The Silicon Underground

On 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.

This is a photograph of me playing Micro League Baseball on a Commodore 64 in late December 1984 or January 1985.

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.