The C64 Across Borders | Code Like It's 198x

The Commodore 64 inside the case was the same everywhere: the same 6510 processor, the same 64K, the same SID and VIC-II. What changed at each border was how a person came to own one. In the United States it arrived in a price war. In Britain it came off a production line at Corby. West Germany became Commodore’s biggest market, and in Italy a magazine editor could write of “the million C64s sold in Italy” as common knowledge. In Poland a single magazine table priced it in złoty, in dollars and in Deutschmarks, because which price you paid depended on which money you had. In Argentina it was built locally and sold as the Drean Commodore 64.

This entry follows the machine through those markets, using what each country’s own press reported at the time. Sales figures in that press usually came from Commodore or its distributors, and they are given here as claims, attributed to whoever made them.

The United States: a price war

Commodore showed the 64 at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1982 at $595. It then cut the price hard: by June 1983 Compute! reported it at $399, or $299 with a trade-in rebate, and in the summer of 1983 Commodore cut its wholesale price from about $360 to $200. Ahoy! reported 1.2 million C64s sold in 1983. By August 1986 Compute!’s Gazette put the installed base at “more than two-and-a-half million 64s”, and in 1988 INFO reported that Commodore had sold eight million C64s worldwide. The Commodore 64 entry sets out how far later estimates of the total disagree.

Britain: built at Corby

The machine was first shown in Britain at the Commodore Computer Show in London in June 1982, where Your Computer quoted a price of £400. By the autumn Commodore was advertising it at £299 plus VAT.

Buyers across Europe got machines made in Britain. In its first issue, in May 1985, ZZAP!64 reported that Commodore had presented Margaret Thatcher with its one millionth and two millionth computers manufactured in Britain, “both 64s”, made at the Corby factory. She gave them to a local school. The machines from Corby, the magazine noted, were “for distribution in Europe as well as Britain”.

The C64 stayed on sale in Britain long after its launch. At a trade show in 1990, Commodore UK’s national sales manager, Kelly Sumner, told ZZAP!64 that the company expected to sell 140,000 C64s that year, 8,000 more than the year before, and put the British installed base at 500,000 to 750,000 machines. An Italian magazine reporting the same show gave a larger figure for British C64 sales since launch: about 1.2 million. The two numbers measure different things, machines still in use against machines ever sold, and both came from Commodore.

Britain had magazines devoted to the machine, among them ZZAP!64 and Your Commodore, and a cracking scene of its own, with groups such as Ikari, founded in 1987. It was a smaller scene than Germany’s: in 1988 Commodore User’s Mike Pattenden counted “a dozen” gangs in Britain against “nearly 50” in Germany.

West Germany: Commodore’s biggest market

West Germany mattered more to Commodore than any other country. Reporting from the CeBIT show in Hanover in 1991, Amiga Computing wrote that Europe accounted for 85 per cent of Commodore’s sales and Germany was “again the single largest world market”. Commodore was building a new factory in Braunschweig, where by then all the machines it sold in Europe were made.

The C64 was still part of that story. The same report said that German C64 sales had “jumped from 108,000 to 180,000”, mainly because of East Germany. A few years earlier, in October 1986, the Polish magazine Bajtek had printed the West German price of a C64 as 370 to 449 Deutschmarks.

German owners built one of the busiest cracking and demo scenes in Europe. Groups such as Genesis Project (founded in 1986), Red Sector Inc., Crest and Oxyron came from there, and so did the paper fanzine Illegal, edited by Jeff Smart from 1986, which ranked the cracking groups in charts. Police in the Netherlands and Germany raided PO boxes and “made numerous arrests”, Commodore User reported in 1988, while Britain was “fairly relaxed”.

Italy: a million by 1987

Italy’s general computer magazine MCmicrocomputer followed the machine from rumour to shop. In March 1982 its news pages noted that there were not yet any guesses at when the “CBM 64” would arrive. That May, it reported that Commodore’s Italian company, Commodore Italiana, had become fully operational on 12 May under its managing director, James Bachmann, and had presented the products shown two weeks earlier at the Hannover fair, the 64 among them. By November the magazine called the machine’s arrival imminent, “a machine that hobbyists will like very much”.

The December 1982 issue carried the magazine’s first look. The 64 had been shown in Italy for the first time on Commodore’s stand at the SMAU exhibition in Milan, “not working, behind a glass case”, and later at the Torino Ufficio 82 show. The testers noted with relief its 25 lines of 40 columns, and liked the light brown case: “you notice the dust much less!”

Five years later the machine was so common that the magazine’s director, Paolo Nuti, used it as a yardstick. Looking back on 1987 in the December issue, he wrote that “the million C64s sold in Italy” was now producing “an endless legion” of Amiga owners, and compared the spread of cheap home PCs to “the boom of the Commodore 64”. He also remembered its downside: many appliance and hi-fi shops had turned to selling computers “in a hurry” at the end of 1983 and in 1984, and had “spent ’85 licking their wounds”. In January 1991 the Italian magazine Super Commodore 64/128, reporting Commodore’s news from London, put Italian sales of the C64 at about 2.2 million, 100,000 of them in 1990 alone.

