The Computer Chronicles - Commodore 64 (1988)

[@bsrhoad]

Parents bought me a C-64 for Christmas in 1984. It changed my life, now almost 40 years later I am s successful Software Developer.

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

do you have proof of this? 🤔

[@bsrhoad]

@@Chevroletcelebrity Proof of what?

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

@bsrhoad proof that the c-64 you received in 1984 is what caused you to become a software developer. Also proud that you are successful in this field if you are in fact in the field. 🤔

[@bsrhoad]

@@Chevroletcelebrity What the Duck is wrong with you, you psycho.

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@Chevroletcelebrity Why would anyone lie about that? It's happened with a ton of people.

[@fennecbesixdouze1794]

"The hottest new game, Tetris" god I love this show so much I can't even put it into words.

[@jayviescas7703]

Thanx a lot, Clint!(of LGR) Now I'm hooked on Computer Chronicles and wishing I'd kept the hand-me-down C64, Vic20 and C64D AND missing the first computer I bought - The Amiga 500! 😂 ❤

[@Diskoboy1974]

Still remember getting my C64 on Christmas day 1983. I had asked for a VIC-20 because my school had one, and didn't even know the C64 existed yet. My dad spent a good portion of the night setting it all up after I went to bed. When I came down in the morning, it was running the Christmas demonstration software that most of the stores were using. Needless to say, I pretty much ignored my other presents for the next hour or so. But it turns out, even had I not gotten the C64, 1983 ended up being my favorite Christmas of all time. It's now the tail end of 2022, and I still have that C64, BTW. And it still gets regular use thanks to that SID chip. 😁 And I love the way Stewart pronounces Sega. "SEE-guh"

[@DS-pk4eh]

Hahaha, I had asked for C64 but got VIC-20 with 16Kb expansion! It was OK for a first computer. I got C64 1 year later.

[@fattomandeibu]

Still have all my C64 and all the tapes. No idea if they still work, but I remember going to Boots every Saturday with my dad to pick a new game from the £1.99 section, with the odd treat of him being nice and getting me one of the boxed(the £1.99 ones come in jewel cases, so you can tell at a glance which was budget and which was full priced) games from the £9.99 section. For Americans: Disk drives on a C64 were really rare in England due to the fact they cost more than the computer did here. It's really odd seeing so many disk games when I've only ever seen one C64 floppy drive despite knowing a few dozen guys who owned a C64.

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@fattomandeibu Yeah I think the disk drives in the UK were more expensive if I remember correctly, so most people stuck with the datasette. While the 1541 was cheaper here so we went with the disk drive and most software here in the US used that.

[@10MARC]

I still use my Commodore 64 all of the time. There are new games released monthly, and new and incredible hardware coming out all the time. Even the VIC-20 has new software and hardware coming out!

[@mick8473]

Same with the Ataris

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

​@@mick8473no. not atari.

[@kellygrant4964]

And who would have thought that still in 2023 there is new software still being developed for this great little machine.

[@marlop1970]

"Commodore 64, a little 8-bit machine that refuses to die", even today in 2024 I'm still playing new games with a C64 C, 1541 diskdrive and a 1702 monitor. What a great program The Computer Chronicles to watch, lot of great memories. Thanks to all behind this project to keep it alive.

[@maxxdahl6062]

Same. And I have a backup machine which is a modded C64 DTV unit that can use a keyboard, 1541, USB power supply, and external joysticks

[@s.bradley6089]

I'm playing 64 roms on my switch, the boot up sequence even shows then the game loads up. I would love to work on my old C64 again however.

[@rabidbigdog]

The knitting lady invented Wizards.

[@logan_cadfgs]

19:00 Bill’s segment is the best. So chill and articulate, then he presses a key and drops the bangers. Had no idea the C64 could handle all that synth hooked up!

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Even the SID by itself was impressive! And I wonder what these guys would think of some of the demos coming out of the demo-scene right now with SID and VIC-II sound and images that are extremely impressive. Robert Yannes, the designer of the SID chip, said that he originally wanted to have 32(!) voices, but couldn't make that happen for one reason or another. After he designed the SID chip he left Commodore and started his own company: Ensoniq, a synthesizer company. Can you imagine if he had been able to do the 32 voices like he wanted?

