Commodore 64 is 40 years old

Commodore 64 (C64) was the most popular home computer in the days when you connected your computer to the TV set. This most popular home computer just turns 40 years old.

Commodore C64: The Most Popular Home Computer Ever Turns 40 article tells that this year marks the anniversary of the most popular selling home computer ever, the Commodore 64, which made its debut in 1982. “Note that I am saying “home computer” and not personal computer (PC) because back then the term PC was not yet in use for home computer users.

Happy Birthday Commodore 64, with Bil Herd

The Commodore 64 is the best-selling home computer of all time — it’s the box that launched a million geeks. In this video Bil Herd walks us through the evolution of 8-bit home computers at his old employer Commodore in the late 1970′s to 1980′s.

The 6502 is at the heart of many of the home computers of the era starting with Atari, Apple, BBC Micro, and of course Commodore. Commodore, under the reins of its founder Jack Tramiel, purchased MOS technologies and became a computer company that owned a chip fabrication plant. Commodore eyed to calculator market, but soon Commodore found itself in the position of being a computer company that could make its own (custom) IC’s, or chips. The VIC-20 was Commodore’s “TI Killer”.

Some amazing chips were combined into a demo and shown to Jack Tramiel, and the decision was made to produce the Commodore C64. The C64 became Commodore’s “Apple Killer” as it was targeted at the market shared with the Apple II. The C64 is listed in the Guinness Book or World Records as the most popular home computer ever sold at 27 million units (although numbers that suggest that somewhat fewer units were sold in actuality). Commodore’s founder Jack Tramiel stated famously that we made “computers for the masses not the classes” with emphasis on selling the hardware at a fair price which would open the door to massive software sales.

I have 10 years ago made a post The Commodore 64 is 30. Read some history from that post and post comments.

55 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Games That Defined The Commodore 64
    The Commodore 64 is one of the most successful gaming computers ever, and these are the games that helped define it.
    https://www.denofgeek.com/games/the-games-that-defined-the-commodore-64/

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The first LowSpec Processor
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2ZBp9O0mk

    For years, an ongoing battle is fought by a group of Engineers to make a product that their industry thought impossible: a processor so cheap it could change the world.

    But to make it happen they would have to struggle in ways they could have never expected.

    #6502 #mos6502 #mos

    0:00 Intro
    0:40 An unlikely hero
    2:42 Motorola
    6:11 Leaving Motorola
    7:49 MOS semiconductors
    10:07 WesCon
    13:12 Trial by Lawsuit
    15:14 Commodore
    17:29 The Personal Computer
    20:00 Apple Computers
    23:09 RadioShack
    25:26 The Revolution of 1977

    Reply

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