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...
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...
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...
CP/M was an operating system written by Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, Inc, in 1974 which enjoyed early widespread popularity. As early as 1979, Commodore’s VP of Marketing, Dennis Barnhart, proposed CP/M...
Commodore DryCopy In early 1962, Commodore expanded into the field of copying machines by creating two new subsidiaries: Commodore Drycopy, Inc. (New York) and Commodore Drycopy, Ltd. (Toronto). Commodore studied the three major copying...
Yes, you read that correctly: there was a Commodore VIC-21 computer, but it’s probably not what you’re thinking. This wasn’t a follow up to the VIC-20 created by Commodore International. No, the Commodore VIC-21...
As of January 16, 2022 I revisited this topic, took a closer look at the data and created a YouTube video to describe my findings. I’m going to leave this page intact because it...
Commodore? They were a typewriter company who moved into making computers, right? So many people know Commodore as the company who made the C64. Some of the more hardcore enthusiasts know about the typewriter...
