Commodore History Presentation with Leonard Tramiel at VCF West
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.
Commodore International Historical Society Blog
Early Commodore History presentation at VCF East in 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
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...
Commodore “Vixen” History
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...
The Challenges of Document Preservation
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...
The Commodore Logo: A brief history
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...
The History of the Commodore ChessMate
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...
Commodore’s Unreleased C64 Game Machine
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...
Commodore’s History in the Adding Machine Business
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...
The very first “production” PET to come off the line
The Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) featured here is Serial #001001, owned by Don Greenbaum, the former Treasurer of Commodore International. This was the first serial number issued by Commodore for a PET, but it’s...
Paper plots of Commodore chip layouts
As I mentioned in a previous post, Sandy Roshong Fisher worked on Commodore’s IC layout team in West Chester, PA from February, 1982 through June, 1993 when she was laid off. During that time...