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@JustWasted3HoursHere I oddly enough, had both a c64 as a kid, and an IBM with an Ensoniq card.

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

@@maxxdahl6062 We weren't rich enough to have a PC back then, back when a PC was a couple thousand dollars and had pretty crappy performance compared to today. There was no internet and email wasn't that big yet either, so not a large number of reasons to get one. Now even my 81 year old mom has one (and a Playstation 2 as well!)

[@doctorsocrates4413]

It is now 2023 and i still use my commodore 64c ...

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

use it for what? elaborate 🤨

[@doctorsocrates4413]

@@Chevroletcelebrity to play games mainly..i use a flash cartridge.

[@retroheadstuff8554]

Me to.. it now 2024 😀

[@OhFishyFish]

The C64 is the reason I'm a systems administrator today.

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

do you have proof of this? 🤨

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@Chevroletcelebrity Do you have proof you're a celebrity?

[@nancykerrigan1335]

I can't stop watching this show. Especially the episodes from the 80s. Between the bad fashion, cheesy production values, and old tech I can't take my eyes away for long.

[@cbw56]

I've been binging for like a week...

[@DarylDawkins]

@@cbw56 same here. I've been googling and searching linked in for the guests to see where they ended up. So many interesting stories.

[@Nunavuter1]

The early 1990s era when they start talking about the Internet is also fascinating.

[@jasonzhang7347]

Nostalgia

[@8BitNaptime]

I enjoy the massive '70s mustaches that survived into the '80s on some of the guests. Like, it looks like a separate life form.

[@ricksnyder9244]

Those were the days. Hooking up my C64 to my 19 inch color TV and printing out on my old Okidata dot matrix printer

[@SteveLeicht1]

I had a Okimate color printer...all pastel colors...only worked half of the time.

[@SteveLeicht1]

But it was awesome nonetheless.

[@paxwebb]

As a 14yo teenager, I saved all my money from my paper route and other odd jobs for over a year in order to afford a C64, floppy drive and TV monitor (setup on a switch so I could watch TV too). I still remember the smell of that computer when I first pulled it out of the box...

[@paxwebb]

My next purchase was a Commodore (MPS-803 maybe) dot matrix printer. Man that thing printed slow and loud lol

[@Dookie69uk]

That little granny is gangsta lol. Instead of watching TV all day, she is coding.

[@TheFellerHasAChannelGodDamnIt]

The C64 came out in 1983. They refer to the machine as "old". Really shows how fast technology was growing and improving at the time.

[@maxxdahl6062]

Came out in 1982 if I'm not mistaken. So even older, but yeah by then the Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, etc were already out so the 8 bit machines by then would be considered previous generation.

[@K24Z3CU2]

I love this show. Thanks to KZbin for allowing it to be copyright free. It's great to watch tech from the time we we growing up! Fortunately I was an 80s kid and got to try a lot of this tech! Computing is in my blood!!

[@gstcomputing65]

The C64 was the first computer that was mine. The family had a Coleco Adam before that, but the Commodore was for me only. I loved writing programs for it, but since I didn't have a floppy drive or a Datasette, the program was wiped out after I turned it off. I had to write the program on paper before turning it off if I wanted to save it. I lost a few programs due to severe weather.

[@aenoymotors]

Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you!

[@wallacelang1374]

When I had decided to buy an actual home computer during the 1980s I had around a dozen to choose from. After reading various articles in computing magazines I was clearly caught between the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64. So I chose the Atari 800, however a friend of mine bought a Commodore 64 and let me try it at his house. I felt like if I had the money I would have really enjoyed having both computer systems.

[@androskris]

Wow that intro at Toys R Us brings me back. They had the worst quality control for their price tags on C64 games. I can remember swapping tags easily and getting an expensive game for cheap.

[@GeorgeZ213]

This ep was only 6-7 years after C64 intro. Don't think I would have called it oldie but goodie just yet.

