The Future We Were Promised
Christmas morning. A package I’d been waiting for since pre-ordering months ago.
Inside: a Commodore 64 Ultimate. The first real Commodore computer in over 30 years. Not an emulator. Not software pretending. An FPGA recreation of the original silicon, wrapped in a clear case with blue LEDs.
And a card with a sticker:
Technology That Enables #
In 1982, Commodore launched what would become the best-selling desktop computer of all time. Not because it was the most powerful. Because it invited you in.
You could play games. You could program. You could modify. You could create. The machine wanted you to do things with it, not just on it.
Something changed. I can’t pinpoint exactly when - sometime in the 2010s, probably. The boiling frog thing. You don’t notice until suddenly you do.
I noticed last year when I used Kagi for the first time and felt like I’d been transported back to the early 2000s. I felt free. Like we were in this together. Not a product. Not being manipulated. Flourishing rather than diminishing.
The new Commodore gives me that same feeling.
Voting With Dollars #
The man behind the revival is Christian Simpson - Peri Fractic on YouTube - who purchased the entire Commodore brand last year after years in the retro community. His stated mission: keeping the happiness of childhood nostalgia alive.
But read deeper and you see the philosophy: technology that serves rather than extracts. Hardware that invites creation rather than consumption. An ecosystem that wants you to expand rather than stay contained.
I ordered this machine knowing money was tight. Knowing I might have to sell everything and downsize next year. I ordered it anyway - partly because I knew I’d enjoy it, but just as much to vote with my dollars for a mission I believe in.
Same reason I pay for Kagi. Same reason I use Proton. Same reason I’m building Node0.
Christmas Day #
I set it up on a solid wood desk I’d been planning to donate. Found some Bose speakers so I could hear the SID chip properly. The machine came with Christmas songs - that distinctive 8-bit sound that defined an era.
I let them play in the background while I worked. Christmas Day, alone, building sovereign infrastructure while a philosophy from 1982 played through modern speakers.
The Movement #
This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a movement.
Kagi proving you can build a search engine that serves users instead of advertisers. Proton proving you can build email and cloud services that respect privacy. People everywhere building alternatives to the extractive default.
And now Commodore - back from the dead, making hardware that embodies the original promise of personal computing.
The future we were promised isn’t dead. It went underground for a while. Now it’s coming back.
Node0 is part of that. Sovereign infrastructure. Technology you own and control. The same philosophy, different expression.
The sticker on that Christmas card made me cry. Not from nostalgia - from recognition. This is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is what we’re building toward.
The future we were promised. Still possible. Still worth fighting for.