For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
s3data.computerhistory.org249 points by indigodaddy 4 days ago
249 points by indigodaddy 4 days ago
I was just a little kid then, and the C64 was a neat micro, but today I can see some questionable things about their comparison matrix in the ad.
Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III business computer). Buyers who knew the real set of alternatives, at and below the C64's price point, might question why they need 64KB RAM, when the popular lower-priced competitors not shown in the table also did fine games and Basic programming (the main uses of home computers) while costing less money.
Then there's structuring "TV Output" as a feature of the C64, which they say the TRS-80 Model III doesn't have. But that's because the TRS-80 has an integrated display monitor, while the C64 includes no display in that price comparison.
I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. But that IBM PC defined industry standard peripheral interfaces for years.
The competitors also had obvious strengths not shown. Want your word processor to be in crisp 80-column text? A real spreadsheet program? Math coprocessor? Better graphics? Option to upgrade to a hard disk drive?
There was a specific reason with the TI: Tramiel was still smarting over how they screwed him with calculator chips. Meanwhile, their home computer unit was suffering millions of dollars in losses due to greedy mismanagement and the VIC-20 was driving the 99/4A into the ground as a practical loss leader. As far as Tramiel was concerned, even acknowledging the 99/4A's existence was too good for them.
Payback, as they say, is a b*tch.
I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are.
They are computers…for example the C64’s floppy drive had its own CPU. This was also typical for printers…in fact it still is.
Yep, and in 1986 I had just interned at a NASA lab where they were investigating multiprocessors, which at the time was a wild and crazy idea. I had the epiphany that I could bit-bang a driver between a C64 and one or more 1541s and make my own little multiprocessor, so I did. I made it all the way to the International Science Fair and ended up getting a college scholarship. I've written a lot of code but I'm probably the proudest of that couple of hundred lines of 6502 assembly I wrote when I was 17.
With your decades of experience in tech, is AI really the next frontier?
AI is ideology not technology. It has lived on the frontier since the 1950’s.
I mean breakthroughs like ChatGPT, etc. that were not possible back then computationally w.r.t. mass adoption and upending real industries. Are we entering a new age of ubiquitous AI computing?
> breakthroughs like ChatGPT
A glass of cold water usually helps.
30 years ago, hallucinating AI was considered a problem. I guess times might have changed.
The disk drive uses a serial protocol and it actually has 8k of RAM and a 6502 CPU.
There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers.
Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.
One of Woz's major accomplishments with the Apple II was driving a floppy drive entirely in software from the host computer's CPU, which made the floppy drive and its controller much cheaper.
... and much faster. Like *30 times* faster. Even had the hardware bug juancn and classichasclass discuss not existed with the C64, the Disk II is still much faster.
It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world—was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direct 1977 competitors, there were abundant human and engineering resources to come up with a fast, inexpensive, and reliable floppy drive and controller; Chuck Peddle at Commodore was certainly no average engineer. And yet, Commodore was still unable to do this in 1984.
Whether one believes in the reality of the existence of the "10X developer", it's hard not to see what Woz did between 1976 and 1978—Integer BASIC, Apple II color graphics, and Disk II—as proof that such a being can exist, even if (as I have written elsewhere) that brilliance straddled the line between optimized and overoptimized. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685888>
With just a little attention to sector interleave, in fact, the Apple Disk II was capable of streaming from the floppy into memory at the full rotation speed of the disk. It wasn't actually possible to be faster at all, without a hardware modification to the drive motor.
And it was all done with a "controller" card build out of like eight chips you could get at Radio Shack. The Disk II really is probably the cleverest single piece of hardware shipped in the microcomputer era.
Need to give credit to the Apple's cassette port interface, too, which not only ran as fast as the 1541 disk drive, but could be pressed into service as a rudimentary half-duplex 1200bps modem with the addition of a few inexpensive off-the-shelf parts to interface with the phone line.
I've always been surprised that nobody else seems to have experimented with that. 1200 bps modems were nothing to be sneezed at in 1980.
I am not dismissing Wozniak's designs here, but it is important to not a couple of major differences between the Disk II and it's competitors:
- Many of the design constraints that other companies faced were removed. Apple designed their own drive electronics and drive interface card. Yes, it takes a talented engineer to handle both the analog and digital side of things. On the other hand, there were compromises. The Apple II was stuck doing a lot of the heavy work. Apple also ended up designing a more complex drive controller to go beyond single sided, double density drives.
- On the flip side, Commodore had more design constraints than most. The 1541 was based upon drives from the PET era. The drives also interfaced to the computer in a fundamentally different way. On the surface level, Commodore drives interfaced to the computer over a generic bus (a bit like USB is a generic bus). The drives also handled high level commands over that bus, to the point where they could operate autonomously. I recall a colleague demoing a drive-to-drive copy between two 1541 drives that occurred without the drives being connected to a computer (after the initial setup was done). The commands were also very high level, dealing with file system access rather than block level access.
