This is rather cool. I saw this on Engadget.
If you’re like us, you’ve probably been holding your breath in anticipation since Commodore USA announced its replica of the famous C64. It promised a keyboard PC that duplicated the original’s retro-beige finish, with an Atom CPU and an NVIDIA Ion graphics card under the hood. But despite numerous announcements, and even after a cross-promotion with Tron: Legacy, they’ve yet to ship any products. The latest word from the company has pre-orders shipping next week, in five different varieties, from a barebones chassis and card reader to the C64x Ultimate – an $895 machine that includes 1TB hard drive and a Blu-ray player. If you haven’t been teased enough over the past year of delays, hit the video after the break for more preview images.
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What would hit my “just too cool” threshold would be if they made the USB Blu-ray to look like the old tape player storage device (or even like the 5-1/4″ single-sided floppy disk drive)
We weren’t Commode Door fans back in the day (we date back to the old PDPs) but this is still highly diverting.
What I liked: http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ibm5150.jpg
IMHO, what made the C64 cool was it’s terrible graphics and Space Invaders. Without them, it’s just a high tech eyesore.
What’s next…Trash-80 Mod I? (Full disclosure…ran a BBS from 1978 to 1984 on one from the Bronx…first one in that borough…4 5.25″ 77KB (!) floppies, 48K (!) RAM, and 1200 baud.) Still have it, it still boots up under TRSDOS. Old computers are the best…and how far we’ve come, right?
Atari vs Commodore 64 Wars veterans, anyone?
I still have my C64, and yes, it still works! I did have to crack open the shell and replace a fuse in it, but other than that it is as good as new. I wish I still had the cassette tape recorder external storage unit tho …
Scaron,
My grandma still has hers and it works perfectly, although the 5 1/2″ floppy for Hangman doesn’t work. :(
It should be in a museum; it’s so old, but last year she decided she wanted to get it hooked up to the Internet so she could start emailing. Oh, grandma :-)
I had a Commodore Amiga back in my grad student days but sold it in a “moving” garage sale in 1997. Hard to imagine how we thought these were actually worth the $1700.00 price tag given that a “not-so-smart” phone has about 1000 times the computing power now… I guess it all depends on what you expect.
I would like to see a retro-version of the TRS-80 as a laptop… it was a “portable” computer in much the same way that a Fender-Rhodes 88 was a “portable” keyboard.
Atari 800XL and ST here, but I respected the 64. I think to make it really cool, they need to have the DVD disguised in the chassis of the old Commodore disk drives ( Was it the1581? Something like that)
Ah, good times. TRS-80 here. I e-cycled it about 5 years ago. Y2K sounded the deathknell for its operating system, otherwise it could still run the programs it always ran. I still have my Lobo Max-80 in a box in the garage and don’t plan to part with it. Three of the original BASIC programs from circa 1980 are still working fine on my HP PC running Windows 7. With each new version of Windows I expected they might drop backward compatibility, but so far, so good.
My first computer was the slightly less boxy-looking C64C:
http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/C64C
I think I still have the keyboard, casette and 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, and an old dot-matrix printer stored somewhere in my parents’ garage …