Commodore , the commonly used name for Commodore International , was a US electronics company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania which played a vital role in the development of the home–personal computer industry in the 1980s. The company is also known under the name of its R&D operation, Commodore Business Machines ( CBM ). Commodore developed and marketed the world's best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64 (1982). The company declared bankruptcy in 1994, but since then, there have been several attempts to revive its Amiga systems. The company revived in 2005 after a few mergers with Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc., SATXS Communications BV, and Tulip Computers.
History
Founding and early years
The company that would become Commodore International was started in 1954 in Toronto as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company by Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel. He was already running a small business repairing typewriters for a few years while living in New York and driving a taxicab, but managed to sign a deal with a Czechoslovakian company to manufacture their designs in Canada, and moved to Toronto to start production. By the late 1950s a wave of Japanese machines forced most North American typewriter companies out of business, but Tramiel instead turned to adding machines.
In 1955 the company was formally incorporated as Commodore Business Machines in Canada ( CBM ). In 1962 Commodore went public at New York stock exchange under the name of Commodore International Limited . In the late 1960s history repeated itself when Japanese firms started producing and exporting adding machines. The company's main investor and chairman, Irving Gould, suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to understand how to compete. Instead, he returned with the new idea to produce electronic calculators, which were just coming on the market.
Commodore soon had a profitable calculator line and was one of the more popular brands in the early 1970s, producing both consumer as well as scientific/programmable calculators. However, in 1975, Texas Instruments, the main supplier of calculator parts, entered the market directly and put out a line of machines priced at less than Commodore's cost of the parts. Commodore had to be rescued once again by an infusion of cash from Gould, which Tramiel used beginning in 1976 to purchase several second-source chip suppliers, including MOS Technology, Inc., in order to assure his supply. He agreed to buy MOS, which was having troubles of its own, only on the condition that its chip designer Chuck Peddle join Commodore directly as head of engineering.
In December 2007 when Tramiel was visiting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, he was asked why he called his company Commodore, he had this to say: "I wanted to call my company General, but there's so many Generals in the U.S.: General Electric, General Motors. Then I went to Admiral, but that was taken. So I wind up in Berlin, Germany, with my wife, and we were in a cab, and the cab made a short stop, and in front of us was an Opel Commodore." Tramiel said that in many interviews, but Opel's Commodore didn't debut until 1968, years after the company had been named.
"Computers for the masses, not the classes"
Once Chuck Peddle had taken over engineering at Commodore, he convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were already a dead end and that they should turn their attention to home computers. Peddle packaged his existing KIM-1 single-board computer design in a metal case, along with a full-travel QWERTY keyboard, monochrome monitor, and tape recorder for program and data storage, to produce the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor). From PET's 1977 debut, Commodore would be a computer company.
Commodore had been reorganized the year before into Commodore International, Ltd. , moving its financial headquarters to the Bahamas and its operational headquarters to West Chester, Pennsylvania, near to the MOS Technology site. The operational headquarters, where research and development of new products occurred, retained the name Commodore Business Machines, Inc.
The PET computer line was used primarily in schools, due to its tough all-metal construction (some models were labeled "Teacher's PET"), but did not compete well in the home setting where graphics and sound were important. This was addressed with the introduction of the VIC-20 in 1981, which was introduced at a cost of US$299 and sold in retail stores. Commodore took out aggressive ads featuring William Shatner asking consumers "Why buy just a video game?" The strategy worked and the VIC-20 became the first computer to ship more than one million units. A total of 2.5 million units were sold over the machine's lifetime.
In 1982, Commodore introduced the Commodore 64 as the successor to the VIC-20. Thanks to a well-designed set of chips designed by MOS Technology, the C64 possessed remarkably capable sound and graphics for its time and is often credited with starting the computer demo scene. Its US$595 price was high compared with that of the VIC-20, but it was still much less expensive than any other 64K computer on the market. Early C64 ads boasted, "You can't buy a better computer at twice the price."
Australian ads used a tune speaking the words "# Are you keeping up with the commodore? Because the commodore is keeping up with you. #"In 1983 Tramiel decided to focus on market share and cut the price of the VIC-20 and C64 dramatically, starting what would be called the "home computer war." TI responded by cutting prices on its TI-99/4A, which had been introduced in 1981. Soon there was an all-out price war involving Commodore, TI, Atari and practically every vendor other than Apple Computer. This price war likely contributed to the video game crash of 1983. By the end of this conflict, Commodore had shipped somewhere around 22 million C64s—making the C64 the best selling computer of all time—and in the process, drove TI out of the home-computer market, almost destroyed Atari, bankrupted most smaller companies, and wiped out its own savings. Tramiel's motto, "Business is war," had taken its toll.
Tramiel quits; The Amiga vs. ST battle
Commodore's board of directors were as impacted as anyone else by the price spiral and decided they wanted out. An internal power struggle resulted; in January 1984, Tramiel resigned. He founded a new company, Tramel Technology (spelled differently so people would pronounce it correctly), and hired away a number of Commodore engineers to begin work on a next-generation computer design.
Now it was left to the remaining Commodore management to salvage the company's fortunes and plan for the future. It did so by buying a small startup company called Amiga Corporation in August 1984, which became a subsidiary of Commodore, called Commodore-Amiga, Inc. Commodore brought this new 16-bit computer design (initially codenamed "Lorraine", later dubbed the Amiga 1000) to market in the fall of 1985 for US $1295.
But Tramiel had beaten Commodore to the punch. His design was 95% completed by June (which only fueled speculation that his engineers had taken technology with them from Commodore). In July 1984 he bought the consumer side of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications which allowed him to strike back and release the Atari ST earlier in 1985 for about $800.
During development in 1983, Amiga had exhausted venture capital and was desperate for more financing. Jay Miner and company had approached former employer Atari, and the "Warner owned" Atari had paid Amiga to continue development work. In return Atari was to get one-year exclusive use of the design as a video game console. After one year Atari would have the right to add a keyboard and market the complete Amiga computer. The Atari Museum has acquired the Atari-Amiga contract and Atari engineering logs revealing that the Atari Amiga was originally designated as the 1850XLD. As Atari was heavily involved with Disney at the time, it was later code-named "Mickey", and the 256K memory expansion board was codenamed "Minnie".
The following year, Tramiel discovered that Warner Communications wanted to sell Atari, which was rumored to be losing about $10,000 a day. Interested in Atari's overseas manufacturing and worldwide distribution network for his new computer, he approached Atari and entered negotiations. After several on-again/off-again talks with Atari in May and June 1984, Tramiel had secured his funding and bought Atari's Consumer Division (which included the console and home computer departments) in July.
As more execs and researchers left Commodore to join up with Tramiel's new company Atari Corp. after the announcement, Commodore followed by filing lawsuits against four former engineers for theft of trade secrets in lat
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