[@jfh400]

1:21 oh my god this is a world where people were just hearing about Tetris

[@tetsujin_144]

You know it's really quite interesting the way it works, you put these pieces together like they were parts of a jigsaw puzzle, but you do it while they're falling so it creates this fast-paced gameplay experience! I've never seen anything like it before!

[@bigrock9637]

Love the violet disks...

[@craigtheduck]

and the C64 would have a continued existence for another six years after this episode!

[@curiousottman]

I had to put down playing Sam’s Journey to watch this. What a C64 moment!

[@eijentwun5509]

I still can't believe the Amazing things they had for the C64 in the 80's. We had gotten an Amiga 1000 around that time and started to neglect the C64 a bit so maybe that's why.....but wow!

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Ah, such great memories hanging out with my friends playing games on the old C64. We'd connect to the local BBS to see what they had, at the mind-boggling speed of 300 baud! Yes, you too can download a 16k program in about an hour! Anyway, I think my original C64 is sitting in my mom's attic. As for GEOS, it is surprisingly full featured considering the resources it has at its disposal. Luckily it can make use of expanded memory, acceleration (like with the CMD SuperCPU)* and even hard drives! Unluckily, it came out right around the time other windowed OSes were coming out, such as for the Amiga, Atari and Macintosh. * Using GEOS with the CMD SuperCPU (which runs 20 times faster than the default CPU) and expanded memory is a RADICALLY improved experience.

[@RemnantCult]

Truly a computer for the people. Learning to work on a C64 is a great learning tool and is just a fun platform to get into.

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

you should get an iPad, you would be blown away. 😲

[@Pau_Pau9]

This show is *perfectly titled!!* Very near in future, we will look at this show as documentary on advancement of modern computers!! With SOOOO much going on with modern computer, why is there not "Computer Chronicles ^ 2.0(Squared)"??

[@geoffreyoltmans4356]

Boy, there's a market that disappeared... expensive encyclopedia software. lol

[@vcv6560]

I bought the DVD rom of Britticana in 2003. I think it got used a dozen times then ka-put.

[@ChristopherDrum]

8:51 "SPREDSHEET"

[@chrismcdonnell7448]

Even in 2020, The 8-Bit Guy is still writing games for the C64. Also, I played Skate or Die on my NES.

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

Skate or Die was a commodore 64 game.

[@Strahan740i]

I loved the C64. I still have fond memories of Mail Order Monsters, Bard's Tale III, Ultima series, Saboteur, Maniac Mansion, Telegard, so many fun games. I like the looks I get from the kids when I tell them I had some games on cassette tapes, lol. The bugs and glitches were great too. Like in Ultima IV, if you are in the overworld, take out the overworld disc and put in the dungeon disk. Walk until it needs to load the next map chunk and you'll get a wildly F'd up terrain made of dungeon parts. You can usually find a way through, and if you find a treasure chest you can loot it forever - they never empty or disappear. Then in Bard's Tale III, if you go to the utils menu during the intro song and choose "transfer a character", the game doesn't give a hoot what disk you actually use when it says to insert your character disk to transfer a char from an prior BT game. So I popped in Ultimate Cookbook recipe disk, lol. The names of the available characters were gibberish and if you tried to take them out of the camp in your party, they'd be uncontrollable and go nuts and slaughter you. But the part that made it valuable is they were typically LOADED with gold and had all sorts of nice items on them you could snatch :)

[@eldiablo3794]

RIP Kelly Flock 12:03

[@jovmilos]

Those 80's C64 games in Toys”R”Us shelves would be worth a small fortune now

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

no, not true. all those games are available freely online now.

[@pauldavis5665]

@@Chevroletcelebrity He's talking about the physical copies. They are worth a lot of money to collectors now especially if they are still sealed.

[@peterhelpme]

I always remember my old Sinclair ZX Spectrum ... as a poor man's Commodore 64. I own both till this day 🙂

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

that zx spectrum sucked. especially with that crummy expansion unit on the back. I remember spending hours programming the stupid thing from a book and just moving the unit slightly caused it to reset or crash and lose everything. not to mention the crappy keyboard on the thing.