While it would be easy to claim that Commodore drives were over-engineered, one must also consider that the original designs came from a time when personal computers had 4 kB of RAM, with nearly 1 kB of that being used by a 40x25 text display (many early computers shared memory between the CPU and video). Software like a disk operating system also required at least some RAM and, in the case of the Apple II, was entirely loaded into RAM. In other words, Commodore was offloading some of the work and memory requirements from the computer.
Wozniak was a genius at designing simple hardware, but those designs usually pushed things into hardware. The Disk II is one example. The other classic example is the non-linear addressing of video on the Apple II. It simplified hardware, but more work had to be done in software.
As for Commodore, well, they were geniuses at botching sophisticated hardware designs. But that's another story.
> I recall a colleague demoing a drive-to-drive copy between two 1541 drives
This is simply because the 1541 was not just a drive, it was a full computer with a 6502 CPU, 2kB RAM and 16kB ROM. You could load software into the RAM through the serial interface, and replace the firmware with any program that you could fit in the 2kB.
>Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should
If that were true then carts like Fastload wouldn't work using the same hardware and same cabling, to load programs many times faster than the stock C64 code.
The C64 ROM code worked, but slowly. This was also true for the built-in serial routines. When I got a 2400bps modem for my C64, the computer couldn't keep up, there was garbage coming through,I couldn't upload or download, and it was caused by the slow ROM serial code. I hacked my favorite terminal program with my own assembly language bit-banged serial driver, and then the 2400bps modem worked flawlessly. The same is true for the slow disk drive serial code. To my knowledge, that wasn't caused by any flaw in the hardware, it was just slow driver code.
Everyone I knew had a Fastload cartridge, but I was in "the scene", so maybe not the average user back then.
Did fastload speed up the protocol, or did it compress the data? I remember using other software for speeding up reading and writing from cassettes, but if I remember correctly this was achieved using compression.
It gets rid of the clock bit, synchronizing the two CPUs so that the 1541 can transmit 2 bits at a time.
It was still slower due to GCR decoding. Over the last 10 years people have started to write streaming GCR decoders too.
Actually, the hardware bug was in the VIC-20's 6522 VIA; the CIA 6526 shift register fixes the bug. The (chief) problem on the 64 was the VIC-II stealing processor cycles.
The CIA 6526 shift register on the C64 is not used. Because the trace on the pcb that connected to it was accidentally cut by the board partner, and Tramiel was unwilling to take the time needed for the rework.
C64 uses the same very slow bit-banging method as VIC-20.
And Atari, though this is acknowledged in the matrix.
Bob Russell once observed the 1541 was the best computer Commodore ever made.
...but dog slow, wasn't it?
Yes, for two reasons. The VIC-20 used 6522 VIAs as I/O chips, and these had a notorious bug in their shift registers requiring a bitbanged IEC serial I/O routine instead. This wasn't a big deal on a system with 5K of RAM, but it was a real problem on the 64. The 64 has 6526 CIAs for I/O, where faster IEC serial communications should have been possible, but the wiring got screwed up during board design and VIC-II DMA ("badlines") caused timing interruptions at inconvenient times, which demanded slowing it down even more. (A remnant of this is UI- and UI+ to speed up and slow down loading when used with the VIC-20, but that only works on the 64 if the screen is off.)
Commodore tried to solve this twice. The first time was for the Plus/4 series with TCBM drives which connected through the expansion port. The only drive of this type was the 1551, which was very fast, but only worked with the Plus/4 family. Commodore was going to design a TCBM interface for the 64 as well, but it wasn't really necessary as pretty much everyone had a fastloader by then. The 128 has a fixed serial bus and burst mode when combined with the 1571 disk drive, which is also very fast and doesn't require using the expansion port, but by then it was 1985 and the 8-bits were on their way out.
The 1571 is way better than the 1541, IME. It's faster with the 128, it's 100% compatible, it's more reliable and less prone to alignment problems, and it can also read MFM formats. But Bob worked on the 1541, so he loves it. :)
Jeez, really? I would pay a blackmailer handsomely to keep a POS design like that off of my public resume.
"What did you do back in the 1980s, Grandpa?" "I designed a floppy disk drive that could barely keep up with the Apple ]['s cassette port." "... Oh."
it had its own CPU which made it more expensive and much slower than Wozniak's drive for Apple.
In 2035 every process with have a 0.1B LLM running at 60x human capacity, with half the overhead and twice the work! ;)
Paperclip (word processor) had an 80 column preview mode, which showed your text in hi-res 80 columns. It seemed like magic at the time and made ten year old me feel like I was performing serious business.
Atari 400 couldn't really compete. I had one as a kid. Neighbor kid had a C64. That membrane keyboard was a big handicap.
The Atari sure had some nice games, though!
The full IBM PC wasn't really a competitor; it was 3x the price and very few families were willing to shell out that kind of money at that point.
The IBM PC wasn't really a family computer like the C64 was. It was a business machine that could be fun for the family when dad or mom were done with work.
Interesting to me that the Apple II+ was the only one in the comparison matrix that supported only upper case letters.
That lead me to this:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...
