commodore 64

I thought I would blog tonight about the 1st computer I had. To be technical, the computer was bought by my parents, but it was the 1st computer we had in the house. It was the commodore 64. I do remember spending a few hours typing out a program into the computer that would allow me to play some game. For those of you that weren't into computers back in the 80's (or who weren't born yet), the programs would use BASIC, which was a computer language that involved typing 10 ____, 20 ____ ... for line after line. Anyway, I do remember (25 years later) that after spending several hours typing it out, I had missed a digit or a comma or a letter and the program didn't do anything. However, I do remember that my parents purchased or I borrowed some word games that did work. A far cry from "Grand Theft Auto" or even "Super Mario Brothers".

I did look up some information on the Commodore 64 online and I thought it was interesting (at least to me). The commodore 64 had 64 KB of RAM (as the name implies). It was introduced in 1982. It cost $595, which is $1318 in today's dollars. It sold 30 million units, making it the best selling single personal computer model of all time. For the time period of 1983 to 1986, the Commodore 64 dominated the market with between 30% and 40% market share.

a couple of tidbits: In the 1999 song, "its all about the pentiums" by weird al yankovic, he sang ""You think your Commodore 64 is really neato, what kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?"

they now have flash drives (or USB drives) that can hold 64 GB of RAM on a device smaller than a chapstick. That is 1,000,000 times as much memory as the commodore 64.