Commodore 64, the best selling computer in the world

I that the Commodore 64 am the son I can play here with great satisfaction an article in the Messenger when I stumbled upon today. Then people wonder why I prefers to work from the command line rather than with any GUI. My better half says that the green numerini sooner or later I will go crazy, and that end up in a plastic Door to Door is the fate of almost all the consultants. That she is right? I do not know. And now I have no time to think about these things: I must return to my numerini green ...

The Commodore 64 is more than one computer. They know the millions of fans around the world, remember with nostalgia the family car beige color, which made its entry into the U.S. market in late 1982 and then experience a rapid spread in the Old Continent. Surfing the net you find that so many kids of the eighties, that maybe they had convinced their parents to buy the C64 rate, are still imprinted in my mind every detail of the fascinating machine: its historical games like Super Mario to commands Basic language such as "SYS64738", became a favorite of surfers today nickname nostalgic.

A computer Guinness. The C64, who turns 25 Monday, still holds the Guinness Book of Records as the best selling computer in history: 17 million units bought worldwide. "It was really the ideal computer for those times," said Jack Tramiel, founder and father of the Commodore C64, a Pole who moved to the U.S. after the Second World War and before creating her jewelry repaired typewriters, which will open Monday Mountain View (California), a museum dedicated to his jewel, to celebrate its quarter century.

The information available to everyone. With a memory of 64 kilobytes (huge for that time but paltry in comparison, today, to that of any electronic device) and a cost of $ 595 (660mila lire in Italy), the C64 presented itself as the computer for families. The price, still prohibitive for many, however, was competitive with those of computers already on the market such as the Atari, which cost three times. To accompany the car was then a catalog of ten thousand programs, including many popular games today. But the strength of the C64 was also to use language, Basic, allowing developers to create independently. The careers of many programmers, including Italian, so began with the creation of games for the C64.

The conquest of the market. Sold in department stores, discount stores and toy stores, the Commodore 64 soon conquered the market. To make it successful was the simplicity of use, far higher than that of its predecessors (PET and VIC-20) and computer competitors. Moreover, in 1983, Commodore offered an incentive of U.S. $ 100 for the purchase of a C64 withdrawing any computer or game console. Tactics that did squirt further sales came to 10 million machines in 1986.

Tapes and floppy disks. The memory available initially only for the C64 was the cassette tape, magnetic cassettes common. The unit cassette (Datassette C2N), however, was rather slow: it was not cleaned well could happen, after long delays, for the appearance on-screen message Load error, an error loading that forced her to repeat the entire procedure. From Datassette is then passed to the floppy disk drive 1541, which made it possible to format a floppy and at the same time, keep writing your own program. All this of course seems outdated compared to modern techniques of memory. But they were also the dexterity and small hitch to make magical use of the C64. He is remembered with nostalgia for that artists such as Article 31 in track C64 vs PC (2003): "The attaccavi to the TV for hours to load games from the recorder. The graphics lacked definition, but replacing the imagination. "

Sites, fan clubs and C64 Orchestra. Nostalgia for the Commodore 64 is still strong; are thousands on the net, sites and fan club dedicated to the machine, including the Commodore 64 Italy , Ready64 and C64 . Almost all games are also available at the Commodore, still today, thanks to emulators that allow them to run even on modern machines. Among the most popular vice , Power64 . Copies, the site claims authorized games of the English originals, they are instead of kiosk 64 .

The voice of the Commodore. And there are those who made the Commodore 64, thanks to advanced sound chip installed, a real art: a Danish rock band, The Press play on tape , consisting of six electrical engineers, using the basis of the musical play their songs. While Rob Kramer, a Dutch musician, in 2006 he founded a real orchestra, "The music of the Commodore 64 games were hypnotic and full of tension - he explained - we remained indelibly on his head. So I had the idea to create an orchestra that was playing. " The "C64 Orchestra" is a reality today: twelve elements that perform regularly at festivals and music festivals playing compositions based on the music of games (some of the biggest success you can hear on MySpace , with titles like Commando or International Karate.