It's a fair cop against the II+ but there are other things in the comparison which are mildly hinky. I find their characterization of POKEY a little unfair, even though I think SID is superior, and the CP/M option on the C64 was nearly useless because the 1541 didn't read MFM formats. (Much more useful on the C128, but you needed a 1571 disk drive, and by 1985 CP/M was on its way out.) The keyboard criteria are also somewhat of an Apples-to-Commodores comparison, so to speak. Still, it's hard-hitting ad copy and it was Tramiel's Commodore -- he was determined to win, by golly.
Wasn’t POKEY out of tune due to limited frequency register? Making it hard to produce music that sounds good.
The Apple is almost five years older than the C64, an eternity in that era.
But there was the Apple 80 column card option with full ascii. Add USCD Pascal and suddenly it morphed from plaything to a programming-for-computer-science trainer.
I bought my C64 very late - around 1991/1992. It was in Poland where I bought a used one from my friend. Back then, Eastern Europe was a decade behind the Western side of Europe. Two years later, I purchased a used disk drive. So, for two years, I could only run cartridges like Boulder Dash (I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games"). But from that boredom, I started programming in BASIC, always dreaming about creating the perfect text based game ;p
>(I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games")
Odd; the Commodore Datasette is about as reliable as a microcomputer tape storage system can be, far more so than the tin cans-on-a-string designs of Sinclair and TRS-80. Did you attempt to use a regular cassette recorder with a third-party adapter?
I think there were alignment programs for the Datasette. It played a constant tone or signal that would show whether the head was properly aligned. I think it was on on cartridge that I didn't have. And actually as a young kid I didn't know about this alignment thing. Learned years later after switching to Amiga 500.
Hmm, same here. I had a Datassette 1530 C2N but never managed to load anything really. I think once or twice it worked.
My parents even sent it in for repair but it came back as "it's not broken".
Similar to me, but years earlier in the US. The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive. My friends who had one just played games. I had to learn to program instead.
> The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive.
Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).
> My friends who had one just played games.
Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!
Luxury! I had a Vic-20, cassette drive, and a black and white TV. Also learned to program.
It's interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, combined with the features that they chose to highlight.
The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show information.
High end workstations of the era gave you decent resolution bitmapped displays long before they focused on colour.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a household that had at various times TRS-80, a PET, CBM8032, VIC-20 and a C64 (plus others, the Casio fx9000P, was nice but I never had the tools to go beyond BASIC) . If you wanted a computer that could do a bit of everything the C64 was a good choice, If you wanted games, it was an excellent choice, but If you wanted to work, characters on screen was what you wanted.
I had no idea about the CP/M option. I’ve never heard of anybody actually running CP/M on a C64.
Same. I played with the CP/M boot disk that came with my C128 later. That was fun for a few hours. Then I went back to not knowing it existed.
Can someone explain the English of this slogan? It makes no sense to me. The thing being advertised is "what nobody else can give you". If I consider that to be "it", then the slogan becomes:
Buy it for twice the price.
So it should have cost $298 then?
Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
You are reading it like:
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you) (for twice the price)
But it should be read:
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you for twice the price)
Rephrased:
No one else makes a machine that can do what ours does, even if they charge twice as much!
I had the same reaction, and had to read it three or four times to make sense of it. (Native speaker, with a degree in English.) I think it’s a very hard-to-follow sentence construction.
We had both an Apple II+ and a Commodore 64 at school when I was about 10 and I just couldn't get into the C64- the slow disk drive (IIRC it's the bus that's the bottleneck) meant minutes of waiting for programs to start. While the Apple II+ would usually load things very quickly. In many ways the Apple was inferior (see the comparison chart in the linked article) but everything about it just felt "right" to me.
I had a similar experience when I got to college and my roommate and I compared our computers- I had a PC and he had an Amiga, and when he explained what it could do it was clearly superior, but it just didn't "feel right" to me.
I had a university friend with an Amiga and another with a similar setup with the Commodore. They had stacks of floppy disks with one game more beautiful than the other. Both spend most of their time gaming and one ended up 8 and the other 9 years before finishing their masters.
I just had a Tandon 286 PC with a 287 coprocessor (yes, probably twice the price compared to an Amiga). But it did run Matlab pretty well, as well as WordPerfect - all I needed for my study.
Funny how the ad compares the C64 only with machines that actually cost more than twice back in '82, and conveniently neglects to compare it with the ZX Spectrum, a clearly better machine, which was released earlier and cost less than a third of the C64.
It was a US-only ad (hence the dollar pricing), the Spectrum was (AFAIK) never sold in the US, only the sort-of-compatible Timex-Sinclair 2068:
The 2068 was also a sub-$200 machine, though it was only released in '83 [1].
[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-12/page/n281
American only buys things with American flags on (usually made in China).
A non American operation breaking into the American market is far harder than the other way round, and relays on a lot of experience with how to market to Americans.
Fun fact: adjusted for inflation, that's equivalent to $2,017.82 in today's money [0]
[0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=1982...
Strange to realize that that's cost of a modern top-end workstation - a reminder that even after correcting for inflation, the absolute cost of technology has decreased significantly.
You can buy a pretty good computer for US$2000, but a "top end" workstation today would be something like a maxed out Mac Studio or a Windows PC with a RTX 6000 in it, in which case you're paying more like US$10,000.
