Commodore

Commodore began in 1954 as a Toronto typewriter assembly company, and it began that way for a specific reason: to get around a trade embargo.

Jack Tramiel had been selling Czechoslovak typewriters in North America from an office in the Bronx. The United States then banned imports from Warsaw Pact countries, and Czechoslovakia was one. His answer was the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company, set up in Toronto to import the machines in parts and assemble them in Canada, so that what crossed into the United States was Canadian. The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels calls it “a sort of typewriter laundering business”. Forty years later, it had produced the best-selling home computer in history, pioneered multimedia computing, and then collapsed into bankruptcy. In between, Commodore made the machines that defined a generation of programmers, gamers, and demoscene artists.

Fast facts

Founded: 1954 in Toronto by Jack Tramiel, an Auschwitz survivor who had been repairing typewriters in New York.
Calculator wars: in the 1970s, Commodore battled Texas Instruments. When TI threatened chip supplies, Tramiel bought MOS Technology outright.
MOS acquisition (1976): brought in the 6502 processor and engineers like Bob Yannes (SID) and Al Charpentier (VIC-II).
The big three: PET (1977), VIC-20 (1980), Commodore 64 (1982).
Tramiel’s exit (1984): founder Jack Tramiel resigned and immediately took over Atari.
Amiga acquisition (1984): Commodore bought Amiga Corporation from under Atari’s nose, gaining Jay Miner’s revolutionary chipset.
Voluntary liquidation (1994): mismanagement, missed opportunities and market shifts ended the company.

The Commodore 64

Released in 1982 at $595 (later dropping dramatically), the C64 became the best-selling single computer model ever:

Hardware: 6510 CPU, VIC-II graphics, SID sound—custom chips that gave the C64 capabilities rivals couldn’t match at the price.
Software: thousands of games, from bedroom productions to arcade conversions.
Longevity: remained in production until 1994, over a decade on the market.
Cultural impact: the UK bedroom coder scene, demoscene, and chiptune music all trace roots to the C64.

The Amiga

When Commodore acquired Amiga Corporation in 1984, they gained a machine years ahead of its time:

Custom chipset: Agnus, Denise, and Paula handled graphics, blitting, and audio while the 68000 CPU multitasked.
Amiga 1000 (1985): the original, with Jay Miner’s paw print (via his dog Mitchy) on the motherboard.
Amiga 500 (1987): the affordable model that brought Amiga to the masses.
Creative tool: video production, animation, music tracking—the Amiga did it all before PCs caught up.

Jack Tramiel’s philosophy

Tramiel’s motto—“computers for the masses, not the classes”—drove Commodore’s aggressive pricing. He believed in vertical integration, owning chip fabrication to control costs. This strategy made the VIC-20 the first computer to sell a million units and the C64 affordable enough to become ubiquitous.

The decline

After Tramiel left, Commodore struggled:

Marketing failures: the Amiga was positioned confusingly, neither business machine nor pure games console.
Missed transitions: slow to adapt to CD-ROM, Windows, and changing markets.
Leadership chaos: revolving-door management couldn’t match Tramiel’s vision or drive.

Tramiel, described from life

Antic interviewed Tramiel in February 1985, months after he had taken Atari, and its description is the closest thing this library holds to meeting him:

Tramiel — born in Poland in 1928 and a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp — is short, heavy, fast-moving, smokes big cigars, talks rapidly in a loud, booming voice, laughs heartily and often.

The same piece contains the single best illustration of “computers for the masses” as an actual belief rather than a slogan. It is about calculators, not computers, and it dates from before Commodore made either:

In 1968 — when calculators sold for $1,495 — he predicted that the price would drop to $9.95 within 10 years. “If anything, I was too conservative then,” he commented. “You get a good, basic calculator for even less than $9.95, and 70 million calculators were sold last year.”

A man who had watched a $1,495 product fall to under ten dollars inside a decade, and thought his own forecast timid, did not need persuading that the same thing would happen to computers. He intended to be the one doing it.

The man the standard account leaves out

The post-1984 decline is usually put down to revolving-door management. The period press is more specific. Amazing Computing, February 1988, profiling the people behind the Amiga:

Irving Gould is the Chairman of the Board and majority stockholder of Commodore Business Machines. Gould helped start the company many years ago with partner Jack Tramiel.

Gould was the constant. He was there at the beginning with Tramiel, he was still chairman and majority shareholder through the Amiga years, and he was chairman when the company put itself into liquidation. The doors that revolved were beneath him.

How it ended

Commodore did not go bankrupt in the ordinary sense. It offered itself for voluntary liquidation, through the Bahamas — a company winding itself up rather than a company put down by its creditors, and a distinction worth keeping when the year is used as a full stop.

The collapse has a precise, documented sequence, recorded as it happened by the Amiga press:

Date	Event
Friday 25 March 1994	Commodore waits until after the New York Stock Exchange closes, then announces significant losses for the quarter
28 March 1994	The NYSE halts trading in Commodore stock
29 April 1994	Commodore announces the liquidation of its major assets

Amazing Computing set out what the announcement meant in July 1994: “Commodore International has offered themselves to voluntary liquidation”, with the legal proceedings run out of the Bahamas, where the parent company was registered.

What followed was a silence that the trade found more shocking than the failure:

Commodore has made no further official or unofficial comments concerning the liquidation. Their official spokesperson apparently is not accepting or returning phone calls. The Bahamas organization who is handling the matter has no further word to offer.

By September the magazine’s columnist could write that “Commodore as a press-releasing entity doesn’t exist any more”, and that Commodore US and Commodore International were “hollow shells, with a bare handful of employees left to be able to hand off the files to whoever buys them”. The national sales companies stayed open — but “without product to sell their existence is a rather hollow victory”.

The chipset that was one test away

The cruellest detail in the whole liquidation is technical. The AAA chipset, the successor to AGA that would have carried the Amiga into the mid-nineties, was not a vapourware promise. From the same August 1994 report:

The work on the AAA chip set was last reported to be only one silicon test away from completion. From reports by departing engineers, Commodore has removed almost all of the development staff.

The engineering was nearly finished. The company that owned it stopped existing first.

Legacy

Commodore’s machines launched careers, created communities, and proved that powerful computing could be affordable. The C64 and Amiga remain among the most emulated and celebrated platforms, with active development communities producing new software decades later.

Computers for the masses, not the classes