The Commodore 64 was an amazing
machine when it was introduced in January of 1982. It had
a whopping 64 kilobytes of user RAM, 16 colors at a
resolution of 320 x 200 pixels, 8 color sprites, and
sound that could rival a dedicated sound synthesizer of
its day. The most amazing thing of all was that you could
get all this for under $600. The cheapest 64k computers
of the day were selling at around $1000 and they couldn't
match the graphics and sound capabilities of the C-64. I bought my first Commodore 64 on August
14,1983 for $199.95. This was after another of a bunch of
price drops that year. 1983 was a turbulent year for the
computer industry. It was the year of the great shakeout.
A number of computer manufacturers bowed out of the home
computer market while others saw their market share
shrink considerably. Commodore who at this time was the
largest selling computer manufacturer to the home market
was not immune to the crunch. It was forced to cut prices
to keep its market share, but this was eating away at
profits.
Their flagship computer was
selling well but the market was shrinking due to a
greater number of different computer brands on the market
and the market becoming saturated. So the price cuts
continued and Commodore showed its first quarterly loss
by the end of 1983. After the turbulent '83 year
Commodore rebounded and with fewer competitors and its
new lower price the C-64 really took off. Millions of
them were sold, one estimate puts it at 17 to 21 million
units worldwide, WOW! No other single model of computer
can claim that kind of success.
The C-64 line ran for a total of
12+ years, and probably would have run longer if
Commodore didn't fold in 1994 due to poor management. The
C-64 is still a popular computer to this day; you can
find users groups and web sites dedicated to it on the
Internet. I still have my original C-64 (pictured above)
and it still works, although I boxed it up when I
switched to the more modern looking C-64C.
