Commodore International Historical Society Blog
The Commodore Programmable Thermostat One of the lesser-known, non-computer items that Commodore put to market was a programmable thermostat, released by Commodore’s consumer products division. It was intended to provide increased energy efficiency for...
1984 International Winter Consumer Electronics Show The 1984 International Winter Consumer Electronics Show was help from January 7 – January 10 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Commodore International was in attendance at the...
I recently had the great honor of doing a joint presentation with Leonard Tramiel at VCF West in Mountain View, California on August 5, 2023.
I was invited to do a presentation at the 2023 VCF East in Wall, NJ on April 15, 2023. There wasn’t any AV set up in the room to record my talk, but my...
The Commodore 8010 acoustic coupler modem appears to have been released around 1980, based on the hand written dates on the PCB of the device I have. I recently picked this one up from...
Drawing from a number of sources including Brian Bagnall’s Commodore: A Company on the Edge, internal documents provided by Michael Tomczyk, various discussions in the Commodore International Historical Society Facebook group, and a litany...
Commodore historians are perhaps fortunate that in the earliest years of the company, Commodore ran somewhat afoul of the authorities due to their relationship with the Atlantic Acceptance Corporation. Atlantic Acceptance was a Canadian...
If you’ve ever been curious about the origins of or the meaning of the world famous Commodore logo, often referred to as the “chicken lips” logo, wonder no more. I put together a short...
In 1978, Commodore International Limited released the ChessMate. ChessMate was a consumer electronic chess playing device. From all outward appearances, it looked similar enough to many of the other popular consumer electronic devices of...
In 1990, Commodore released the C64GS. “GS” stood for “Games System”. It was Commodore’s attempt to have the wildly successful Commodore 64 compete in the game console market. On the surface, this doesn’t seem...
Jack Tramiel and Manfred Kapp weren’t strictly in the typewriter business even from their earliest business ventures together. Nearly all of their ventures focused on office equipment generally, rather than typewriters or adding machines...