Trying to teach myself BASIC on the C64 in high school frustrated me so much it kept me from becoming a programmer until I was 29.
Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful.
No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on.
Just dreadful.
I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways that mattered, and even taking into account the weird key combinations required to write code, and the fact that it wasn't particularly well regarded either, but I think Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum range was actually better. You had drawing commands, you had sound commands (although the PLAY command on the 128K honestly didn't give you that much access to the power of the Yamaha FM soundchip so it still wasn't great, and on 48K you were limited to BEEP). You didn't have sprites but you had UDGs and they were easy to use. And I think it might have run faster - it certainly felt faster.
It did still have some annoying oversights: e.g., want to read the joystick? Well, I can't remember the damned address but in the end I figured out enough to realise I was going to have to PEEK the right location in memory, which I duly did after a quick study of the memory map and trying out a bunch of different addresses.
Anyway, point is I remember being so frustrated when I upgraded/crossgraded from a ZX Spectrum 128K +2A to a C64 with how difficult it was to get anything done in BASIC.
I thought C64 BASIC was just as good as any other BASIC at the time. BASIC is, well... "basic", and even with POKEs and everything else, we still did quite a bit with C64 BASIC.
I started on Atari BASIC and that BASIC was pretty bad, too, but even so I made use of it and did all kinds of graphics stuff, and wrote games, etc.
I did all kinds of stuff in BASIC on the C64 between 1986 and into the 90's. But, after a few months of learning all about BASIC, I went right into Assembly language. The C64 manual taught BASIC, but it also had the memory map and documentation about all the 6510 opcodes, registers, custom chips, and even a schematic of the computer in the back. It was incredible compared to all other computers at the time, because it was made for DIY, you could go as deeply as you wanted with it.
https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...
I created so many cool things with the C64, got into the Demoscene, and made crack intros, etc. I even wrote some code to do 3D vector rotations in C64 BASIC and displayed the data with an assembly language line drawing routine.
I don't know you, but if you couldn't do amazing things with the C64, that says more (to me) about you than it does the C64. And like all machines, the system is what it is, you either make use of it or you don't.
I had a C64 as a kid (~13 years old), and like you, after doing as much as I could do in BASIC, I knew I had to learn machine language. I saved up money and bought the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide, learned the opcodes, the memory map, how to work with peripherals, and so on, but had no way to actually input and assemble programs, so I was stuck. The book referred to the 64MON cartridge, but as a little kid I had no idea where/how to get it. I ended up writing writing a few programs on paper, hand converting them into numbers to POKE into memory and then SYS to them, but obviously that was the really hard way to do anything.
It wasn't until my dad sold the C64 and upgraded the family to a C128 (with a built in assembler/monitor) that I finally got to try my programs, but by that time, the 8 bit world was winding down and everyone was moving to PCs. To this day I wish C64 shipped with the 64MON cartridge.
I was about your age with the same interest in the system internals. I wonder if I owned the Programmer's Reference Guide. However, I decided that my programming directly in assembly wouldn't be productive or possible. I subscribed to Compute!'s Gazette, and there were plenty of type-in BASIC programs, as well as the crazy machine-language data-entry bonanzas that yielded arcade games and a word processor.
I did my own BASIC programming, and I was satisifed with experimenting at that level. It was the systems architecture that enthralled me, though. Just to peruse the diagrams of how RAM and ROM were laid out; the bank switching; registers and I/O routines; programming the SID chip; sprites and colors and fonts.
By the time I went into college I was quite well-primed for subjects like systems architecture, and the upgrade path at home from 286 to Windows PCs was bittersweet, as I left behind those raw system internals for more opacity and high-level sysadmin tasks. But I never forgot the 6502 and 6510 that started it all for me.
My first experiments with machine code were using POKE statements too. Once I knew that I knew what I was doing, I got deeper into it. Fortunately around the same time I got a 300baud modem and found some assembley language tools on BBSs. The modem was key, it opened up a much wider world to me. I learned all kinds of programming tricks from others, like how to disassemble and read other's programs.
C64 BASIC was bad compared to BASIC on the Spectrum, and terrible compared to BBC BASIC on the Acorn machines. Sure, you could POKE your way to doing everything, but compared to having OS routines for most things, and an assembler accessible from BASIC it was hard work.
Commodore BASIC was pretty bad because Tramiel had bought a permanent license to Microsoft BASIC back in 1977, for the PET, and saw no reason to upgrade for the VIC or 64.
Teaching myself BASIC on a Commodore 64 in elementary school made me a programmer and set the direction for the next 40 years. Different strokes I guess.
The same for me. I only knew how to assign variables, use for loops, if->then, and use poke command. And from this specific point I started thinking about myself as programmer event that the only thing I wrote with C64 basic was a ball moving on the screen. :)
As a counterpoint, I taught myself BASIC and some simple music theory on my C64 hooked up to a black and white TV in elementary school when I was 10. I think it all depends on where you are in life and what 'clicks' with you at the time.
Commodore was such a juggernaut at the time. It was the first truly successful home computer.
It’s a shame that poor management, product fragmentation, and failure to respond to IBM/Microsoft killed the company.