[@andrewchristiansen8311]

0:08 Gauntlet to the bottom left. I have that on steam the new 3d re work its awesome.

[@royf.9034]

Oh that floppy drive that it had. It was slow as molasses in January. In a class by itself. I remember one game that had me switching from one floppy to another every 2 minutes, and one of those minutes was just waiting for the disk to be read.

[@fitfogey]

The 1541 had an inherent bug that made it slow that was fixed in the 1571 drive. 8 bit guy covers this if you search for him on youtube. I never knew that before watching one of his videos about that.

[@gregorymalchuk272]

@@fitfogey Given how much development work is still ongoing in the C64 community, I wonder if we crowdsource a patched version of the chip, though that would probably also require reverse engineering and modifying Commodore Basic 2.

[@fitfogey]

@@abdulazizalserhani7625 Right I wasn't saying there weren't workarounds. My point was just that it had a bug that made it that slow. Again, 8 bit guy talks about all of the workarounds like fastload, etc.

[@Think-About-It]

I thought it was fast! Much better than my commodore casset tape drive.

[@tetsujin_144]

With fast-loaders you could make the 1541 up to 10 times faster! But then it would still be like one third the speed of the Apple II's disk drive, though. :)

[@Valitzu777]

How does a kid growing up with a name like Max Toy get his revenge on all his adolescent bullies? Become the president of the greatest 80's computer and rake in the cash! 😀

[@jeddis92]

That little computer still refuses to die!

[@jcp012000]

Awesome video

[@GoWithAndy-cp8tz]

this is a good old bread box with amazing tunes :)

[@floydjohnson7888]

2:40 I remember wondering how they pulled off GEOS in the 64K of RAM available once you got a handle on the 6510's bank-switching, as well as whether or not they offered the "SDK" to create one's own GEOS apps.

[@Kennephone]

and people are still making software for it in 2022

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

no. all software production ceased in 2021

[@BenvanBroekhuijsen]

Hmm when seeing this kind of video, I feel like going back in time. On the other hand, would I really want that? I think I would go nuts. It's a shame I cannot go there and try for a month or so :D

[@amalgamatedsociologicalins6680]

Thank you Stewart Cheifet. I owe you one career.

[@richardhedderly]

This is a great episode of the show given it was right at the top of the curve for the C64. From then on the Amiga got much cheaper and other 16bits took the market. The Genesis / Megadrive in the following year really made a dent in 8 bits. GEOS esp for the 64 / 128 showed how much the system could be pushed. A classic.

[@fennecbesixdouze1794]

@15:26 Love how Kildall is disappointed that they're selling their game too cheaply: for ONLY the equivalent of $75 in today's money. 😂

[@bigmaxy07]

I was a teen at this point but working in this industry must have been so rapidly moving forward at this time.

[@randybobandy9828]

It's hard to imagine how fast things moved back then. A 3 year old machine was ancient

[@beavacuda]

Mike Dunsmore was awesome as Happy Gilmore's caddie

[@ZagnutBar]

My dad bought the original Spectrum Holobyte version of Tetris for our Apple //e. I always thought that was the first platform (that's what I told my Gameboy friends at school who thought they discovered it first). Very interesting to learn nearly 40 years later that it was a C64 game.

[@TKFTGuillotine]

The history of Tetris and who did/n't have the rights to publish it is an absolutely crazy one. They made a feature length film on Apple TV+ about it, but there's also the video here on KZbin by Gaming Historian that explains it well. It's really worth a watch.

[@joejoseph00]

I remember begging for a mouse, GEOS 2.0 , a modem and a printer after I saw GEOS 2.0 at a computer store in the summer of 1988. I had tried an entry level mac at school and wanted a similar OS for home. I was very pleased with the purchase of GEOS 2.0, still impresses me today. I used it for GeoPaint and GeoWrite mostly and the spell checking , fonts. Then with the 1670 1200 baud modem learned about the burgeoning BBS life, chatrooms, sysops, message boards, empire turned based games, downloads, ccgms color , some very artistic bbs surfing was had, and I made a few petscii drawings myself. I have 3 fully functioning C64s today, my kids will learn programming on them.

