The Most Popular Computer in the World

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:20:00 +0200

Introduction

Imagine that, several decades ago, one person made a few slightly different decisions — and today your professional life looked nothing like the one you know.

Dennis Ritchie, Niklaus Wirth, Steve Jobs, Richard Stallman, Bill Gates — although in that last case it might have worked out rather well for all of us — Guido van Rossum…

For me, that person is the author of the phrase “computers for the masses, not the classes”: Jack Tramiel. Without him, the eight-bit computer would never have found its way into quite so many homes.

It certainly would not have found its way into mine.

A Little History

Jack Tramiel was born in Łódź in 1928 as Idek Trzmiel. He rarely spoke about the early years of his life, which is hardly surprising. During the war, he was imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto, then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and later sent to the Ahlem labor camp near Hanover. He was liberated by American troops in 1945 and emigrated to the United States two years later.

He served in the US Army, where he learned to repair office equipment. He later worked for small typewriter companies until he eventually founded his own business, selling and repairing such machines under the Commodore brand.

The name was chosen deliberately. It was meant to evoke a military rank — preferably an American one — and sound suitably serious. General and Admiral were already taken, so he had to move a little farther down the chain of command.

Calculators and Computers

When typewriters could no longer compete effectively with Japanese products, the company changed direction. It moved into electronic calculators with LED displays, which at the time represented the height of modern technology.

A price war with Texas Instruments taught Tramiel one important lesson: it was better to own a semiconductor factory than to buy chips from your main competitor.

Commodore therefore acquired MOS Technology, gaining control over both the design and production of its most important components.

Designer Chuck Peddle persuaded Tramiel to enter the computer market. He argued that the calculator business had little future left and that the company needed to take the next step.

This led to machines including the Commodore PET and the VIC-20.

The Most Popular Computer in the World

The Commodore 64 was unveiled in January 1982 as the successor to the VIC-20. It reached the market — at least in the United States — in August of the same year.

Production continued until 1994, when Commodore declared bankruptcy. The machine also entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling desktop computer model in history.

Its success did not come from one exceptional component. Commodore combined excellent custom chips, its own manufacturing facilities, a generous amount of memory, and a merciless pricing strategy.

Competitors could design computers that were equally good, or perhaps even better. Commodore, however, could build its machine quickly, produce it in enormous numbers, and place it on store shelves at a price that caused sudden emergency meetings in the boardrooms of other companies.

Specifications

At the heart of the C64 was the MOS 6510, a modified version of the MOS 6502 processor.

Because MOS Technology already belonged to Commodore, it could prepare chips tailored to the needs of its parent company — provided, of course, that they could be manufactured quickly, cheaply, and in enormous quantities, in accordance with management policy.

Graphics were handled by the VIC-II, while sound came from the legendary SID. Both were also designed by MOS Technology and, at the time of release, ranked among the finest chips of their kind available in home computers.

Depending on the target market, the computer used a VIC-II variant compatible with either PAL or NTSC. It offered a palette of 16 colors, a 40 × 25-character text mode, and graphics modes reaching a resolution of 320 × 200 pixels.

The VIC-II could also display eight hardware sprites: independent graphical objects that could move across the screen without constantly redrawing the background.

Today, that may not sound particularly revolutionary.

At the time, it certainly did.

The character set used by the computer was called PETSCII. In addition to letters, digits, and punctuation marks, it included a substantial collection of graphical symbols, allowing users to create borders, simple illustrations, interface elements, and anything else a determined person could assemble from a grid of characters.

Two DE-9 ports, already familiar from Atari computers and consoles, accepted joysticks. The keyboard, joystick ports, timers, and several other input-output functions were managed by two MOS 6526 CIA chips.

The original machine came in its distinctive rounded case, commonly known as the breadbin, and occasionally as the soapbox.

Characters were printed both on the top and the front of the keys. Four physical function keys on the right-hand side, used either alone or together with Shift, provided eight possible combinations.

The joystick ports sat on the right side of the case next to the power switch. Along the back were, among other things, the cartridge port, video output, serial disk-drive connector, cassette-port connection, and user port.

And then there was the most important feature: 64 KiB of RAM, from which the computer took its name, together with 20 KiB of ROM.