We were a commodore family growing up. I got started on a Vic-20 and went through a good chuck of their offerings until doom changed the world.
After the Tomy Tutor, we started with a C64 and then later a C128. Both were in regular use pretty much through high school.
It's a 1982 brochure, but they show Ace of Aces in the games section.
The Accolade Ace of Aces (WW2 combat flight sim) wasn't released until 1986.
It seems that this may have been a different Ace of Aces -- perhaps a version of the Nova tabletop game that never got released.
Anybody know anything about this?
OK, here's something:
https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/ace-of-aces/
Jim Rothwell (see the gallery image and enlarge it) was supposed to release something called Ace of Aces for the Ultimax, it seems, IIUC.
I didn't know about the Ultimax until 5 minutes ago.
EDIT: Here's the image link:
https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/wp-content/uploads/gtw64/a/a...
I don't know anything about the Ace of Aces pictured, but it's definitely not the Artech/Accolade one. $595 was the 1982 introductory price for the C64, so this pamphlet almost certainly dates from then.
Does it say 1982 anywhere except the pricing table and the submission title here? Is it possible that the brochure is actually newer?
At the very bottom right there is a reference to 0782100M
Googling that returns below which also says (maybe infers?) the brochure is from 1982.
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264626...
I had considered that, but noticed the price and as classichasclass points out in a reply to me (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949843), $595 was the intro price. They're also comparing against the Atari 800 instead of the 800XL, so that's another piece of evidence. The 800XL was released in 1983.
Ahh, the times when a computer could send analysts back to typewriters. This really defines the transition where ad copywriters could for computers still did not get what computers meant.
Perfect throwback. I really miss that old tech magic - nothing feels the same anymore, tbh.
My first computer was a VIC-20 (1982 or so).
3KB of RAM. So little room, I needed to write most of my apps in Machine Code. That was OK. At school, I had an STD Bus-Based 6800, with 256B.
Was a very good learning experience.
Same here, but never heard of assembly until college. How did you learn it? I don't think anything but a Basic manual came in the box.
I had a Radio Shack Color Computer and Radio Shack actually sold a ROM cartridge (right alongside all the game cartridges) that was an editor/assembler. That's how I got started in assembler. The manual that came with it covered using the assembler itself but only had a minimal overview of 6809 CPU assembly language. Pretty strange that you could pick up an assembly language IDE at your local Radio Shack store (with over 7000 locations, virtually every town in the U.S. had at least one Radio Shack).
My teenaged self actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called their offices asking for information on how to program their CPU. Some nice salesperson there took pity on me and sent me their 6809 reference manual along with a quick reference card for free. The manual was quite a sizable book that I wasn't fully ready to understand yet but that reference card was my constant companion. I still have it today. :-)
Those reference cards are very helpful. In college the embedded PC boards (generic) x86 and (I forget if it was a 68 or 65 series CPU) each included a CPU manual and quick assembly reference card. Seeing instructions grouped by how the decoder wanted them, it was much easier to see where a given entry would have 3 or 4 bits utilized to decode a sub function among a general class of instructions.
Sadly I couldn't find a good link to a quick reference card, but there are some copies of the CPU manual on https://archive.org/search?query=6809 . A Wikipedia site is nowhere near as good as a properly typeset and slightly grouped to convey clarity card, but it's still useful https://github.com/Ta0uf19/Motorola-6809-Cheatsheet
Here's a PDF that's identical to my Motorola 6809 Quick Reference Card: https://web.archive.org/web/20190714001537/http://chiclassic...
Not OP, but In 1983 I was 13 and I won a scholarship to a summer camp that rented space in a rich kid prep school for computer camp. I learned pascal over two weeks and the following summer I went back and learned assembly. Three years later I built a 286 and fortunately lived near the Yale bookstore and it had a book on 286 assembly. Basically being a middle class kid adjacent to rich people is how I learned assembly at a young age. If it wasn’t for that camp I wouldn’t have learned computer architecture, logic, and assembly until college. Zip code matters.
My C64 Programmers Reference Guide taught BASIC, and had a memory map of the computer, documentation for all the custom chip registers, all the opcodes for the 6510 CPU, chip timing diagrams, I/O port pinouts, and a full schematic of the C64 in the back of the manual. I'm sure not all C64s came with that, this was the old-school 2-inch-thick C64 manual that came with early computers, at least mine had it. From this manual I learned assembly language in about a week in 1986 while I was still in junior high school. It was pretty amazing. It definitely ignited my passion for programming, and I still code assembly today on embedded MCUs.
https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...
There was a third-party Machine Code Monitor cartridge. Don't remember who made it. You could write code, as well as view it, or debug it.
I used the 6502 manual. I was taking Machine Code in school at the time (tech school -not "proper" school), and had learned how to trawl the tech literature for guidance.
Oh wait, not entirely true… I made a few DOS .com files with debug but did not understand much.
