Commodore

Commodore, the commonly used name for Commodore International, was an American electronics company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania which was a vital player in the home/personal computer field in the 1980s. more...

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The company is also known under the name of its R&D operation, Commodore Business Machines (CBM). Commodore developed and marketed the world's best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64 (1982). The company declared bankruptcy in 1994, but since then, there have been several attempts to revive its Amiga systems.

History

Foundation and early years

The company that would become Commodore International was started in Toronto by Jack Tramiel in 1954. He had already run a small business fixing typewriters for a few years while living in New York and driving a cab, but managed to sign a deal with a Czechoslovakian company to manufacture their designs in Canada and moved to Toronto to start production. By the late 1950s a wave of Japanese machines forced most North American typewriter companies out of business, but Tramiel instead turned to adding machines.

In 1962 the company was formally incorporated as Commodore Business Machines (CBM). In the late 1960s history repeated itself when Japanese firms started producing and exporting adding machines. The company's main investor and chairman, Irving Gould, suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to understand how to compete. Instead, he returned with the new idea to produce electronic calculators, which were just coming on the market.

Commodore soon had a profitable calculator line and was one of the more popular brands in the early 1970s, producing both consumer as well as scientific/programmable calculators. However in 1975 Texas Instruments, the main supplier of calculator parts, entered the market directly and put out a line of machines priced at less than Commodore's cost of the parts. Commodore had to be rescued once again by an infusion of cash from Gould, which Tramiel used beginning in 1976 to purchase several second-source chip suppliers, including MOS Technology, Inc., in order to assure his supply. He agreed to buy MOS, who were having troubles of its own, only on the condition that its chip designer Chuck Peddle join Commodore directly as head of engineering.

"Computers for the masses, not the classes"

Once Chuck Peddle had taken over engineering at Commodore, he convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were already a dead end and that they should turn their attention to home computers. Peddle packaged his existing KIM-1 single-board computer design in a metal case, along with a full-travel QWERTY keyboard, monochrome monitor, and tape recorder for program and data storage, to produce the Commodore PET. From its 1977 debut, Commodore would be a computer company.

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