NEWS – I have many fond memories of the Commodore 64. It wasn’t my first personal computer (that was the TI-99/4A) but it was definitely my favorite. I remember typing in assembly code from magazines, modding a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive to pirate games (shhh), and upgrading from a 300 baud modem to a 2400 baud modem back in the heyday of BBSes. Ah, the good old days when I was a young Gadgeteer Jedi in training!
If you also have good memories of your geek days gone by, check out the My64 or even the My Vic20 cases from myretrocomputer.com. They are barebones cases with a built-in mechanical Cherry Switch™ keyboard, an SD card reader, and a chassis for a hard drive or DVD. You have to add your own CPU (more about the selection of components for this case here) and other hardware to make your own DIY computer. You can buy one for €209.29 (US $256) from myretrocomputer.com
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Love the photographs. Wood paneling dates you. I also started with the TI99 than Commodore. I was never any good with software but became a hardware (cabling) person.
Hi John, Those pics were taken back in the early 80’s. 🙂 I went to college for software/programming and ended up in IT for application support for Cummins Inc. for the last 33+ years.
I did the Heathkit (in college), then on to a Commodore VIC20, complete with tape drive for storing programs and games, and a joystick controller. The VIC20 is in the crawl space holding the cover closed on box of vintage Eagle’s 8-Track tapes.
Micheal, I moved from the C64 to an Atari 520ST (skipped Amiga) and then to an IBM that had a whopping 10MB of RAM (that I upgraded myself) and it was in a HUGE steel case that weighed a ton. From there it was a couple home built tower PCs and finally on to iMacs, Mac Minis, and MacBooks.
Thanks for sharing the personal pics. That’s what makes The Gadgeteer the site that it is. Any site can review hardware and post news, but it feels like more of a group of friends here. Looks like we’re around the same age. I was born in ’73, and my C64 setup looked similar to yours. I like the dust cover over the dot matrix printer!
Chris, I’m 11yrs older than you are. I was born 6/4/64 😀 I’m pretty sure that printer was a color thermal Okidata 10 printer.
https://archive.org/stream/Ahoy_Issue_15_1985-03_Ion_International_US#page/n99/mode/2up
My first was a TI-00/4A also, and this is scary, our rooms looked the same back in the day!
Robert, I need to see a pic of your room! That might be a fun article to do… Hmmmmmm
Alas, those are lost in the mists of time….