Commodore International

» see commodore.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

commodore sat in the part of computing history i can read about but cannot personally remember. the commodore 64 peaked in 1983 and 1984, when i was a year old. the home-computer culture that grew up around it was a us and uk and west-german phenomenon, with the c64 in millions of suburban living rooms and the amiga in european demo-scene basements. in turkey the home-computer market in those years was thinner and built more around eastern european clones of the zx spectrum than around commodore. by the time i was old enough to want a computer it was the early 90s and the only relevant box was an ibm-compatible pc on dos.

jack tramiel founded commodore portable typewriter company in toronto in 1955, moved it into adding machines and calculators in the 60s, and pulled it through the 1975 calculator-price crash by buying mos technology, the chip company that made the 6502 cpu. mos was the actual reason commodore could ship a complete computer at a price no competitor could match. the pet shipped in 1977. the vic-20 in 1980 became the first computer to cross one million units. the commodore 64 in 1982 became the best-selling single model of personal computer ever made, at around 22 million units over its production run.

tramiel ran the company on a price-war strategy that worked for as long as commodore owned the chip supply. by early 1984 the company was doing over a billion dollars in annual revenue. that january tramiel had a final fight with chairman irving gould and walked out. four months later he bought the consumer division of atari from warner and started shipping atari st computers against his former employer. the commodore that remained without him was an amiga-era company with no clear product strategy, run by a board that did not understand the consumer market.

the slide ran from 1985 through 1993. the amiga 500 in 1987 was the most successful product of the post-tramiel years and sold around six million units across europe. the amiga line lost ground to the ibm pc compatible from 1991 onward as windows 3.0 caught up on graphics and games. commodore international ltd filed for bankruptcy on april 29 1994 in the bahamas, where the holding company was incorporated for tax reasons. escom ag of germany bought the assets in 1995 for about 14 million dollars and itself went bankrupt fifteen months later. the brand has cycled through tulip computers in 1997, yeahronimo in 2004, and a string of licensing deals since.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the c64 years ~

the commodore 64 ran on a 1mhz 6510 cpu with 64 kilobytes of ram and a sid sound chip that the demoscene is still writing music for in 2026. the wedge-shaped breadbin case sold for 595 dollars at launch in 1982 and was down to 199 by 1985 after tramiel cut the price three times to push tandy and atari out of the home-computer aisle. about 22 million units shipped, depending on which historian you ask and whether you count later european runs. the c64 was the family computer that taught a generation of programmers in north america and western europe how a memory map worked.

~ the amiga years ~

the amiga came out of jay miner's hi-toro project, which commodore bought in 1984 for about 27 million. the amiga 1000 shipped in 1985 with custom chips for video and audio that were five years ahead of anything in the ibm pc category. the amiga 500 in 1987 was the cheap consumer version that did the actual market work. babylon 5 used amigas for its cgi pipeline. the demoscene used amigas for cracktros. video toaster turned an amiga 2000 into a broadcast-tv video-effects rig. none of it saved the company that made the hardware. by 1993 commodore was selling the amiga 1200 at a price that did not cover its costs and shipping the cd32 console against the 3do and the jaguar in a category that did not want any of them.

~ what got buried with it ~

the brand never died, but it never came back either. amiga, inc has changed hands six times since 1994. commodore usa shipped beige-keyboard pcs in 2010 that ran linux and put the chicken-head logo on them, and lasted about three years. there is a delaware corporation called commodore international corp in 2025 that owns the trademark and sells branded usb drives. none of it is connected to jack tramiel's company. the working amigas in 2026 run amigaos on emulators on modern intel hardware, with the demoscene still posting new cracktros to scene.org.

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