As I searched for a first computer I hoped to talk my parents into buying for my late-teen self, I read a lot of early computer magazines and visited local stores. I looked first at the Atari 400 and loved the games but, wanting to learn programming too, I just couldn't imagine that membrane keyboard being livable. Then I saw the C64, fell in love and went home from the store clutching the same color brochure linked above. How could I not love the promised 320 x 200 resolution, the sprites, all those colors - but I knew that $600 was too expensive. Ultimately, I had to settle on a Radio Shack Color Computer at around $400.
I loved the 6809-based Coco but, at the time, I felt it was inferior to the C64 and Atari 400/800 because it had no sprites, far fewer colors, lower resolution, lower clock speed, etc. Because I didn't yet understand computer architecture and simply believed the specs in the brochure, it was only much later, during my computer-industry career, that I grew to understand that the Coco, which I'd felt so insecure about, was really pretty ideal for my young self to learn on. The built-in Microsoft Extended Color BASIC was far superior to the ROM BASIC the C64 shipped with. Perhaps more importantly, the comprehensive, illustrated BASIC manuals Radio Shack commissioned are still legendary for being excellent for beginners to self-teach. And, unlike many of its peers, that ROM BASIC had extensive native commands for graphics, sound and music from day 1.
Once I'd written a bunch of graphic games entirely in BASIC, I advanced to learn assembly language because it was the only way to draw more and bigger objects faster. Fortunately, Radio Shack offered a ROM cartridge-based 6809 editor/assembler that was unreasonably good for a cheap home computer. And the Motorola 6809 CPU, being the little brother of the legendary 68000 was really an 8/16-bit CPU with an elegantly orthogonal instruction set which supported advanced addressing modes and many features neither the 6502 nor Z80 had. Things like re-entrant, relocatable, program counter relative code, separate user and system stacks, a multiply instruction and multiple levels of interrupts. Today it's considered the most powerful 8-bit CPU of that era (in fact, Apple originally intended the Macintosh to use the 6809). Radio Shack even offered a multi-tasking, multi-user, Unix-like operating system for their 8-bit, 64K 'toy' home computer.
Of course, back then I didn't know how good I had it since my only experience was with the computer I owned and I still believed the impression I formed from that beautiful C64 brochure. It wasn't until the mid and late 90s when there were piles of C64s and Ataris at thrift stores for $5 and $10 that I really understood that the C64's 320x200 resolution and 256 colors weren't all available at the same time, at least for regular users (short of advanced programmer tricks and esoteric demo scene hacks far beyond a beginning coder). Once the computers I'd lusted after were nearly free (or actually free when people just gave them to me vs throwing them out), I managed to acquire ALL of the widely available 8-bit and 16-bit computers I'd never been able to afford in the 80s and actually play with them.
Only then did I understand a 0.89 Mhz 6809 was two to three times faster than a 1 Mhz 6502 and that I'd 'grown up' in programming understanding interrupt driven multi-tasking, managing multiple stacks and using index register indirection, which made pointers feel natural when I later learned C on 68000-based computers. Even the lack of hardware sprites in my 'poor Coco' forced me to figure out software sprites using bit masks and XOR in assembler - and I had a blazingly fast CPU to do it with. Even the higher resolution and colors of the C64 and Atari didn't turn out to actually be that much higher than my Coco. Setting aside the amazing tricks demo scene coders eventually figured out on all these machines, in practice, as a beginning assembly language game coder back then I would probably have only used 3-color sprites on a background with an effective 160 x 192 resolution background. My Coco had four colors (although from a more limited palette) at an effective resolution of 128 x 192 and, being entirely software-based, I could do anything with those pixels that I could figure out how to CPU blit in one frame. With no hardware graphics to rely on, work around or trick, it was always just my code and the unforgiving pace of the CRT beam. This kept me focused from day 1 on cycle-counting performance and intense code optimization, which made my practical experience with real-time graphics more Apple II-like - except with 2 to 3 times more CPU power to throw at it. Sure, I didn't have the hardware GFX I'd lusted after in that brochure but those capabilities weren't quite as accessible to novices as I'd assumed - and what I got instead had some pretty sizable advantages I didn't appreciate at the time in shaping and preparing the programmer I would later become.
To be clear, I'm not being critical of the C64, today I revere and respect all of these classic machines. They're each great in their own unique way, and each one represents a different vision of what personal computing could be. That's a big part of what I miss about 80s home computing and the reason I've collected over a hundred different models of non-Intel 8-bit and 16-bit home computers over the years (all the commonly available Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, Amiga machines a few dozen more rare 8-bits from around the world). It's just ironic how my teen self misunderstood the specs in that brochure and how it led to an undeserved inferiority complex which existed only in my head.
Thanks for taking the time to write that! I really enjoyed hearing about your journey, and I learned a fair bit about the Coco too, which wasn’t really known in my part of the world. Sounds like a great little machine, actually!
> Sounds like a great little machine, actually!
Yes, it was quite decent and attracted a strong community of advanced hobbyists who were attracted by the 6809 CPU's power. The Coco had quite a lot of third-party hardware upgrades made by hobbyist garage companies and by leveraging these it could be inexpensively upgraded to quite a nice system, much like the Apple II's expansion capability - except the Coco had no internal slots so we had to solder wires to chip pins (another good learning lesson :-)).
