In a church basement on a Thursday night, a robust middle-aged fellow with thick glasses hammers the keys of a beige Commodore 64. Tom Luff is showing off a version of Monopoly. "Okay, St. Charles Place," he says, staring at a screen where the game board appears in chunky primary colours. "This will cost me $104. . . . Let's see if it puts it up for auction. Oh, it didn't. Son of a gun!"
The payoff never comes -- but for Mr. Luff's audience of about a dozen men, seeing an unfamiliar game on the 1980s computer is enough of a reward. They're members of the Toronto PET User's Group, a group of Commodore loyalists that have stuck with their favourite computers as they moved from the cutting edge of the 1970s to the dustbin of computer history.
Once a month, the group gathers to swap files, share hacking techniques and troubleshoot several generations of Commodore systems, from the early PET (or Personal Electronic Transactor, a clunky green-screened desktop) to the VIC-20 and the more sophisticated 64 and Amiga. Mr. Luff is the president; it says so on his cards, printed neatly on an archaic dot-matrix printer. "Our main motto is to . . . support and be there for anyone who's new to the market," he says.
At this meeting, one such young man, Kirk Zathey, 15, sits to the side listening keenly in a black leather jacket. Then there's Leif Bloomquist, a neatly assembled thirtysomething. "I'm an engineer, and I've got a strong sense of wanting to tinker with stuff," Mr. Bloomquist says. "The old computers are a fun and cheap way to tinker with things. And if you blow it up, you can find a replacement on eBay for like five bucks."
But while there's a trickle of new members, the group on the whole is in a slow decline. TPUG was founded in 1979, and at its height in the mid-eighties, Mr. Luff says, it had more than 20,000 members. Its convention, the World of Commodore, was held in the International Centre. At this year's convention, taking place this weekend at Alderwood United Church in Etobicoke, they don't expect to see more than 100 attendees. (And tonight they have to be out in time to clean up for a Sunday-school class.)
It's a strange fate for a computer that in the eighties was nearly ubiquitous. Commodore's PCs were hugely successful, affordably priced at around $600 and popular for games and business use. The 64 still holds the Guinness World Record for sales of a personal computer: 17 million units in its long lifespan from 1982 to 1994. The original World of Commodore convention was run by the company, until bad business moves and the onslaught of affordable IBM PCs sent it into bankruptcy. But three years ago, the members of TPUG decided to revive the convention -- albeit on a smaller scale.
Many are long-standing Commodore enthusiasts, dedicated members from the past who are still seeking new applications for their archaic computers. Nostalgia and a sense of computer-whiz community has kept them going for nearly 30 years. There's a friendly atmosphere to the meeting, as members crack jokes decipherable only to the true 8-bit fans.
"It's obviously a lot of camaraderie," Mr. Bloomquist says. He hadn't heard of TPUG before 2003, but his own tinkering earned him not only a welcome to the group but the title of webmaster. "One thing I always wanted to do was hook my 64 up to the Internet," he explains, "and now I actually have the design and engineering background to do it. So I did it." And he found he wasn't the only one; soon, an army of other Commodore 64s made contact with his special Web server. "Within a week, I had 2,000 callers," he says.
Going online with a decades-old computer -- today's $600 desktops are thousands of times more powerful -- is no small feat, and the motivation for Mr. Bloomquist and others is a mix of novelty and nostalgia. Computer fans are enjoying the eighties revival as much as anybody. For the generation born in the seventies, computers and gaming are culture. Machines like the C64, which had one of the largest game catalogues of the decade, are a big part of their past, and now they want to reclaim it.
Many use emulator programs, software that can translate the original code of beloved titles into versions they can play on a current PC. But for others, there's nothing like the tactile experience of an original machine. If they're lucky, it means dusting off the old machine from their basement; others seek them out from garage sales or on eBay.
After the meeting, as a howling Boy Scout troop clears out of the church's gymnasium, member John Easton describes the upcoming show. He imagines it filled with tables, vendors, and televisions airing programs like Bits and Bytes, an eighties computer show on TVOntario that was hosted by Luba Goy. As well as being a volunteer at the church where they meet, Mr. Easton is one of TPUG's original members and, at a sprightly 74, also one of the oldest. He first got started on the monochromatic green screen of the Commodore Pet through his work at the Ministry of Education.
"So we've still got a PET library, although very few people are looking for things like that any more," he says. "But the PETs did wonderful things. This whole church ran on PETs for years."
Back in the meeting room, members are still chatting and arguing over decades-old lines of code. Mr. Easton shakes his head. "This always happens. I have to kick them out now, and then they'll go and talk in the parking lot for an hour!"
The World of Commodore runs today from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Alderwood United Church, 44 Delma Dr. ($10, families $15). .