In the meantime the 64 would sell two million units for each of the years 1983 to 1986. In fact, Commodore offered a $100 rebate to anyone who traded in a rival computer or video-game system, arguably contributing to the circumstances that led to the crash, and cementing home computers as the successors to video-game consoles until the late 1980s, when Nintendo would take back the crown. This put it in competition with contemporary video-game consoles which were largely technologically inferior, and the potential for productivity applications made the 64 an attractive choice for parents, especially after the 1983 video-game crash. These sales were helped by Commodore’s arrangements with department and discount stores such as KMart, who sold the 64 through their electronics departments, a non-traditional sales channel for computers at that time.
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However, by mid-1983 a large quantity of software titles began to appear, and that, combined with a cut in the 64’s retail price to just US$300, caused the public to embrace it with gusto. Software publishers were not given any advanced access to the computer, and without backward compatibility with the VIC-20, the 64’s software catalogue was quite minimal. Because of this, it only cost Commodore an estimated US$135 to manufacture a 64.Įven at such a low price sales of the 64 were initially slow. Commodore could afford to undercut its competitors as it was its own supplier for many of the 64’s components – MOS Technology manufactured the microchips as well as designing them –including the 6510 CPU (central processing unit). The Commodore 64’s retail price was set at US$595, which was a substantial savings over other computer models available at the time. The addition of 64 kilobytes of RAM also made more sophisticated, memory-intensive programs such as word processors and spreadsheets possible.
The SID (Sound Interface Device) audio chip featured three oscillators that could choose from four different waveforms (sawtooth, pulse, triangle and noise.) It also had a hardware frequency filter and ADSR (attack, delay, sustain, release) volume envelopes and was very advanced for its time. The VIC-II chip supported 320×200 monochrome and 160×200 multi-colour video modes, 16 colours and could manage 8 24×21 (or 12×21 colour) pixel sprites, – independent graphics objects – and detect collisions between them. The Commodore 64’s 40-column screen was much easier to read than the VIC-20’s. The new project was dubbed the VIC-40 but renamed the C64 in time for CES. However, after the chips were completed, several Commodore engineers disagreed with the project’s direction, insisting that the company should instead develop a successor to the VIC-20, Commodore’s low-cost computer, not a console.Ĭommodore CEO Jack Tramiel opted to go ahead with both projects, however he insisted the computer come with 64 kilobytes of RAM in order to make business applications more practical than they were on the memory-starved VIC-20. In early 1981, Commodore-subsidiary MOS Technology began work on graphics and sound chips for a next-generation video-game console called the Ultimax, thinking that was where the company’s future lay. The Commodore 64, introduced at the 1982 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, was a significant improvement on the VIC-20, and would become the best-selling computer model of all time.
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