Commodore 64 Coming Back for Christmas?
There she is, the wanna-be PC of the early 1980s that inspired a whole generation of geeks. It was a $200 computer in an age where real computers were out of reach to the common person. With a creaky floppy drive and two-tone graphics at best, the Commodore gave a rising generation its first real computing experience. And now it is back in all its chunky key glory.
Well, kinda.
A group of what appears to be aging geeks in full blown mid-life crisis is launching a product claiming to be an exact replica of the classic Commodore 64. Of course, it just looks that way. Under the hood of this throwback is all the whiz-bang technology of any all-in-one computer on the market today. It is like throwing the engine of a Corvette into a Model T.
The inaugural C64 sold for $595, and that ultra-low price eventually dropped even lower, to a mere $199. “We made machines for the masses,” Jack Tramiel said on the machine’s 25th anniversary, before a gesturing to the Buddha-like man sitting beside him, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. “They made machines for the classes.”
Tramiel said his company sold almost half a million Commodore 64s each month before he departed in 1984, and he estimated that between 22 and 30 million C64s were sold before the machine finally gave up the ghost.
A classic Commodore 64 in decent shape on eBay can be had for about $500 or more these days.
