Drew Saur’s Ode to the Commodore 64

Drew Saur, pushing back on my post slagging on the Commodore 64:

I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours.

That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my.

I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as brief a form as I can — why it captured so many hearts during the 8-bit era.

What a great post. Fond memories all the way down the stack with that whole era of computing. As I told Saur in email, my fondest memory of the Commodore 64 is that they sold them at Kmart, and for years had a working model on display. And every time I’d go to Kmart with my mom, I’d swing by the electronics department and type:

10 PRINT "KMART SUCKS!!!!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Sometimes I’d be clever and do something like add an incrementing number of spaces to make the lines go diagonally. Something like:

5 LET X = 0
10 PRINT SPC(X); "KMART SUCKS!"
20 X = X + 1
30 IF X > 28 THEN X = 0
35 FOR T = 0 TO 100 : NEXT : REM SLOW DOWN
40 GOTO 10
RUN

This never got old for me. Try it yourself. (And of course I never actually commented my code at Kmart — that REM is for you, if you’re wondering what that do-nothing FOR loop is for.)

★ Tuesday, 15 July 2025