Introductions seem to be somewhat customary here, so I'll try to write mine...

Introductions seem to be somewhat customary here, so I'll try to write mine...

I found this community actually just today in another Commodore one I've been a passive member of for a long time, mainly because of time constraints and the somewhat lack of focus in the community itself. Looking through here I can see it's quite different and I like the approach of active conservation and preservation of all things Commodore unlike anywhere else. I'm not sure how much I can contribute, but I think I may have some links and ideas which have not yet been mentioned. I'm still looking through all the posts and links here, though!

I was born in the year of Star Wars and the PET, but I only got my first computer in early 1989. It was a C64-II (the actual one in the photo) and from this I learned all the computer basics, although before I had a couple of months fun with a loaned Kaypro II (the "portable" CP/M beast!). I stayed with the C64 only until November 1990, when I switched to the Amiga 2000 - and that was my main computer for about five years until a switch to the PC was inevitable. But I never sold my C64 or Amiga and in the mid-1990s and early 2000s I bought several more of them - currently I have my original C64-II, a "dark" breadbox C64, a "light" breadbox C64 and two C128D, one with the original plastic case and one with the metal case. Plus several 1541-II, one 1571 (not counting the two in the C128Ds) and one 1581. I only have one Amiga 2000, and this one unfortunately has a crashed harddrive and one broken floppy, but some great hardware additions like an A2386 bridge card and a 2MB RAM expansion, which were both quite expensive back in the day.

All of those still work except the Amiga harddrive, but fortunately I have backed all my old disks including the failed harddrive to the PC. I'm not sure how much of a taboo emulators are around here, but I love the fact that we can get all the old software and games running nowadays on all sorts of devices including tablets and even phones. Having both the collected C64 and Amiga treasures on the memory cards of my phone or tablet is still a mind-boggling concept to me. There are grown people around today who were born after Commodore went bankrupt in '94. I'm not sure if that makes me feel old or whatever, but I'm glad that I caught at least the end of the heyday of Commodore. I was never a big programmer or hardware modifier, but both the C64 and Amiga taught me a lot of stuff about computers that was very useful later in the age of the PC. 

But I never lost sight of the Commodore computers and a while ago in late 2013 and early 2014 I wrote a couple of articles about the C64 and C128 on my blog especially for the young folks in my photography circles on G+, who had hardly heard of those old machines, let alone floppy disks or tape drives! You can find those articles here: http://blog.bibra-online.de/category/commodore/ and maybe if you look through Google+ under the hashtags #commodore and #vintagecomputing - I never got around to write the Amiga posts, but maybe I'll finally do it this year.