We Eighties kids were there at the dawn of the technology revolution. O.G. video gamers. O.G. PC users.

Believe it not, the term “supercomputer” originates to 1929 in reference to grand-sized tabulators manufactured by IBM. Later, the second generation of computers were constructed as mammoth transistorized computers which flushed entire office walls in the 1950s and Sixties. The CDC 1604, the IBM 7090 and the Harwell Cadet being some of the earliest examples of multiprogramming and multiprocessing beast machines. You can get a farcical idea of one of these gaudy goliaths in the Twilight Zone episode, “From Agnes With Love.”

Today, computers rule our lives. The more compact and transient our metadata, the better. Cell phones, Bluetooth and portable tablets have molded society into a state of tech dependency. You can’t go anywhere without three-fourths of the available humanity in sight scrolling obtusely on their iPhones and droids. We’ve sold ourselves out. Game over. The seemingly unstoppable rise of AI technology is ushering us plugged-in meatbags toward a realistic fleshing of Blade Runner-styled replicants, i.e. artificial human beings designed to think for and carry the unwanted task loads of future generations. Blade Runner architect Philip K. Dick was a prophet by writing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?

The 1980s saw homogenization of the home microcomputer housed with an internal central processing unit capable of writing, calculating, data storage and, of course, video gaming. The most famous name to strike the decade outside of IBM and Apple (the latter, whose early version desk computers remain today a source of debate as to viability) was the Commodore 64.

At one time, the Commodore 64 was a Guinness World Record holder for most home personal computers sold at 17 million units. Today, retro stories and movies set in the Eighties almost always throw a nod to the Commodore 64. It was a one-stop shopping 64K, DOS-based system used by home consumers and businesses where you could balance your books, then play an insane number of available games (surpassing the Atari 2600 and Intellivision gaming consoles tenfold) like Aftermath, Elevator Action, Delta Man, Kung Fu Master and Spy vs. Spy. Assuming you shelled out for the add-on modem, printer and disk drive, which Commodore 64 bragged was still cheaper than their bruising competitor, the IBM PC Jr.

I never owned a Commodore 64 back in the day, but the same friend from yesterday’s post where we crashed to watch taboo movies had one. I have vivid memories of Motley Crue, Twisted Sister and Def Leppard cassettes giving our rapid finger motions extra verve playing games like Summer Olympics and Forbidden Forest, the latter being one of the earliest video games to depict primitive 8-bit gore. In Forbidden Forest you were an archer fending off monster-sized spiders, bees, frogs, snakes and dragons, even a wizard, armed only with four quivers of arrows per level. Assuming you hadn’t been chowed down into a riotous fountain of digi-blood to square off against the Demogorgon. By today’s vernacular, the boss villain.

My friend attested to playing on the Commodore 64 with nearly the same zealousness as his outdoor BMX bike tricks. He was a whiz-kid at both, even if he mentioned his parents were often chasing him off the Commodore 64 after hours on school nights. Ahh, the memories.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.