Pet 2001

One of my favorite companies of all time was the Commodore computer company. I hadn't taken much notice of them until they began to produce home computers. As a matter of fact, they were the first company to do so, functional computers that is. They had started out in 1954 as a typewriter repair company. A few years later they branched out into adding machines and hand held calculators. Their first computer was the Pet 2001.

Vic-20

In 1981 the Vic-20 had become a popular Commodore computer. One of the reason it was so popular was that it had a form of BASIC on it that was very easy to program and didn't take a scientist to use. Its price for a real computer at the time, was considered very reasonable. It cost about $400.00. It could use a joystick and store data on a ordinary cassette for auto storage. It could also use a printer and later a floppy drive came out for it. The price just kept dropping and even Apple and Atari at the time were using the Commodore 6502 processor in their computers.

The best was yet to come. Commodore had a machine in the wings that would blow the lid off the home market, and they released it in 1982. At the time most business computers had a memory of only 64,000 bytes. Commodore was about to release a home computer with the same amount of memory for only $1,000 and after just a few months this price would fall to $300 then later to about $100. The Commodore 64 is considered one of the greatest computers in the history of computing. It is said that more people owned a Commodore 64 than would ever own a single brand of computer again. Commodore was flying high. The demand for the new machine was incredible. I remember that over the course of a few years I had several of the machines myself. It could do word processing, but the lines on the screen were only 40 characters wide so this took some getting to. The games for it were legend. Thousands of inexpensive games came out. This machine used the Commodore 6502 chip and had a sound chip called SID, which was the 6581 Sound Interface Device. This sound chip was far ahead of any other on the market in its day. It could even allow the computer to talk. It could provide four different voices and many distinctive wave forms. The color graphics were also advanced. The C-64 had 16 colors and sprites. Sprites are characters that can move around the screen and are controlled by hardware. This machine way out performed the IBM computers of the time, since they weren't color and could only make simple beeps. The C-64 also had an excellent composite color monitor with speakers built in. I used one of these monitors for almost 20 years and finally gave it away without it once ever having failed me. The worst thing that ever happened to it was a little plastic door over the controls on the bottom broke off after about 16 years.

Commodore 64

The SX-64 was another new computer from Commodore. It was more of an everything in one unit with a detachable keyboard. It had a 5 inch color monitor and floppy drive built in. It was introduced in 1983 as a portable. It never became as popular as the C-64.

Other machines were released by Commodore such as the 264 series and Max machine but these are of little note in the overall history of the company.

Next Commodore came out with the Commodore 128 computer in July of 1985.. This was a great computer that was really three computers in one. It had a mode which made it a Commodore 64, another which enabled it to run in Commodore 128 mode which gave it the advantage of being able to show 80 characters across is screen and it memory was increased to 128 K and you got a new form of basic and a third mode that allowed you to run CPM. The machine had a built in disk drive which was faster and held more data. With the push of a button you could toggle between 40 and 80 character screens. The amount of software available became tremendous. Most of it was for the C-64 though, but some was some for the C-128.

Commodore 128

There were other things going on at Commodore. Commodore had their eye on a little cash strapped company named Amiga Inc. It seems that this company had begun to develop a very advanced game machine that's development was later changed to a home computer, a 16 bit home compute. But this was no ordinary home computer, it was the most powerful home computer ever made up to that time and was light years ahead of anything else on the market. In 1984 Commodore purchased the company just as its own sales were beginning to slow down. They were now the owners of the great Amiga computer and they had purchased the rights to it for only $1,000,000. The next thing Commodore did was invest $27,000,000 into the final development of this computer.

Commodore was very good for AMIGA in the beginning. Jay Miner, the developer of the Amiga said in 1998 during an interview. But this was not to remain the case. The Amiga was launched on in September of 1985. The Amiga began to catch on. More models of the Amiga were being released by Commodore. But in 1987 the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 appeared. The Amiga 500 was an affordable version of the Amiga Computer that took the world by storm. Everyone wanted one of these compact computers (It looked like a thick keyboard with a floppy slot on the side). Commodore was making money hand over fist. Then it happened, Irving Gould replaced the former chairman of Commodore. Gould cut the payroll from 4700 people to 3100 and closed five plants and the corporate headquarters in North America saying that profits in North America were too small. Next followd a time of stagnation for Commodore who was not developing anything and was satisfied with the status quo. But while this was going on Apple and Microsoft were eating little pieces from the company in the form of business accounts. Amiga was losing any chance it had to get into the workplaces. In 1990 the Amiga 3000 came out. It was a 32 bit machine. It had major upgrades to the operating system and used SCSI. But Commodore also launched CDTV a disaster from the word go. It was little more than a disguised Amiga 500 with a hard drive. Commodore blew a deal in which Sun would have produced A3000s as UNIX workstations. A company called NewTek developed something called the Video Toaster that assured the Amiga some longevity in a niche market. The device replaced expensive video special effects equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars with an Amiga.

Amiga 1200
Photo Source: Me

1991 brought a year of disarray to Commodore. Commodore decided to upgrade the A500 with the A500 plus and ships it without any advertising to save money. Commodore cancelled CDTV. Next they launched the A3000T then cancel it and release the A4000. A year later, before the A500 plus has a chance to make it, the A600 is released. This was the most hated machine Commodore ever made. It was the butt of many articles. Everything inside the case was surface mounted (soldered into place) making repairs costly. The machine no longer had a keypad. In 1992 the A1200 came out. This was a great machine following the style of an A500 but it was 32 bit machine and very powerful. It was not supposed to be very expandable, the idea being if you wanted expansion you would go with the much more expensive A4000. But it fooled everyone. Third party companies soon came out with every expansion device you could dream of for the machine. Commodore was now breaking sales records with this machine but losing money through bad management. They came out with a game system called CD32 which sold good in the beginning but ultimately failed.

In 1994 Commodore filed for bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, breaking the hearts of millions of Amiga owners. The Amiga was to be purchased by many other companies only to see them either fail or resell the assets. The greatest computer of all time was now relegated to the scrap heap of history and the Commodore Corporation, once the darling of the computer industry was no more.