[@RayinSD]

Best home computer ever!

[@NuntiusLegis]

To this day, I don't consider a place without a C64 a home.

[@MrLyosea]

0:15 Never again these days would you hear someone call a 6 year old pc an "Oldie".

[@oldtwinsna8347]

Was Max Toy any good for Commodore? Trying to read up on him but not much info out there on what things he actually did for Commodore, whether good or bad. Appears he was the last in the revolving door until the infamous Medhi Ali arrived to take the throne. Toy's predecessor was Thomas Rattigan, who it seems may have had some good success but was terminated. And before that was Marshall Smith, who is well known to have fully authorized the total destruction of the LCD machine, which if it had moved forward we know in hindsight it would've been a smashing success. But again, can't really find much on Toy.

[@DonaldMohrMusic]

I'm not sure an LCD commodore would have done well. The price of the screen would have made it ultra premium, and Jack was a bargain builder.

[@NuntiusLegis]

@@DonaldMohrMusic I think CBM had their own LCD plant, so could havbe been cheaper than the competition.

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@DonaldMohrMusic The LCD machine was long after Jack was gone.

Iteresting watching a man called Max Toy trying to sell the C64 as something more than a gaming machine

[@lowstaar]

The C64 was ahead of its time

[@MegaasAlexandros]

Presenter says like its unexpected new titles are still coming out for the machine... Fast forward 35 years and not much has changed, new games are still coming out except nowadays they are generally better!!!

[@haizahmedhaiz5387]

They should write a game dedicated to combovers of the 80s...it would be some hair-raising ribaldry..

[@valley_robot]

I watch this mostly for the bad haircuts and combovers

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

​@valley_robot I work in retail and I've seen plenty of your generation with stupid hare cuts to 🤨

[@oubrioko]

20:35 *Lionel Richie* - _All Night Long_

[@MaximRecoil]

The way that musician talks reminds me of Tim Meadows' "The Ladies Man" character.

[@JulianSarnoff]

23:23 this whole next paragraph sound like it was taken out of the infomercial for the turbo-encabulator.

[@TheUtuber999]

I didn't catch a word Cynthia Steele said. What a doll! 😍

[@surefmeurope5766]

The Knitting Machine - Dream Weaver!!! HAHAHA 😃

[@ShieTar_]

I loved the C64, but to see a show promote GEOS in 1988, a good 2-3 years after the AMIGA OS, Windows 1.0 and the Macintosh were around, is kind of funny in retrospect.

[@sa3270]

"Interest in the C64 is still going strong."

[@dougjohnson4266]

I can't even imagine have as much cubicle space now as they did at minute 2:50.

[@Chevroletcelebrity]

there stuff took up more space and people were more obese back then so they needs it

[@jayburgh]

Mad to think the C64 was considered old in 1988 😮

[@NuntiusLegis]

Meanwhile, it is considered timeless.

[@airjuri]

As a comic relief, yesterday i did presentation on my employers monthly developer Teams meeting, about how to do C development for C64 nowadays :D cc65 is the compiler and i just showed how incredibly slow Basic is compared to compiled C-language.

[@NuntiusLegis]

You mean interpreted BASIC, but there is also the C64 BASIC compiler BASIC Boss that speeds BASIC up 100 times or more.

[@airjuri]

@@NuntiusLegis Jep, i mean the basic basic V2 basic that is basically in use when you do not have compiler for it :) Is there basic compiler for C64 that uses basic dialect without line numbers? I'd like that.

[@NuntiusLegis]

@@airjuri Well for C, you also have to get yourself a compiler, but I don't think you can have an interpreter as well.

[@pauldavis5665]

The good old days of old tech.

[@Dazlidorne]

13:36 This guy reminds me of the comic book store owner on Big Bang Theory.

[@kraftwerk974]

The Chiefet's haircut could not be missed.