Radio Shack wasn't really a full computer company like Atari, Commodore, Apple, Sinclair, etc. They were primarily an electronics retailer who did their own manufacturing to drive down costs but only dabbled in original computer design. While they did a few somewhat unique designs like the Model 1, 2, 3, 4 series of 6502 machines, they tended to stick close to designs based on off-the-shelf chip manufacturer parts and didn't often do custom chips. Some of their computers were even private label rebrands of other manufacturer's computers, like the Model 100/200 and all the Pocket Computers.
Because of this, Radio Shack's Color Computer was a straight off-the-shelf implementation of Motorola's 6809 system reference design - and Motorola had no cool graphics hardware support in their 6847 video chip. However, the upside of no GFX hardware was all that money went to the CPU which was two to three times more expensive than the 6502 or Z80. In fact, Woz wanted to use the 6809's earlier ancestor the 6800 in the Apple I but they were far too expensive at the time. Many don't know that most of the team that created the 6502 actually worked at Motorola designing the 6800 but were frustrated that when visiting customers all they heard was "Great chip, way too expensive" so they left and founded MOSTEK to create a cheaper, less powerful 6800 clone. Their first CPU, the 6501, was actually compatible with the 6800 but Motorola sued them so they changed it enough to be incompatible and called it the 6502. Due in part to the lawsuit sapping their resources, MOSTEK started running out of money before completing the 6502 and that's how Commodore was able to buy their own chip company at a good discount.
The UK had the very similar Dragon 32 and 64 computers (and I have both!). They had the same hardware design but included a hardware serial port chip instead of a software bit-banger port. Software was mostly compatible between the Coco and Dragons as they used the same ROM-based Extended Color BASIC licensed from Microsoft. Dragons were also sold in Spain for a while and very briefly in the US by another company Dragon licensed. I think there was also a Coco-alike in Australia but can't recall the name. I don't think of these systems as Coco clones because they were all based on the same Motorola reference design and Microsoft ROM BASIC, which Motorola created to drive sales of their 6809 chip family (6883 system controller, 6847 display chip and 6821 UART).
Man, I had a hand-me-down Atari 800 with 48k. It was great, but I coveted the c64 with its crunchy cool sid sounds.
Then I had a 486 vga pc that could barely scroll a game at 60fps (except for ones like jazz jackrabbit with its hardware scrolling wizardry) and I coveted the Amiga with its smooth scaling and rotation and 4 channel samples.
That is some hard hitting copy. I wonder how it performed …
It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school.
Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive word processor.
But yeah, mostly I played games on it. It was a great gaming machine for its time.
You could touch type on that horrible keyboard? I learned to type on typewriters at school, but never could very well on my C64 with its elevated, mushy keyboard.
I too learned on a typewriter (IBM Selectric, if memory serves). Yes, the C64 keyboard was pretty crap, but still better than not being able to rearrange text.
I had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)
I interpreted the copy initially as justifying the product being twice the price of the competition. My eyes are used to much more concise copy nowadays though so maybe it landed properly back then?
Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.
I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)
Yeah I realised once I read the comparison chart in the ad.
It's also possible that the ambiguity was intentional.. Ad copy is an art and it did compel me to read all of it to unpack the meaning. Though thinking this through I would assume that everyone interested in computers at the time would know what the prices of other products were so the $595 would immediately be understood as very cheap in comparison
It was life changing at the time. They sold something like 15 million units. Everyone was running a commodore in my neck of the woods.
It's interesting because when I read "For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price" all my brain does is parse that sentence as they are charging double what they should because there's no competition.
It's not until I scroll down to the pricing table to see what they really mean is their machine is half the price while having more features than the rest.
"Commodore's programmers examined the whole jungle of software available today—literally hundreds of programs"
How quaint!
Interesting that the M4 Mac Mini is the same price
Comparing prices across time without even thinking about inflation is basically just numerology
The iMac is $1299 since its launch in 1999 https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iMac-price-history
And that's without taking interest rates into account -I think that's about $2500 in today's money.
> without taking interest rates into account
I’m sure you know — but you mean inflation.
That's about $2000 today. Still fair if the competitors costs twice that much.
> Cartridge Slot: Will accept games and other applications designed for Commodore 64 or Max Machine™ on plug-in cartridges.
Wait, the what now? Now I’m off to learn what a Max Machine is.
I always wondered what it would be like if Commodore had serious co processors, but the base Commodore is really too slow for anything like that. Could you imagine a Voodoo 2? I think the SNES was only about 10mhz as well and used the FX math co-processor for 3d.
>had serious co processors
What decade do you think this computer is from?
"Serious co processors" in 1982 wasn't a thing.
Maybe not in 1982, but as other commenters have pointed out, by 1985 you had the Amiga, which definitely DID have serious co-processors.
The BBC Micro (6502B at 2MHz I think) had an interface for adding second processors. I don’t know much about them. I wonder how much the interface added to the cost?
IMO in those days money would have been better spend on a faster CPU than coprocessors. That's assuming you're using the computer as a computer not as a game console.
