Commodore was founded by Jack Tramiel in 1955, beginning as a typewriter sales and repair business and later moving into adding machines and electronic calculators. When the calculator market collapsed in the mid-1970s as the chip suppliers Commodore depended on began selling finished calculators themselves, Tramiel resolved that Commodore would never again be at the mercy of an outside semiconductor vendor. That lesson drove the decision that reshaped the company: in 1976 Commodore acquired the Pennsylvania chip maker MOS Technology, bringing the designers of the inexpensive 6502 microprocessor and a full semiconductor fabrication capability in-house.
With its own silicon, Commodore moved straight into personal computers. In 1977 it shipped the Commodore PET, an all-in-one machine with a built-in monitor and keyboard that became one of the year’s pioneering microcomputers alongside the Apple II and the TRS-80. The PET was followed by the low-cost VIC-20 in 1980 and, most importantly, by the Commodore 64 in 1982. The Commodore 64 Programmer’s Reference Guide, the company’s own technical manual for the machine, documents the custom VIC-II video chip and SID sound chip that Commodore’s MOS engineers designed, giving the company a vertically integrated advantage few rivals could match.
Commodore’s strategy was built on price. Because it owned its chip fabrication, it could undercut competitors aggressively, and Tramiel promoted the idea of building “computers for the masses, not the classes.” The Commodore 64 sold in the tens of millions and is widely regarded as the best-selling single computer model in history, putting an affordable, capable computer into ordinary homes and schools on a scale no earlier machine had achieved.
The same price aggression that built Commodore also destabilized the market. The home-computer price wars of the early 1980s, which Commodore pressed hard against Texas Instruments and others, crashed margins across the industry. Tramiel left Commodore in early 1984 after a dispute with the company’s chairman; he went on to acquire Atari’s consumer division. Commodore continued under new management, launching the Amiga line after acquiring Amiga Corporation, but never repeated the Commodore 64’s commercial success and filed for bankruptcy in 1994.
As a Computer History Museum lecture marking the Commodore 64’s 25th anniversary recounts, the company’s combination of in-house chip design, ruthless cost control, and mass-market ambition made it one of the defining forces of the home-computer era. Its machines introduced a generation to programming in BASIC, to game development, and to the demoscene culture that grew up around the Commodore 64 and later the Amiga.