The Commdore 64 was released in 1982. The Commodore 64 is regarded by most as the most popular home micro of the eighties, at least for the States. The photo shows the three most widely known case designs of the machine.The original 64 (top left), the classic version (top right) and the one made according to Commodore's `new' design, as applied to the Commodore 128 and the Commodore Amiga.Needed external power supply (like many machines of the early 80s). Is considered one of the best home machines of the eighties, with a large range of available software and hardware. Hard-core, die-hard fans still produce software for this family of machines, even after Commodore's demise. Commodore intended to resurrect the 64 as the Commodore 65. A number of beta testing prototypes of this machine were sold when the company shut down, and they are now being used normally. It had what was often referred to as the worst BASIC to find its way to a home micro's ROM. It was, in fact, a standard implementation of BASIC. All special features of the machine (graphics, sound, etc.) had to be accessed by POKEing values to the memory-mapped hardware, and calling (SYSing) ROM functions. Simon's BASIC, a cartridge popular among serious programmers, solved all these problems and more: it was definitely one of the best BASICs for home computers. Quoting Colin Guillas: "On the C64, the tape port (and drive)'s actual read rate is 1100-1200 baud. Data is written twice, and is accompanied by a CRC checksum code. This slows down the process to give or take 300 baud. CBM was the first (and last) computer company to have this feature in tape drives. This process has a drawback, however, and that is that the whole process is very intensive, and so all unnecessary functions are temporarily terminated. There no longer is a screen write, sound write, keyboard read (limited solely to the scan of the RUN/STOP key), and the jiffy clock (TI; TI$) is also stopped, which can wreck a program's tape load execution. Because of this, the more expensive disk drives became popular, and contrary to popular belief, they weren't popular only because of faster loading times for more data... even though that should have been the reason."