Commodore 64 at 30: computing for the masses

The Commodore 64 is the best-selling personal computer of all time and 30 years old this week, writes Christopher Williams.

Commodore 64 fans gather Credit: Photo: afromusing on Flickr

This week 30 years ago, the computer age got a massive boost when the Commodore 64 was introduced to a world in which home computers were the preserve of the nerdy and the wealthy. It went on to sell around 17 million units over its 12-year life, ranking it as the best selling personal computer of all time, a record that is now unlikely to be beaten as tablets take over the mass market.

The machine was the brainchild of Jack Tramiel, a businessman with a rather different background to that of his SIlicon Valley rivals, who included Steve Jobs. Born to Jewish parents in Lodz, Poland, in 1928, he had survived the Holocaust and a tour in the United States Army by the time he took advantage of a veterans' business loan programme set up the a typewriter repair shop in New York in 1953.

He settled on the Commodore because he wanted a military-sounding name for the firm, and General and Admiral were already taken.

Tramiel quickly moved the firm into importing new typewriters, and across the border to Canada to circumvent Cold War trade restrictions. By the early 1960s, however, cheaper, higher quality Japanese models put pressure on his sales of Czechoslovakian typewriters and a new strategy was required. On a trip to Japan, undertaken to pick up manufacturing tips, he saw early digital calculators, and promptly moved his firm to Silicon Valley where microchip designers and manufacturers were based.

As the information revolution gathered speed in the late 1970s, Commodore saw the next opportunity in computers for everyone. While Apple and IBM made machines that cost the equivalent of around $3,000, Tramiel wanted to make "computers for the masses, not the classes". After early successes such as the VIC-20, the first computer to sell more than a million units, this mass market ethos culminated in the Commodore 64 in August, which cost less than half the price of an Apple II.

"All we saw at our booth were Atari people with their mouths dropping open, saying 'How can you do that for $595?'," David Ziembicki, the co-designer of the Commodore 64, said, recalling its launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1982.

Apple's co-founder and engineering genius, Steve Wozniak, was a fan as well as a rival.

"Unlike Apple, IBM and other competitors in the early 1980s, these were focused on the home," he recalled in an interview the industry website Tech Republic when Jack Tramiel died earlier this year.

"That was smart and Commodore really just sold so many of them. Wow, it was the right move."

Despite undercutting rivals, the Commodore 64 was more advanced in many ways, with its 1MHz processor, eponymous 64 kilobytes of memory and 16-colour graphics. Crucially, it could also be connected to a normal television rather than a monitor.

That graphical prowess combined with its low price meant that as well as serious computers, the Commodore 64 took on videogame consoles from Atari and others. It played host to dozens of classic titles on tape and disk: International Karate set standards for beat-em-ups, Spy vs Spy offered addictive multiplayer action, and Gauntlet introduced arcade-quality gaming to many homes for the first time.

Summer Games, an athletics game released in 1984 to take advantage of the Los Angeles Olympics, offered innocent, unlicensed button-bashing fun.

Millions of Commodore 64s were thus sold as entertainment devices, only for their young owners to be curious then hooked by the possibilities of writing their own software in BASIC, the machine's built-in programming language. So like the Spectrum and the BBC Micro in Britain, the Commodore 64 played a vital role in producing a generation of self-taught software engineers.

Politicians and computer experts agree that today's slick tablets and smartphones will never foster talent in the same way. The Government is overhauling the computer science curriculum to teach programming instead of spreadsheet skills, and initiatives such as the £25 Raspberry Pi computer aim to replicate the home brew culture of the Commodore 64's heyday.

While old enough to be found in museums, the machine itself remains much-loved and used, with a thriving retro-gaming scene. As if to demonstrate its longevity and adaptability in an age of disposable gadgetry, fans have even created software to allow them to tweet from from their Commodore 64.