In 1982, when memory was expensive, offering 64 KiB in a computer aimed at ordinary users was impressive.

Furthermore, although part of the processor’s address space was occupied by ROM and input-output hardware, RAM still existed underneath. By switching memory banks, an experienced programmer could use almost all of the available memory.

And an experienced C64 programmer used everything.

Preferably several times.

Peripherals

The three basic devices purchased by the user — or, more accurately, by the user’s parents — were a cassette drive, a joystick, and a cartridge.

The cassette drive was the cheapest and therefore the most popular mass-storage device. Programs were stored on ordinary audio cassettes. The waiting times, the peculiar noises coming from the television, and loading errors occurring just before the end soon achieved legendary status among users.

The joystick was naturally used for improving productivity, usually in the form of better grades at school.

Without a decent utility cartridge equipped with at least a fast-loading system, working with either cassette or disk storage became significantly more irritating. Popular cartridges added faster loading routines, machine-code monitors, program-freezing features, convenient file-copying tools, and a reset button.

In other words, everything that should have been built into the computer from the beginning, but could not then have been sold separately.

Commodore also offered dedicated monitors, such as the later Commodore 1084S. But who could afford a monitor when the computer could be connected to an ordinary household television without much trouble?

That is exactly what most of us did.

Another peripheral that remained beyond the reach of many users was the Commodore 1541 disk drive, followed later by the 1541-II, with its external power supply and a case designed to match the C64C.

The drive was expensive because it was almost a separate computer in its own right. It had its own MOS 6502 processor, RAM, ROM, and an operating system responsible for handling disks.

Some programmers even persuaded it to perform tasks extending far beyond simply loading files.

Does that remind you of anything?

Ah, if only cryptocurrencies or machine learning had existed back then…

A third device, known to many users only from urban legends and computer magazines, was the dot-matrix printer — for example, the MPS 801, MPS 802, or MPS 803.

Most of us probably learned about plotters, mice, modems, and memory expansions only twenty years later, after venturing much deeper into retrocomputing and the demoscene.

Reception

From the beginning, Jack Tramiel imposed an aggressive pricing policy. The competition was always supposed to remain two steps behind, never one step ahead.

Commodore did not restrict itself to specialist computer stores. The C64 appeared in ordinary shops and department stores, and repeated price cuts brought it within reach of customers who had never previously considered owning a computer.

Eventually it also crossed the Iron Curtain — and certainly reached one particular country on the Vistula River.

The gaming community and the demoscene welcomed the new machine with open arms, especially as its price continued to fall. The number of games, demos, utilities, and productivity programs created for the C64 probably surpassed everything produced for competing platforms.

The computer worked at home, at school, and in small offices. It could be used for gaming, programming, word processing, household accounting, music, drawing, modem communication, or spending several hours adjusting the cassette-head alignment.

It suited its era perfectly.

Nobody knows exactly how many units were sold. Serious estimates begin at around 12.5 million, official Commodore figures claimed 17 million, and Jack Tramiel himself mentioned numbers exceeding 20 million.

Commodore was more interested in counting the money it earned than in maintaining accurate sales statistics.

This is unfortunate, because later inventions such as the C116, C16, and Plus/4 did not share the fate of their older and far more famous sibling.

Keeping precise records of their sales would probably have been considerably easier.

Shortcomings

The computer’s greatest limitation was Commodore BASIC V2, whose origins went back to the Microsoft BASIC interpreter licensed by Commodore in the 1970s.

The language provided virtually no convenient commands for controlling graphics, sound, or sprites. To use the VIC-II or SID, users had to write values directly into hardware registers with the POKE command.

As a result, the first program written by many young users was not:

PRINT "HELLO"

but something more like:

POKE 53280,0
POKE 53281,0

You did not yet know what a hardware register or an address space was, but at least you had a black border and a black background.

Mass-storage support also fell far short of what some competing systems offered. BASIC V2 did not even include a convenient command for listing the contents of a disk.

The directory had to be loaded as though it were a program, potentially destroying the program already stored in memory.

The absence of a built-in reset button was another serious inconvenience. The user had to turn the machine off and back on again, or rely on a button provided by an external cartridge.

Frequently switching the computer off and immediately back on was not a particularly good idea. The original C64 power supply was hardly the pinnacle of engineering. It was, however, unquestionably the pinnacle of cost-cutting, and when it failed, it could take the computer’s chips with it.

