If you are a long time computer user you might find this link very interesting:

Impact of the Commodore 64


http://www.computerhistory.org/event...ction=calendar


If you do not have broadband you might just skip it. It's 200M.

My first computer science courses were at the Fletcher School of Engineering at Dartmouth College and I recall the IBM 360 Assembler and Fortran. We keypunched thousands of punch card and toted them to the high priests who ran the locomotive in the big glass room for processing. Three or four days later you returned for your printout. If the darn thing bombed you started all over again.

So, it was quite remarkable when he could actually have such a powerful machine in the home for under $300.00. And, 64K of RAM! You also could buy a 20M hard drive for under $1500.00 but no one did. Cripes, who would never need 20M.

Sometime prior to the introduction of the Commodore 64, Ken Olson, CEO of DEC stated at a Boston Computer Society meeting that there was no compelling need for a home computer. Some years later, in 1982, he had a change of heart but it was too late. No one remembers the DEC Rainbow 100.