GoKawiilOn September 1, 1982, the Commodore 64 launched. Its name referred to the amount of memory it had on board: 64 kilobytes. And it was the first computer with 64K of memory to sell for under $600.
When the Commodore 64 was introduced vs when it was released
When the C-64 first shipped is a bit of a mystery. Commodore showed prototypes at the January 1982 Consumer Electronics Show, but these weren’t production-ready models yet. Some engineers quoted in Brian Bagnall’s books say they shipped some units in August. Michael Tomczyk’s book, The Home Computer Wars, says it launched September 1. Given that Tomczyk was writing in 1984, not long after the actual launch, I’m inclined to think Tomczyk’s date is correct. Why the discrepancy? Commodore wasn’t selling direct. So if they intended to sell any machines on September 1, they had to ship the first units in August.
Commodore built the initial units in Santa Clara, Calif., but ran into quality control problems, so they outsourced production to a Japanese company called Kentron. Kentron was mass producing C-64s by January 1983.
Within six months, they’d sold half a million units. And it quickly went up from there. By the end of its fiscal 1984 years, Commodore had sold about 5 million units.
It became the best selling computer of all time, selling about 12.3 million units. Or, if you count the C-128 as a separate product, the C-64 alone sold about 10.6 million units.
It was the computer I grew up with, and invariably, when I join a videoconference from my basement, where I have a C-64 hanging on my wall behind me, someone my age will say something about it, that they had one, or remember using one.
Its early success was no accident but its staying power was
By modern standards, it wasn’t cheap. Even in 1984, when we got one, the computer with a disk drive typically cost $450 unless you really shopped around. But the only other thing comparable both price-wise and capability-wise at the time was an Atari 800XL, and Atari was having supply chain problems in 1983, so it was a lot easier to find a Commodore 64 that year.
The Commodore 64 probably would have been successful just because it was cheap and had a lot of memory for 1982. Its predecessor, the VIC-20, was the first computer to sell a million units, and it did so because it was the first computer with color to sell for less than $300. It took some weird compromises to hit that price point, with rudimentary graphics and sound capabilities and an oddball 5K of RAM.
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