Released in August 1982 by Commodore Business Machines, the Commodore 64 is the best selling single personal computer model of all time, selling around 17 million units during its lifespan. Unlike other home computers of the day, the C64 (also known as the C= 64, CBM 64 or the VIC-64) was distributed not only through authorized dealers, but also via toy shops and department stores. The unit could be plugged directly into a television set to play games and so did not require a special monitor, which allowed it to compete directly against video game consoles such as the Atari 2600.
The unit's main competitors in North America were the Atari 8-bit 400 and 800, the IBM PC and the Apple II, all of which were considerably more expensive (in some cases, costing three times as much), whilst having a standard memory configuration of 16K, 48K less RAM than the C64.
In the United Kingdom, the primary competitors to the C64 were the British-built Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC 464. The Spectrum had been released a few months before the C64 and soon became the market leader, selling for almost half the price. However, by the late 1980s, the C64 overtook the Spectrum in popularity, outliving its rival, which was discontinued in December 1990.
By 1988, Commodore were selling 1.5 million C64s a year worldwide. Although demand for the computer had fallen in the US by 1990, it continued to be popular in the UK and other European countries. In March 1994, Commodore announced that the C64 would be discontinued in 1995 due to rising production costs; however, the company filed for bankruptcy a month later.
Games
There were approximately 10,000 commercial software titles made for the Commodore 64, including games, office applications and development tools. Games included:
The C64 used an 8-bit MOS Technology 6510 microprocessor and had 64 kilobytes of RAM, of which 38 kB were available to built-in Commodore BASIC 2.0. The graphics chip, VIC-II, featured 16 colours, eight sprites, two bitmap graphics modes and scrolling capabilities. The sound chip, SID, was very advanced for its time. It had three channels, each with its own ADSR envelope generator, and with several different waveforms, filter capabilities and ring modulation.
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