Commodore 64: the first computer I ever used

I'm starting a self-indulgent series about my own personal history with computers, back when computers were whimsical, exciting, and empowering. To begin, this is the story of me and the first computer I ever used. Commodore 64 At some point in the early 1990s, my family acquired a Commodore 64 from one of our neighbors. The C64 launched in 1982, sporting 64 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz processor. In modern units, that means 0.00006 GB of RAM and a 0.001 GHz processor (and, by the way, that processor didn't implement floating point, or even integer multiply/divide). Multimedia was enabled by specialized chips: the VIC-II for graphics (with a fixed 16-color palette) and the famous SID chip for 3-channel sound and music. All of this was housed in an uncomfortably tall beige keyboard. Video and audio signals could be sent to a TV or a composite video-capable monitor. Power came from a notoriously temperamental power supply brick. To complete the picture, the computer was ideally paired…