Italian owners had a press of their own. Commodore Computer Club was devoted to Commodore machines. Edizioni Hobby of Milan published an Italian Zzap! under licence from May 1986, and the weekly PAPERsoft printed foreign type-in programs translated and adapted for Italian readers.

Scandinavia: a Commodore stronghold

In Norway Commodore dominated the home computer market early. In January 1985 the Norwegian pages of the magazine RUN reported that, by the company’s own figures, Commodore had sold more than 35,000 CBM 64 and VIC-20 machines in the country. Its importer, Commodore Computers Norge of Oslo, claimed a market share of close to 70 per cent, and a readers’ survey by the magazine Mikrodata had found that more than 56 per cent of its readers owned a CBM 64 or a VIC-20. Commodore Norway then had about 15 permanent staff.

Scandinavia also produced some of the best-known C64 groups. Sweden had Triad (founded in 1986), Fairlight (1987), Censor Design and Booze Design; Norway had Razor 1911, which began in 1985 cracking C64 games; and Finland’s Future Crew started on the C64 in 1986 before moving to the PC. In May 1993 the copy party The Computer Crossroads in Gothenburg drew an estimated 1,700 people, with C64 owners among them. The demoscene these groups helped build was added to Finland’s National Inventory of Living Heritage in 2020.

Poland: three prices for one machine

In Poland the C64 was a luxury, and Bajtek, the country’s computer monthly, reported its price in several kinds of money. In October 1985 a C64 with its cassette deck cost up to 185,000 złotych at Warsaw’s Jarmark Perski market, about twice the price of a 48K ZX Spectrum. A year later the magazine’s price table put a C64 at 150,000 to 165,000 złotych at the market, beside its prices in Western Europe: 370 to 449 marks in West Germany and £90 to £110 in Britain.

By February 1989 the table’s three columns described three ways to buy a computer: the Giełda Bajtka market in thousands of złotych, the hard-currency Pewex and Baltona shops in US dollars, and the average price in West Germany in marks. A C-64C cost 650,000 złotych at the market, $219 at Pewex or Baltona, and 275 to 350 marks in West Germany. A 48K Spectrum cost 350,000 złotych. The ZX Spectrum was the more common machine in Poland: in 1989 Bajtek called it the country’s most popular home computer.

Behind the Iron Curtain

Across the rest of the socialist bloc the C64 was an import, and each country let it in differently.

Yugoslavia did not let private buyers import home computers until the end of 1984. In December that year Svet Kompjutera reported that a federal decision in force from 28 November allowed people to bring in a home computer worth up to 40,000 dinars, paying customs duty of up to 50 per cent. Until then, the magazine wrote, computers could not be imported, and the warehouses at the border were full of machines confiscated earlier. An assistant federal secretary, Dobrila Nikolajević, said the aim was to stop smuggling and the black-market trade. The magazine was unimpressed: 40,000 dinars would buy nothing serious abroad, it wrote, apart from the cheapest Sinclairs, the VIC-20 and “perhaps the most sought-after, the Commodore 64”. That same month a special edition of Računari put the C64 on its cover beside the Spectrum, the Amstrad, the BBC Micro and Yugoslavia’s own home-built Galaksija.

Hungary sold the machine over the counter by the later 1980s. In a Christmas buying guide at the end of 1987, Mikroszámítógép Magazin visited the Foto Elektronik shop on Múzeum körút in Budapest, whose manager, Tibor Hrabovszky, said it had Commodore’s Plus/4, C16 and C64 “in adequate quantity”. A C64 with a tape recorder would cost 24,000 to 26,000 forints, and a 1541 disk drive 25,000 to 28,000.

East Germany built its own home computers, but its state institutions knew many citizens had Western ones. In 1987 Mikroprozessortechnik announced a six-cassette BASIC course, made by Radio DDR II and the state record company VEB Deutsche Schallplatten from Horst Völz’s radio lessons. Its programs came for the East German KC85 machines, and versions for the Commodore C 64, the Atari 800XL and the Sinclair Spectrum were in preparation. The box cost 96.60 marks in record shops. When the border opened, East Germany became a market for the C64 in its own right, and by 1991 it was the main reason German C64 sales were rising.

Latin America: built locally, or barely seen

Argentina made its own C64s. The first issue of Drean Commodore, dated December 1985, reported that Drean was already building the C-16 and C-64 at its plant in San Luis, and planned to make 100,000 to 120,000 machines in 1986. They were sold in specialist computer shops and in household appliance chains such as Frávega and Hogar Obrero. Drean’s sales manager, Pedro Nemesio, said the company wanted to lead the home computer market. The magazine’s own name for the machine was la Drean Commodore 64.

