What's this about?
The Commodore 64 was released on September 1, 1982. It remains the best-selling single computer model ever made.
Why did it matter so much?
Price and completeness. It cost a fraction of its competitors, plugged into a television, and booted straight into BASIC — so the machine you bought to play games was also, immediately and without any decision on your part, a programming environment. A generation of people who became engineers did so because the thing they wanted to play with happened to have a prompt. That property is almost entirely absent from modern consumer hardware, and it is what the NYC schools thread was reaching for.
Why is it worth noticing?
HN 334 points, 173 comments
- It outscored the Gemini release for most of the day, which tells you something about this audience.
- The "boots into a programming language" property is a recurring theme in every discussion about computer literacy.
- Pure nostalgia is also a legitimate reason for a thread to exist.