[@lambrinos]

If you notice, Gary’s right cheek is swollen and looks like makeup is covering up a bruise. He got into bar fights towards the end of his life, ultimately ending his life in one. I wonder if this is an example of that.

[@gregorymalchuk272]

I knew about the fight that killed him, but how do you know he repeatedly got in bar fights?

[@fordxbgtfalcon]

Probably had a swollen tooth here.

[@lambrinos]

@@gregorymalchuk272 Stuart Cheifet mentions it in this more recent interview: kzbin.info/www/bejne/g5-YnZ2JrtySZpI

[@maxxdahl6062]

I don't think he was quite at that point yet here.

[@chadhartsees]

GEOS was amazing. A real technical feat.

[@maxxdahl6062]

Yeah, gave the c64 some of the features and things the 16 bit machines had.

[@echopathy]

Oh my gosh... Lucy Morton is SO DANG RIGHTEOUS! @5:50

[@danfuerthgillis4483]

What a time Koalapainter was my favourite software it was mind blowing back then lol

[@incumbentvinyl9291]

Max Toy? Sounds like something from an adult store.

[@Lachlant1984]

I don't understand how to play Tetris, but even I don't think Stewart was playing it very well.

[@JonitoFischer]

Sadly, processor speed evolved much faster than the ability to code efficiently (I assume he was referring yo programming in assembly language)

[@Frostie3672]

It wasn't until 1988 when I was in college that I bought a C64 so I was a bit late to the party.

[@The_Conspiracy_Analyst]

The good old Commode 64

[@9852323]

The music reminds me of some sort of pump. strange sounding music.

[@thechillhacker]

First off, what a name for a president of a "totally not just a game machine" computer company: Max Toy xD Am I the only one who wants to see a collab between Bill Morrow and LookMumNoComputer on a muxed-SID 64/128? And yes, the C64 was my second computer, after a CoCo, both in the early 90s. Being a poor kid then was awesome for learning programming. Got a computer with no storage devices, no software, and an old spare tv? cool. guess you are learning BASIC, and maybe a few cool PEEK/POKE locations... Then there's the warnings to everyone NOT TO TURN THAT COMPUTER OFF xD ah, good times

[@ZagnutBar]

Someone should tell the host that the goal of Tetris is not to make the tallest stack you can.

[@TopSecretVid]

Damn I miss my 128...

[@speedbird737]

he spelt SPREDSHEET wrong lol @ 08:47 and his MEMO is in a DAIRY!!!! any cows?

[@angelfishbone]

14:27-14:34

[@andywest5773]

Rub your thumb around on the surface of that $300 CD some more, Paul.

[@StarlancerAstro]

Little did they know there are still people writing games and software for the C64 in 2024 and it has a cult following

[@WrvrUgoThrUR]

Reminiscing about watching this show triggers two reactions: 1. Computers really were lame and pitiful back in the day. 2.(and this one wins out) It was the bestest, coolest computer gear at the time, and I WANTED IT ALLL!!!!!

[@estebanvillalobos2303]

1988, commodore 64, old but good... haha

[@infinitecanadian]

The Atari ST was more popular with musicians because of its built-in MIDI interface.

[@incumbentvinyl9291]

300 dollars for an encyclopedia on a CD. .....

[@ayaygabriel]

Probably worth it. Wikipedia sux

[@incumbentvinyl9291]

@@ayaygabriel Not only is it free, but you get free updates constantly.

[@MCOfan]

Most everybody in that user group at 9:58 is long dead.

[@alcimlibero]

Alfa Romeo! 👍

[@melloickii]

When Tetris was controversial!

[@sa3270]

I was shocked when they said Russia was hit by their first computer virus. Then I remembered it was 1988.

[@aliren6118]

I swear I think some of these software prices have already been adjusted for inflation.

[@tetsujin_144]

2:38 - "The award for popularity must go to the Commodore 64, a little 8-bit machine that refuses to die." "DIE!" C64: "I REFUSE!" PLA chip: "Well, 'refuse' is such a strong word..."

[@TheUtuber999]

And later in the video a review of Skate or Die.

[@NuntiusLegis]

Only the very early ones had frequent PLA failures.