Commodore 64

The development of the Commodore 64 is inseparable from the vision and aggressive business philosophy of Jack Tramiel, Commodore's founder. Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor who built Commodore from a typewriter repair shop into a computer company, believed passionately in making computers affordable for ordinary people. His motto was "computers for the masses, not the classes." After the success of the VIC-20, Tramiel pushed his engineering team to create a more powerful successor that could be manufactured at an even lower per-unit cost.

The heart of the C64 was built around chips developed by MOS Technology, which Commodore had acquired in 1976. This vertical integration was crucial to Tramiel's price war strategy. The CPU was the MOS Technology 6510, a variant of the legendary 6502 designed by Chuck Peddle, running at approximately 1 MHz. The 6510 added an integrated I/O port for bank switching, allowing the C64 to map its 64 kilobytes of RAM in flexible configurations alongside ROM chips containing the BASIC interpreter and KERNAL operating system.

The VIC-II (Video Interface Chip II, MOS 6567/6569) was designed by Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble. It provided hardware sprite support (8 sprites per scan line), smooth scrolling, multiple graphics modes including multicolor bitmap mode at 160x200, and a text mode with programmable characters. The VIC-II could display 16 colors and included raster interrupt capability, which skilled programmers exploited extensively to perform mid-screen hardware changes, effectively multiplexing sprites and creating effects far beyond the chip's nominal specifications.

The SID chip (MOS 6581) was perhaps the most remarkable component. Bob Yannes designed it as a genuine synthesizer-on-a-chip, incorporating three oscillators with four selectable waveforms (triangle, sawtooth, pulse with variable width, and noise), programmable ADSR envelope generators, ring modulation, oscillator synchronization, and a multi-mode resonant filter. The analog filter section, manufactured through a digital CMOS process, exhibited significant unit-to-unit variation that gave each individual C64 a subtly different sonic character. The SID was far more capable than any other home computer sound chip of its era and arguably remained superior to most until dedicated sound cards appeared on the PC platform.

The C64's aggressive pricing triggered devastating price wars in the home computer market. Tramiel intentionally undercut competitors, particularly Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A and the Atari 800 line. TI was forced to sell its computers at a loss and eventually exited the market entirely in late 1983. Atari's computer division hemorrhaged money, contributing to the company's sale by Warner Communications. Even Tramiel's own company suffered from razor-thin margins, and internal conflicts eventually led to Tramiel's ouster from Commodore in January 1984.

The C64's hardware design proved remarkably resilient. Despite being designed in late 1981, the machine remained commercially viable for over a decade. A revised version, the C64C, was released in 1986 with a redesigned case and updated board. The C64 Games System (1990) attempted to reposition it as a dedicated console. Cost reductions through die shrinks and board revisions kept production economical well into the early 1990s, making the Commodore 64 not just the best-selling computer model ever but also one of the longest-lived commercial computing platforms in history.