Commodore 64

~ the obit ~

Commodore showed the 64 at the Winter CES in Las Vegas in January 1982 and put it on shelves that August at $595. The name was the memory. Sixty four kilobytes was a great deal of it in 1982, and $595 was a number a family could be talked into. Nothing else on the market that year offered both.

What followed was less a product launch than a demolition. Between 1983 and 1986 the C64 held 30 to 40 percent of the American market at roughly two million units a year, outselling the Apple II and the IBM PC compatibles at the same time. Commodore owned MOS Technology, the company that fabricated its chips, so it could cut prices whenever it liked and it liked often: $595 down to $425 in January 1983, then to $300 by that June. Texas Instruments tried to follow it down, reached $99 on the TI-99/4A, and lost money on every one it sold. TI left the home computer business that October.

How many were sold has never been settled. Commodore said 17 million. Jack Tramiel talked about 22 to 30 million. The company's own production records point to something nearer 12.5 million, and even that lowest figure holds the Guinness record for the best-selling desktop computer, which nothing has taken off it since.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the sid chip ~

The 6581 SID was a three-voice analog synthesizer on a chip. Bob Yannes designed it wanting a real instrument rather than a beeper, and it shipped with programmable envelopes and a resonant filter at a point when competing machines produced square waves.

That single decision is most of why the demoscene exists. Programmers who could not afford studio equipment had a synthesizer sitting inside a $300 computer, and the tracker music written for it turned into a genre that has outlived the hardware by decades. Chiptune still carries a SID accent even when it is being played on something that never met one.

~ the 1541 problem ~

The disk drive was the sore spot. A 1541 could cost more than the computer it plugged into, and Commodore said exactly that when it finally announced the end of the line. It was slow as well, because a hardware fault in the original chip design forced Commodore to cripple the serial bus, and a stock 1541 moved data at a rate that made loading a game something you planned an evening around.

An industry grew in the gap. Fast loader cartridges and replacement ROMs existed only to work around one silicon bug from 1981, and commercial games shipped their own loaders on top of that. Most owners in Europe never saw a disk at all and used the Datasette, which was slower still.

~ the last shipment ~

At CeBIT in Hanover in March 1994 Commodore announced that the C64 would be discontinued the following year and gave the price of the 1541 as the reason. The announcement did not survive long enough to be carried out. In April the company filed for bankruptcy and the line stopped with it, eleven and a half years after the first units shipped and without a final one anybody bothered to photograph.

Remaining stock went where old stock goes. The last machines cleared into Brazil and Eastern Europe, markets where a 1982 design at liquidation prices still made sense in 1994.

Turkey sat near that band without ever being a Commodore country the way West Germany was. 1994 is the year I turned ten, four years before anything in the house made a modem noise. The 64 had finished happening well before I was in any position to notice it. The machine reached me the way it reaches most people now, as a sound.

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