![]() 1977: April - Commodore Business Machines Inc.1977: January - Commodore's Chuck Peddle shows the first PET to Radio Shack, hoping to have Radio Shack sell it.1977: January - Commodore first shows a prototype PET computer at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show.The Apple II, the Atari 800, the Commodore PET and 64. A popular 8 bit processor that soon would be used in machines like 1976: Commodore purchases MOS Technologies, an American maker of IC chips.197? Commodore manufactures calculators and digital watches, but gets killed by Texas Instruments.1955: Tramiel relocates to Toronto and becames the biggest manufacturer of low cost office furniture in Canada.1953: Jack Tramiel opens a typewriter repair shop in the Bronx, New York.Here are schematic diagrams of different Commodore computers.In 1984, Commodore released the SX64, the *portable* C64, with a built-in monitor, floppy drive and The chips contains three sound channels, each with its own ADSR envelope generator, ring modulation and filter capabilities.Ĭommodore continued to improve reliablilty, as well as reduce manufacturing costs.Įventually, it cost only about $25.00 to manufacture the C64, and the consumer price dropped to around $200.00. Referred to as the 6581 SID (Sound Interface Device), ![]() Public bulletin board systems (BBS), the precursor to the internet, for chat, downloads, and online games.ĭue to its advanced (for the time) programmable sound generating chips, the Commodore 64 became popular for generatingĬomputer-generated music, one of the first home computer to have such capabilities built-in. Famous for being very slow (serial), noisy, and prone to failure.Īlso available were rebranded C.Itoh or Epson dot-matrix printers, as well as daisy wheel printers and color plotters.Ĭommodore offered a number of inexpensive modems for the C64, allowing quick and easy access to the thousands of dial-up It was rather slow, transferring data at only 300 baud.Ī floppy drive was eventually released - the famous 1541. Originally, the only method of storing your own data was on the proprietary Commodore Datasette recorder. All this make it an excellent game machine, which is what it excelledĪt the most, with thousands of software titles release and numerous peripherals to extend its capabilities. The C64's microprocessors support two high-resolution graphic modes, smooth scrolling, "sprites",īit mapping, character collision resolution and character mapped graphics, not to mention threeĬhannels of complex sound. They are similar, but the C64 is more powerful with more features. The C64 looks nearly identical to the Commodore VIC-20, released in 1981. That's about 17 million systems,Īccording to the Commodore 1993 Annual Report.ġ989 interview, Sam Tramiel, then-president of Commodore, said that "When I was at Commodore we were buildingĤ00,000 C64s a month for a couple of years." More C64s haveīeen sold than any other single computer system, even to this day. Although it looks like an unimpessive keyboard-like box, the Commodore 64 was incredibly popular.
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