The consequences of cost-cutting could also be seen on the keyboard. Reducing the cursor keys to two because the other two directions could be produced using Shift was worse than a crime.

It was a mistake.

Still, the accounts balanced, and fortunately neither VisiCalc nor Excel had arrived yet.

Variants

The best-known later variant was probably the C64C, housed in a slimmer, more angular, and considerably more modern case styled after the Commodore 128.

In terms of capabilities, the machine remained compatible with the original. During production, however, the motherboard was redesigned to reduce the number of chips and lower manufacturing costs.

In later units, the main components included:

the MOS 8500 processor,
the MOS 8580 SID sound chip,
the MOS 8565 VIC-II graphics chip in PAL machines, or the MOS 8562 in NTSC models.

The newer chips used less power and produced less heat. The SID 8580, however, sounded somewhat different from the older 6581, particularly in the behavior of its filters.

To this day, the subject can provoke a debate every bit as calm and rational as a discussion about the best text editor — Emacs, obviously.

As another cost-saving measure, Commodore stopped printing graphical symbols on the front faces of the keys. All markings were now placed on the top surface.

Another variant was the C64G. It combined the light-colored keyboard of the C64C with the classic breadbin case, also produced in light-colored plastic. Inside, it usually contained one of the newer simplified motherboards.

The result looked as though two generations of the C64 had met by accident in a parts warehouse and decided to build a computer from whatever happened to be lying around.

Entirely in keeping with Commodore tradition.

The Company Goes Bankrupt

Commodore’s management style was truly original: from one major argument to another, from the conflict between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould to yet another loan carrying an interest rate high enough to make even a banker glance around nervously.

After one particularly serious dispute, Tramiel left the company. Not long afterward, he acquired the consumer division of the collapsing Atari and began work on the Atari ST family.

Commodore, meanwhile, possessed the Amiga technology — probably the finest multimedia platform of the second half of the 1980s — but failed to exploit its potential as effectively as it had once exploited the C64.

The company went bankrupt in 1994. This was the culmination of many problems: poor management, internal conflicts, unsuccessful products, bad marketing decisions, and a complete lack of long-term vision.

More forward-looking machines such as the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 later found a new owner in the form of Escom.

That did not lead to a happy ending either.

The Commodore curse is a name that could be given to the fate of successive companies acquiring rights to the brand or technology of the former corporation. Sooner or later, the new owner runs into trouble, goes bankrupt, or sells the rights to the next brave contender.

The name survives.

The owners change.

Afterward

The community surrounding Commodore products seems not to have noticed that the company went bankrupt.

Admittedly, for obvious reasons, millions of new machines no longer appear in stores, and the global economy is no longer based on C64 sales.

The computer itself, however, remains very much alive.

Original units can still be purchased secondhand. Replacements are being developed for increasingly rare chips, together with new motherboards, FPGA-based systems, HDMI video adapters, SD-card readers, modern joysticks, and universal tools such as the Ultimate-II+.

From time to time, the market also receives a device such as THEC64, available in a full-size version with a functional keyboard, or the MEGA65 — a development of the concept behind the almost mythical and never properly released Commodore 65.

Nor do the original machine’s limitations appear to represent a particularly low ceiling for modern creators.

The number and quality of new demos, hobbyist programs, and commercial games can be astonishing. Every year, someone crosses another boundary that was supposedly impossible to cross. Someone discovers a new way to exploit the graphics chip, another memory trick, or a method of extracting a sound from the SID that the chip should theoretically be unable to produce.

The ceiling is still nowhere in sight.

So, should you have a little free time, join me in returning to this unforgettable world — to discover the computer that changed an entire generation, to enjoy its limitations, or simply to remember the years of our youth.

In future articles, we will look inside the C64, run it on modern hardware, connect a few devices, see what it can still be useful for, and try to answer the most important question of all:

can a computer from 1982 still improve our productivity?

Welcome.

Retro on dev@iostream.pl

The Most Popular Computer in the World

Introduction

A Little History

Calculators and Computers

The Most Popular Computer in the World

Specifications

Peripherals

Reception

Shortcomings

Variants

The Company Goes Bankrupt

Afterward