Commodore 64
At the MAL, we were decided to research Commodore 64. Commodore 64 also known as C64. It was a home computer introduced in Jan 1982 by Commodore International.
Background
Commodore 64 was one of the best-selling of all time. Especially in German, the computer was sold in ten thousand each quarter of 1983. The Company even published several C64 related books and magazines after the release. This computer uses 8-bit memory and it contains sound and graphics features.
Commodore 64 Commercial
The Commodore 64 was arguably the easiest to use programmable computer that has ever been made. It was intended to be user-friendly, affordable and accessible to most of users. In fact, this device was way cheaper than its competitors like Apple II and IBM at that time.
Experience
When I first saw this computer, I was surprised by its parts. I thought it would be like one big screen contains everything I need to use the computer. Instead, the whole system consists a lot of parts. Monitor, floppy disk drive, keyboard, joystick and cassette player. But essentially, the most important part was the keyboard itself — also called computer.
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At first, we were really confused about how to turn on the computer. Thankfully, the manual instruction helps us a lot. It was clearly shows the each step and function of each symbol on the keyboard which made us a lot of easier to learn the device.
One of the most important features of Commodore 64 was the ability to save and load program to and from the cassette tape or disk. One thing to notice, if you want to load a certain program or game, you must turn off the computer before inserting any disk or tape. Of course, the loading process took forever.
To load a program, we first enter certain code in order to allow reading the contents of disk.
The program is now loading
When program is loaded, “READY” appears again and then we can click “RUN”
After following the loading instructions, we were able to play a few games. Majority of the games were racing games, meaning you just need to use keyboard up, down, left and right key to move. Overall, it was easy to navigate and the keyboard were surprisingly responsive.
Conclusion
Overall, it was an interesting experience to learn the computer and its history. Most of Commodore 64 functions were limited to game as far as what we experienced that day. But the most important thing was I got to know how technology changed over last decades and how its affect our lives. With computers, we are able to work quicker and more efficiently because of how advanced they are. They can store masses of memory and data and you can open up many applications on the internet to help with your work. Most importantly, they are become more accessible and travel-friendly.
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Yue Liu 