by Jason Snell

July 15, 2025 5:31 PM PT

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Commodore, Apple, and the early computer days

As noted by John Gruber, a reborn Commodore is selling a “new” Commodore 64. It’s not an emulator, but a re-engineering based on the old design and modern programmable electronics.

As Gruber writes:

This is, no question, a fun and cool project, and I hope it succeeds wildly. But personally, the Commodore 64 holds almost no nostalgic value for me. The Commodore 64 — which came out in 1982, when I was 9 — always struck me as cheap-feeling and inelegant. Like using some weird computer from the Soviet Union.

Gruber and I were chatting about this in iMessage last week. My first computer was a Commodore PET—which predated the “compact” Commodores and didn’t offer any color graphics—and so Commodore BASIC was the first programming I ever did.¹

And like Gruber, I hold absolutely no affection for the Commodore 64. A lot of people really got into it, but by then I was deep into the Apple II and was never going to look back. And, yes, Commodore’s keyboards were bizarre—but even five minutes typing BASIC into a C-64 emulator took me back to the days of typing programs from COMPUTE! magazine into that PET. Shift-2 for quotation marks? It’s totally nutty², but I’ve still retained muscle memory from back then, somewhere.

As Gruber noted on Tuesday, there’s also an incredibly fun piece by Drew Saur about how much he loved the C-64. I highly recommmend it, despite the fact that it contains several statements with which I disagree. Saur writes:

Even then, I could compare one of my favorite home video games between the VIC-20 and the Apple II version, and I know which one I preferred.

If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home computer anyone had ever seen at that point. It was laughably underpowered… but: it was only $300! They sold a million of ’em.³)

Saur continues:

Commodore 64 fans were the original “Think Different” crowd…. In the overall hierarchy of the day, it was Commodore/Atari, then Apple, then IBM. Kids of the day — programming kids of the day — adored the ’64 because it was a more thoughtful and downright fun machine to use and to program. We also thought it was adorable, well-designed, and less “corporate” than any Apple II or IBM PC. I know more people who leapt from a Commodore 64 to a Mac than I do who came from an Apple II. There’s a reason for that.

This is deranged and ahistorical, and I say that as a “programming kid of the day.” Commodore, Atari⁴, and then Apple? And the Apple II was… “corporate”? Nonsense. The Apple II was the ultimate counterculture computer. It was made by hippies for hippies. Certainly the people who introduced me to the Apple II were hippies. The Commodore, meanwhile, was the product of a guy in a suit and tie.

Anyway, those days are long gone. It’s all water under the bridge, no matter how much this nostalgia trip has resurfaced ancient, prehistoric platform animosities. And I love that every single one of these computers can run in a web browser, on pretty much any device, today.