How the Commodore 64 Shaped My Career and Opened My World
I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
I credit my career as a Lead Application Developer to the Commodore 64 my parents bought me in 1983. Beyond basic BASIC programming, playing pirated games taught me resilience and problem-solving. The machine also bridged language barriers with family, introduced me to sports culture, and connected me to a global community via BBS, ultimately giving me a life worth living.
This 8-bit computer with 64 kilobytes of random access memory has given me a life worth living.
- bruce511
There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation".
When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC and so on.
[1] yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.
- kleiba2
I could probably write a blog post with the opposite title, sth. like "My life got ruined by the Commodore C64". Equally hyperbolic, the narrative would go something like this: I was the exact same child/teen as the guy from the other blog, but the problem from 2026 me is that I got lured into IT through games and BASIC, and now I so wish I had chosen a different career. Alas, it's all I know how to do, and at this point in my life, changing careers is not a viable option.
So, thanks C64!
I still love you, though...
- karmakaze
Fun nostalgic read (also Korean). I grew up an Atari kid, having spent many hours in arcades and eventually getting an Atari 400 included BASIC, and Asteroids cartridge. No storage not even cassette.
I had friends that had Ataris of course, but also some that had C64s and even a TI-99/4A. The thing in my circle was that the C64 and TI folk were more users and the Atari kids were more hackers, not that there were very many of each at the time. I learned BASIC, machine/assembly, and got into coding and engineering. (One of our pastimes was cracking games just to see how it was protected and see if we could. We'd show off any success amongst ourselves but never distributed as that wasn't the fun part.) I get the feeling that I probably worked for some C64 kids as adults that always seemed to have more of a product or business sense about them than the Atari kids.
- mark_something
I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.
It was fun, but primitive, when I learned Pascal at university I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments!
- tzot
Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain).
In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)
- eggy
I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out registers on paper gave me a strong foundation in computers. I realized computers would only be tools and always managed to take jobs outside of comp. sci. or IT, but always used a computer and programmed utilities for every job I had in any language I fancied at the time and throughout the years: C, Basic, asm (6502, PIC, Scenix, 68000, 8086/88, now ARM/x64), Forth, Lisp (Lush/Lush2 lush-users on Sourceforge with Yann LeCun to get Lush running, APL, J, Logo, Pascal, Factor, Java, Python, F#, now Rust, Odin, and J is still open on my desktop daily). I had in mind how people were talking about high-paying jobs if you learned WordPerfect, and it was "the future" back in 1991-93. I felt people were putting the tool before thought, intelligence, and process. I did dip into DBA and IT here and there for a little bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing embedded software for the window animation I was working on for a display company, and interactive prox switches on the store window at Sachs to trigger a pneumatically actuated Nutcracker to raise his arm and close his jaw and o […]
- RajT88
I grew up with a C64, and the story resonated with me. Not as much about getting pirates games to run, but more trying to play the latest games on our old 386 which came after the C64.
A friend of mine said, "PC gaming creates techies". Does it still? I hope so.
- tiborsaas
I can't describe that mystery feeling when getting bunch of random cassette tapes from my cousins with a giant catalog of programs on them, some demos, some games, some wild stuff and just casually browsing them. All I had was a title if I was lucky. Then the fun stuff of calibrating the tape head :) Great memories.