Brazil protected its own microcomputer industry with what Micro Sistemas called in November 1981 “protectionist legislation”, the reserva de mercado or market reserve. As the person it was interviewing pointed out, small computers still came into the country easily in travellers’ luggage. The C64 appears in that magazine in July 1983, in a reader’s letter from Campinas: Eduardo Chaves wanted to found a club for Commodore users (“PET, CBM, VIC-20, C-64”) and mentioned that he belonged to the Toronto PET Users Group. The market reserve entry covers the machines Brazilian firms built instead.

Sources

Compute!, issue 22, March 1982, p. 26: the Commodore 64 at the January 1982 Winter CES, $595. Compute!, issue 37, June 1983, p. 6, and issue 39, August 1983, pp. 35–36: the price cuts. Ahoy!, issue 4, April 1984, p. 6: 1.2 million sold in 1983. Compute!’s Gazette, issue 38, August 1986, p. 23: “more than two-and-a-half million 64s”. INFO, issue 22, September/October 1988, p. 35: eight million C64s. See Commodore 64.
Your Computer, July 1982, p. 16: the London showing and £400; October 1982, p. 105: Commodore advertisement, £299 plus VAT.
ZZAP!64 issue 1, May 1985, p. 26: “The PM’s CBMs”, the one millionth and two millionth British-built computers, both 64s, made at Corby.
ZZAP!64 issue 67, November 1990, pp. 7–8: Kelly Sumner, Commodore’s national sales manager, on 140,000 C64 sales expected in 1990 and a UK installed base of 500,000 to 750,000.
Super Commodore 64/128 (Gruppo Editoriale Jackson), year 7 no. 39, January 1991, p. 21, “La Commodore… mette la quinta”: British C64 sales of about 1.2 million; Italian sales of about 2.2 million, 100,000 of them in 1990.
Mike Pattenden, “Piracy: hacking at the industry’s roots”, Commodore User, June 1988, pp. 93–95: gang numbers in Germany and Britain; raids in the Netherlands and Germany.
Amiga Computing issue 37, June 1991, p. 17: CeBIT ’91 report; Germany Commodore’s largest market, the Braunschweig factory, German C64 sales from 108,000 to 180,000 “mainly due to East Germany”.
MCmicrocomputer no. 7, March 1982, MC news: no date yet for the “CBM 64”. No. 9, May 1982, MC news: Commodore Italiana operational from 12 May, James Bachmann, the Hannover fair. No. 13, November 1982, MC news: the arrival of the Commodore 64 “imminent”. No. 14, December 1982, “Anteprima Commodore 64”: SMAU, Torino Ufficio 82, the 40-by-25 screen and the case colour.
Paolo Nuti, editorial, MCmicrocomputer no. 69, December 1987, p. 18: “il milione di C64 venduti in Italia”, the “boom del Commodore 64”, the appliance and hi-fi shops of 1983–85.
RUN (Danish edition, Norwegian section), vol. 2 no. 1, January 1985, p. 30: Commodore’s sales in Norway, the importer’s claimed 70 per cent share, the Mikrodata readers’ survey, Arild Aspås and the Oslo staff.
Bajtek no. 2, October 1985, pp. 24–25: Jarmark Perski prices. Bajtek 12/86: price table dated 15 October 1986. Bajtek 3/89, p. 28: price table dated 15 February 1989 (C-64C 650,000 zł, $219, 275–350 DM; ZX Spectrum 48K 350,000 zł). Bajtek 10/89, pp. 3–5: the ZX Spectrum as Poland’s most popular home computer. See Bajtek.
“Odluka protiv šverca”, Svet Kompjutera, December 1984, p. 4: the import decision of 28 November 1984, the 40,000-dinar limit and customs of up to 50 per cent, Dobrila Nikolajević, the Commodore 64 as the most sought-after machine.
Računari special edition, December 1984: cover with the Amstrad, Spectrum, Commodore 64, Electron, BBC B and Galaksija. See Računari.
Mikroszámítógép Magazin, 1987 no. 12, p. 26: Christmas buying guide, Foto Elektronik, Múzeum körút 19, Budapest; C64 with tape recorder 24,000–26,000 forints.
Mikroprozessortechnik, 1987, news item “BASIC — 1x1 des Programmierens”: Radio DDR II and VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, versions for the C 64 in preparation, 96.60 M.
Drean Commodore no. 1, December 1985: “120.000 C16 y C64”, the San Luis plant, the shops, Pedro Nemesio. No. 2, 1986: “la Drean Commodore 64”.
Micro Sistemas no. 2, November 1981, p. 40: interview on the “Reserva de mercado” and computers arriving in travellers’ luggage. No. 22, July 1983: reader’s letter from Eduardo Chaves of Campinas.
576 KByte issue 37, September 1993: report on The Computer Crossroads, Gothenburg, 29–31 May 1993. See crack intros.
Finnish Heritage Agency, National Inventory of Living Heritage, 9 April 2020 (web, secondary). See demoscene.