Stefan Höltgen et al., "Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer" (Projekt Verlag, 2026)

I'm delighted to welcome Stefan Hölken, co-editor of the new volume C64, Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer, published as part of the Computer Archaeology series, bringing together 19 contributions from scholars across multiple disciplines.

The book explores the enduring significance of the Commodore 64 from its role in the digitization of society and computer literacy to its continuing impact on digital art, culture, and emerging technological fields.

Welcome to the show, Stefan.

Yeah, hello.

Welcome, everybody.

Nice to be here.

To begin, could you briefly reintroduce yourself? Yes, Stefan has been on the show before, dear listeners.

Please check out our other conversation in the dark archives.

Stefan, please tell us what motivated this volume.

What made the Commodore 64 worthy of a fresh scholarly examination more than four decades after its original release?

Yeah, okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's been a while I've been here, so something changed, and, uh, it's probably worthy to introduce myself again.

Um, I'm a scholar, um, at, uh, the University of Bonn.

There I am running a, um, a DFG-funded project on the programming cultures of, uh, the 1970s to 1990s with the basic programming language.

And the idea of this, um, project is, uh, to, to examine specific programming styles to learn about the cultures behind the codes.

So what I'm doing, I'm not reading texts about programmers and, uh, historiographies about it, but I'm reading computer codes and try to learn from the, the codes, uh, about, um, those scenes and those cultures and st- specific programming styles and other things like that.

Um, and, um, while I did this, of course, the C64, uh, gained a lot of, um, impact on my work since it's the most sold, um, home computer platform of the 1980s and 1990s.

And, um, of course, there are plenty basic programs for the Commodore 64 written by hobbyists in the 1980s and 1990s, and some of them got into my project.

So, um, when I read about that and I collected, um, huge amounts of paperware, uh, to scan and found those, um, c- basic programming listings, basic, basic program listings, uh, within the magazines and books and handwritten stuff, um, uh, the, the idea came to look, uh, what made these, uh, platforms so important back in the day.

And as a part of the retro computing community, um, as I am, um, I know the platform is, uh, important today as well.

So the first two parts of the book, uh, the past and the present, uh, of the Commodore 64, uh, were quite obvious, uh, to, to think about.

And then I thought, "Okay, what about the future?" And I was astounded to find people who are working on, let's say, uh, futuristic projects with the Commodore 64, especially in the fields of, uh, computer science and physics.

And, um, then I s- I think it was, um, at the end of a party, I spoke to one of my co-editors, um, Jens Schröter, who is the professor, um, uh, where I'm working for at the University of, uh, of Bonn.

And, uh, he himself had a C64 back in the day, and, uh, we came to the idea, okay, let's, let's think about doing a conference on the C64, and that got quite fast, quite real.