Even then, the Commodore Plus/4 could do some pretty sophisticated gaming, even without the dedicated sprites of the VIC-II -- simply because the CPU was about twice as fast as the C64's. An example: https://psytronik.itch.io/pets-rescue
Anyway, that's blasphemy to a Commodore fan, especially an Amiga fan, to whom good system design consists of having amazing custom silicon for which the CPU is a mere mediator. After all, if a faster CPU were really all you needed, the PC wouldn't suck as much as it does!
This school of thought won out in the end, as most of the compute in today's high-performance applications (like AI) is done on the GPU, the CPU's role being to transfer programs and data to the GPU, basically a front-end processor to the actual computer which is made by NVIDIA.
Yes but think of the Commodore of the trusted, known and completely grokable system that orchestrates the co-processors. Then you can run LLMs or whatever data-intensive task you like. Still, all that data has to go through the CPU bus.
Wow. I got a c64 as soon as I could get one, a huge upgrade from my Ohio scientific C28P. But I had no idea it could run CP/M? I totally would have been all over that.
Is there a port to the 6502, or did they run a computer in a cartridge to do that?
It's a Z80 in a cartridge and was capable of booting CP/M 2.2. But don't get too excited: the 1541 was still the 1541, so it could only run software that had been copied to a GCR disk (no directly reading MFM floppies).
CP/M Plus on the 128 was much more useful because the 1571 could read MFM disks, though it was hobbled by its architecture and ran slower than it should have.
>It's a Z80 in a cartridge and was capable of booting CP/M 2.2. But don't get too excited: the 1541 was still the 1541, so it could only run software that had been copied to a GCR disk (no directly reading MFM floppies).
This by itself is no great obstacle; even aside from the nonstandardization of CP/M 5.25" disk formats, CP/M on Apple II has the same GCR/MFM issue but the SoftCard and its many clones were among the most popular accessories, and consequently no shortage of software available on the Apple II disk format.
No, the issue with the C64 CP/M cartridge is that it sucked, like almost everything else Commodore designed. Even assuming that someone in 1985 or 1986 wanted to run Turbo Pascal or WordStar on the 128 as opposed to buying an inexpensive PC clone or a used Kaypro or Osborne, the 128 implementation is so slow that it is more or less unusable for regular use.
It also didn't support 80 characters on the screen (or even the 52-or-however-many characters of the Osborne).
The C64 CP/M implementation required the Z-80 cartridge which contained an actual Zilog Z80 processor that took over when CP/M was running - the 6502 would essentially go idle while the Z80 accessed the C64's memory and peripherals.
> Commodore is one of the few companies that manufacture their own chips.
This is one of the best takeaways from this ad. Because they owned MOS, Commodore had an advantage over their competitors that is commonly replicated today.
How big a selling point would CP/M have been, really?
The copy and the features remind me a lot of modern Apple.
This was the first I’ve heard that Commodore made their own hardware.
Looks like a (web) Landing Page to me. Funny that the marketing UI is still the same.
I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling.
This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in the gaps.
Tech these days has long lost it's magic. The 'AI' boom tried to recreate the buzz with nonsensical claims that it has failed to deliver. It's all smoke and mirrors these days.
I think the last time I was truly wowed was when Shazam appeared. That was 23 years ago.
I’ve seen this sentiment a lot, and I do understand it but… I just feel so completely differently. The 2000s web, early web apps and Flash, the iPhone and smartphone revolution, the incredible buffet that is modern video games, virtual and mixed reality, and yes, even (imperfect, fraught) AI have all seemed as magical to me as those wonderful things from the 80s and 90s. Probably not coincidentally, many of those things have featured in my working life pretty heavily!
I remember chatting online (MUD) with a friend in Sweden in 1990. I sent her an email, and she confirmed it arrived moments later, and my mind was blown. For some reason I felt “mail” surely couldn’t arrive that fast, even though we were chatting interactively in real time.
I visited a relative last summer and tried on their Meta Quest 3 headset, the first time I ever tried a modern VR headset. I was blown away by the interface overlaying my vision. I tried a VR minigolf game (Walkabout mini golf? I'm not certain) and was amazed by how immersive it was.
Your comment has prompted my response because it reminded me that I thought Shazam was great too, and it made me think of what more recent incredible technological experiences I've had. I don't know if you've tried on a VR (or more accurately AR) headset recently but the engineering is really something.
I was wowed when I first got home Internet in 1995 because it was so much more than the BBSs I’d been using up to that point, but nothing has recreated the sense of wonder I had on 8-bit machines in the 80s. Even when I bought a secondhand PC in the late 80s, going through the hand-labelled disks was like a treasure hunt. That’s how I first discovered Hack/Nethack, played Leygref’s Castle and started learning Borland Turbo Pascal.
If you get ice crean for dessert nightly, it's not exciting or even a joy.
It needs to be rare, or new, to be a treat.
I think now, there's always a computer near me. How can it still be special?
Even the change in sound and graphics was astonishing, now it's minor tweaks.
I still remember my first Internet search-- Phineas Gage-- and bewilderment at where this information came from. The recursive beauty is the story itself has been transformed by the Internet, and has been filled in very differently than was reported back in the mid 90s.[1]
