Joel Durham Jr.

What separates the toddler and youngster aimed PeeWee Pivot 2.0 Tablet Laptop from an ordinary Atom-powered netbook? Two of the thing are: The swiveling screen comes off to become a self-contained tablet; and the manufacturer's price is $600.

Tablet mania, sparked by the relatively-new-but-almost-ubiquitous iPad, is all over town. Every manufacturer around the world, it seems, is releasing a tablet for the upcoming holiday season, and about half of them dual-boot Google Android. How do you make an also-ran into a stand-out?

Way back in the Mesozoic era of computing (also known as the early 1980s), we didn't have slick little netbooks or big, powerful desktops. Businesses that used computers at all generally relied on Unix servers or ancient mainframes driving terminals at employees' workstations. Meanwhile, home users could choose from a narrow assortment of systems, none of which bear much resemblance to the array of computers for sale today; and one of the most popular models back then was the Commodore 64.

The makers of the C-64 included a hard-coded copy of BASIC on its internal ROM so you wouldn't have to boot from a 5.25-inch floppy disk, as you did with most contemporaneous PCs. The machine had a generous 64 kilobytes of memory, and you loaded programs into it from a tape drive--eventually to be superseded by a painfully slow floppy disk drive (the legendary 1541).

Tired of the glitz and glamour of your brand-new OS? Bring it back to the good old days with our Commodore 64 theme for Windows 7.

Way back in the Mesozoic period of computing (also known as the early '80s), we didn't have slick little netbooks or big, powerful desktops. Businesses generally had UNIX servers or ancient mainframes driving terminals at users' workstations. Home users had a choice of a few systems that bore little resemblance to the array of computers for sale today, and one of the most popular models was the beloved Commodore 64.