First official C64 in 36 years

The keyboard seems to be an improvement over the original. Sounds more like an Apple M3501 keyboard. With respect to the tan color of the function keys, those are more like what you'd find on a ViC-20. From what I remember, early C64 machines did come with them, whereas the later breadbox C64s (like the one we owned) had the grayish-brown function keys.

Gary Kildall was the guy behind CP/M.

Unfortunately, he passed away during the 90s in an accident.

JDW said:

In light of the recent passing of Computer Chronicles host, Stewart Cheifet, it’s perhaps fitting for this thread that I post the episode which focused exclusively on the Commodore 64:

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Thank you for sharing that. Koala paint with the pad is one of my earliest memories. I must have been preschool or kindergarten-aged. In early grade school I would have spent more time with games like summer and winter games, paperboy, dig dug, zaxxon, bruce lee, TMNT, tapper, test drive, spy hunter, etc. I spent countless hours exploring each of the disks that filled multiple disk organizers that must have been copies handed down from my uncle to my dad.

I have a starlight edition C64U on order that hopefully should ship soon. I ordered it once I saw the video about the production line and realized this project was actually happening and not going to be a long drawn out promise of something for the future.

I know my childhood C64 works as I dug it out of my parents' basement along with the monitor and the 1541 disk drive. My dad is persistent on wanting to keep it along with his 8088 XT clone which was the first computer I used to get on the internet. I'm particularly sentimental about those machines.

You're lucky. They aren't guaranteed to work after sitting around for decades. Any Commodore/MOS manufactured chip ( PLA, MOS 74 series chips and unfortunately the SID chip ) were prone to corroding internally over time due an imbalance between phosphorous and boron used when manufacturing these chips. They used more boron to soften the silicon and make it flow faster which corroded the chip inside, so you didn't have to be actively using the machine for it to fail.