You Can Keep Your Fake Commodore 64

By PCMag Staff

April 7, 2011

Without the Commodore 64 and, later, Commodore 128, I might never have become a technology journalist or come to work at PCMag. Now, almost 30 years later, the Commodore 64 has risen from the tech landfill, reemerging as an all-in-one doppelganger, with a spec list that would put my old PC to shame.

In its heyday, Commodore sold millions of Commodore 64s. It was an incredibly popular and accessible personal computer. So I get the nostalgic impulse to resurrect the old design as something fresh. Buying the is, though, like buying a custom car kit. What you really want is that sexy chassis—what's inside is immaterial. In the case of the new Commodore 64, which ranges in price from $250 to almost $900, the most expensive model stuffs a terabyte drive and a Blu-ray drive inside the classic-looking computer/keyboard. You can see what it all looks like in this slideshow.

Interesting and entertaining as this new Commodore 64 is, I'm not buying. I feel about this computer very much the way I do about any replica—disappointed. Replica classic cars, toys, signs, etc. always feel like a cheat. You see them out on the road or in a store and for one fleeting moment are excited: You marvel at the preservation and wonder if it still works. Then you find out it's just a simulacrum of the real thing. Anyone can build a PC with powerful insides and a retro-looking body. I have an old 8088-class PC in my basement. Perhaps I'll gut that, put in a Core i7 motherboard, an Nvidia GTX 590 graphics card and three 1TB hard drives in a RAID array (hey, that's not such a bad idea…), but to what purpose? People will marvel over the case, but know that the insides are brand new and work just the way their own new PCs do. Similarly, I think this new Commodore 64 overlooks all that was special about these early PCs.

Looking Back

The original Commodore 64 was a scrappy blend of utilitarian design and late 20th century ingenuity. It connected to a simple RGB display and a 5.25-inch floppy drive. There were hundreds of applications for it—all of which ran off the floppies. It had precious little horse power, though that was de rigueur. The processor was 8-bit and there was just 64K of memory. By then end of the '90s, we were dealing with 640K of memory (and using memory managers stretched that to 1MB).

The applications were both monochrome and RGB, with graphics that made you wonder if they were all written in BASIC. I did play some games on the 64 like Commando and Lode Runner, but probably spent most of my time in Fleet Systems' word processor.

The Commodore 64 arrived in my home just as I was entering college. I wrote most of my papers in the software. Its DOS-like interface prepared me for working on Xywrite, the DOS-based Word processor of choice in 1991 at—yes, you guessed it—PC Magazine. At my college, IBM PCs were just arriving (most students were learning FORTRAN and BASIC on dummy terminals), but since no one had them at home, it was impossible for me to bring in my Commodore OS-based 5.25-inch floppies and print out papers at campus. Instead, all my papers were collected on floppy disks and I printed everything at home on a dot-matrix printer.

Oddly enough, my father was attending college at the same time as me, so he, too, wrote his papers on the Commodore. Halfway through our college terms, we upgraded to a Commodore 128. This replaced the slightly boxy, Apple IIe-influenced design with something brighter and sleeker. The 128 meant we just doubled our memory and performance. I don't recall noticing much of a difference, but was relieved to find that all our applications still worked and I could still read all of my Fleet document files.

Digital Piracy, '80s Style

Speaking of applications, perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of the Commodore 64 craze was the highly active, yet super-secretive software piracy network. I swear that the entire Commodore 64 user base bought exactly five full sets of games and applications and then endlessly copied and traded them among themselves. Commodore 64 (and 128) owners like my dad would meet at local libraries and friends houses to trade for games and applications. We had dozens and I can't remember my father buying more than one or two.

I, like my father and all his Commodore 64 buddies, loved the computer and the software we ran on it. With millions of users, I think many of us assumed the Commodore's reign would never end. We had, after all, so much invested in it.

Commodore Demoted

By 1984, however, things were changing, fast. Apple unveiled the Macintosh computer and IBM launched the XT series. These computers had internal hard drives and, while they didn't have any more memory than the Commodore 128, they could accept memory upgrades, had more powerful CPUs, and boasted unquestionably greater functionality.

Even before I left college, I encountered my first Macintosh. I marveled at its graphical operating system and how I could use the mouse to manipulate it (we had a mouse for the Commodore 64, too, so this experience wasn't entirely alien to me). Using the computer in combination with PageMaker V 1.2 and a then-powerful Postscript LaserWriter printer, I never looked back. At home, I still had to complete papers on the Commodore 128 with Fleet Systems, but I couldn't wait to get out into the real world where they had powerful personal computers like the Macintosh and IBM PC.

Commodore couldn't keep up with Apple, IBM, or the vast number of IBM clones. Its operating system never saw another major update, while the Mac OS and Microsoft's DOS (and then Windows), soon dominated the landscape. Eventually all that pirated Commodore software was worthless, and the files we stored on those 5.25-inch floppies might as well have been written in hieroglyphics—they were all simply lost to the sands of digital time.

So forgive me if I don't get excited about the new, fake Commodore 64. I knew the real Commodore 64. I considered it a friend of mine and this, my friends, is no Commodore 64.