Commodore 64

What it was
The Commodore VIC-20 was the first affordable home computer for many American kids, but it was a piece of crap (even at the time), so the first real home computer for many was the upgraded Commodore 64 (or C=64 for short). It had a whopping 65,536 bytes of RAM, and came with a BASIC interpreter. You had one-byte-at-a-time access to all of the RAM (with 'peek' and 'poke' commands in BASIC) so you could hack the software to your heart's content, or write in pure machine code. The latter feature was exploited by magazines that would publish pages full of numbers you could type in to create nifty games -- this was downloading via NEWSPRINT and EYEBALLS and FINGERS, people. Used audio tapes (ick, no) or 5.25" floppy disks (170 kilobytes!) for loading & saving data. Thanks to 'peek','poke' and a lack of any RAM protection by the OS, software piracy exploded as kids swapped floppies during every recess.  This lead to the trend of copy protection schemes where the game would stop halfway and ask you to solve a puzzle with the help of a chart in the manual, or assembling puzzle bits that were in the box.

If you can't be arsed to get a C=64 emulator, you can buy old Commodore 64 games (with an emulator wrapper) on the Nintendo Wii shopping channel.

Little known facts

 * The C=64 was still being manufactured until April 1994.
 * The audio chip in the C=64 was the famous SID 6581, which became a staple of electronic music for decades.
 * The 1541 disk drive was actually a microcomputer in itself, with it's own operating system. Hackers were later able use up to 16 of them in series for cluster computing (fuck your Beowulf clusters, we got disk drive clusters!)
 * The game system is the worst thing ever you can't even play most games on it avoid at all costs. Stick to your regular C64.

The List
For a definition of the Genres, see A List and Guide to Game Genres.

Links

 * Lemon64 haven for nostalgiafags
 * c64s.com Play these games in a java applet emulator.
 * C64-Longplays Let'sPlay style movies of entire C64 games