That’s right, I can’t very well memorialize the TRS-80 and neglect my first true love, the indomitable C64! Yes, it was August of 1982 when Commodore keyed in LOAD"*",8,1 on the C64 and released to market.
It wasn’t my first computer nor my first gaming machine but it was maybe my truest. My first floppy drive, the 1541, chugged along for a good several years. A lot of gaming firsts for me on this platform too - first text adventures from Infocom, first point and click adventure with Maniac Mansion and Zak McCracken, first RPGs with the Ultimas and Bard’s Tales. So many other great games like Lode Runner, Bruce Lee, Blue Max … well that list could go a lot longer. Here’s to a king among personal computers!
Ah the memories. Putting the cassette for Flight Simulator II in the drive and going to make lunch. Typing a program from a magazine and realizing that you made a mistake in the huge block of machine language code at the end. Then painstakingly checking every single character. The sound of the 1541 slamming its heads into the stop. :)
C64 was my first computer when I was in 3rd grade. I was typing in programs from COMPUTE and other magazines right from the get go until I got my first real game - Ultima 2. Such memories. That computer definitely shaped my life.
My second computer (after a VIC 20 that i franken-expanded to 40K). Loved it.
My first job out of college was at COMPUTE! magazine. I’d moved on to the Amiga by then (1989), but it was cool to meet all the people who’d done the cool C64 stuff, like Charles Brannon, who wrote Speedscript. Gazette was actually still being published when I started.
They’re getting close to releasing the mini-console; I hope the don’t fail on the full-size 64 they’ve promised, as I’m inordinately excited about it: Basically a 64 with a bunch of built-in euro games that came out after I’d moved on to Amiga so I don’t care about, but it has an SD card slot and HDMI. Gonna teach my teenager that COD deathmatches got nothin’ on some MULE and Archon competition. :)
I miss COMPUTE! --and Compute!'s ST Disk and Magazine–but especially COMPUTE!
And the Commodore 64 introduced me to some of my all-time favorite games: Colonial Conquest, Rails West, Cartels & Cutthroats, President Elect, M.U.L.E., Lords of Conquest, Seven Cities of Gold, Winter Games, PSI-5 Trading Company, Pirates!, … The ST will always be my favorite system and the Amiga will always be second, but the C-64 was my formative system.