The Commodore 64

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The roots of the Commodore 64 lie in the history of a Canadian company called Commodore, founded in Toronto in 1958 by Jack Tramiel. A survivor of the concentration camps in Poland, Tramiel was born Idek Tramielski, but changed his name after World War II, when he emigrated to the United States. After serving in Korea, Tramiel worked as a typewriter repair technician, eventually opening a repair company of his own, along with a business partner. Commodore was the company he and his partner formed next, and this company wouldn't repair typewriters, it would manufacture them (Bagnall xiii). Once again, the history of 10 PRINT is intertwined with earlier technologies, leaving the impression -- wholly inaccurate and technologically deterministic as it may be -- that personal computers were a natural progression from typewriters, which in turn emulated printing presses.

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In the mid-sixties Commodore shifted its focus from producing typewriters to producing calculators, a move made purely for financial considerations, but which in hindsight seems to evoke the same tension between text and numbers, between poetics and algorithms that underwrites the aesthetic and procedural dimensions of 10 PRINT. Caught in a price war with Texas Instruments and Japanese manufacturers in the seventies, Tramiel sought the cheapest calculator components he could find, eventually buying parts from MOS Technology, a semiconductor company comprised of many former Motorola engineers (Bagnall 55).

+

In the mid-sixties Commodore shifted its focus from producing typewriters to producing calculators, a move made purely for financial considerations, but which in hindsight seems to evoke the same tension between text and numbers, between poetics and algorithms that underwrites the aesthetic and procedural dimensions of 10 PRINT. Caught in a price war with Texas Instruments and Japanese manufacturers in the seventies, Tramiel sought the cheapest calculator components he could find, eventually buying parts from MOS Technology, a semiconductor company comprised of many former Motorola engineers. While MOS Technology earned its revenue from selling calculator chips (mostly to Commodore, its largest customer), the company was also developing a microprocessor, the now legendary 6502 chip. While the 6502 would become the central processing unit (CPU) for the original Apple I, the Apple II, the Atari 400 and 800, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and of course, the Commodore 64, MOS Technology never intended the chip to be used in computers. The 6502 was designed as a single chip replacement for the two- or three-chip processors found in cash registers, appliances, and industrial machines. "If we were going to do a computer," Chuck Peddle, the lead engineer on the project confessed, "we would have done something else" (Bagnall 14).

+

With an eye on vertical integration and the 6502 microprocessor, Jack Tramiel bought MOS Technology in September, 1976, though not exactly in the most straightforward fashion. A ruthless businessman, Tramiel withheld payments to MOS (whether because Commodore was cash-strapped or there was a problem with an order of chips, or both, is speculation), meaning MOS was in turn facing a cash shortfall, a problem compounded by a lawsuit from Motorola over possible intellectual property infringement (Bagnall 56). Tramiel was able to buy MOS Technology at a bargain basement price -- around $750,000 -- and suddenly Commodore had its own chip design and production facility. Tramiel was still intent on dominating the calculator business, however, and it took Chuck Peddle and Commodore's Vice-President of Engineering, Andre Sousan, to convince him that a personal computer would in fact be the next generation calculator, leapfrogging over Hewlett-Packard's successful programmable HP-65 calculator. Thus was born the project that would ultimately become the 8-bit Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) -- and the forebear of the Commodore 64 (Bagnall 62).

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The Commodore 64

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 The roots of the Commodore 64 lie in the history of a Canadian company called Commodore, founded in Toronto in 1958 by Jack Tramiel. A survivor of the concentration camps in Poland, Tramiel was born Idek Tramielski, but changed his name after World War II, when he emigrated to the United States. After serving in Korea, Tramiel worked as a typewriter repair technician, eventually opening a repair company of his own, along with a business partner. Commodore was the company he and his partner formed next, and this company wouldn't repair typewriters, it would manufacture them (Bagnall xiii). Once again, the history of 10 PRINT is intertwined with earlier technologies, leaving the impression -- wholly inaccurate and technologically deterministic as it may be -- that personal computers were a natural progression from typewriters, which in turn emulated printing presses.
-In the mid-sixties Commodore shifted its focus from producing typewriters to producing calculators, a move made purely for financial considerations, but which in hindsight seems to evoke the same tension between text and numbers, between poetics and algorithms that underwrites the aesthetic and procedural dimensions of 10 PRINT. Caught in a price war with Texas Instruments and Japanese manufacturers in the seventies, Tramiel sought the cheapest calculator components he could find, eventually buying parts from MOS Technology, a semiconductor company comprised of many former Motorola engineers (Bagnall 55).
+In the mid-sixties Commodore shifted its focus from producing typewriters to producing calculators, a move made purely for financial considerations, but which in hindsight seems to evoke the same tension between text and numbers, between poetics and algorithms that underwrites the aesthetic and procedural dimensions of 10 PRINT. Caught in a price war with Texas Instruments and Japanese manufacturers in the seventies, Tramiel sought the cheapest calculator components he could find, eventually buying parts from MOS Technology, a semiconductor company comprised of many former Motorola engineers. While MOS Technology earned its revenue from selling calculator chips (mostly to Commodore, its largest customer), the company was also developing a microprocessor, the now legendary 6502 chip. While the 6502 would become the central processing unit (CPU) for the original Apple I, the Apple II, the Atari 400 and 800, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and of course, the Commodore 64, MOS Technology never intended the chip to be used in computers. The 6502 was designed as a single chip replacement for the two- or three-chip processors found in cash registers, appliances, and industrial machines. "If we were going to do a computer," Chuck Peddle, the lead engineer on the project confessed, "we would have done something else" (Bagnall 14).
+With an eye on vertical integration and the 6502 microprocessor, Jack Tramiel bought MOS Technology in September, 1976, though not exactly in the most straightforward fashion. A ruthless businessman, Tramiel withheld payments to MOS (whether because Commodore was cash-strapped or there was a problem with an order of chips, or both, is speculation), meaning MOS was in turn facing a cash shortfall, a problem compounded by a lawsuit from Motorola over possible intellectual property infringement (Bagnall 56). Tramiel was able to buy MOS Technology at a bargain basement price -- around $750,000 -- and suddenly Commodore had its own chip design and production facility. Tramiel was still intent on dominating the calculator business, however, and it took Chuck Peddle and Commodore's Vice-President of Engineering, Andre Sousan, to convince him that a personal computer would in fact be the next generation calculator, leapfrogging over Hewlett-Packard's successful programmable HP-65 calculator. Thus was born the project that would ultimately become the 8-bit Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) -- and the forebear of the Commodore 64 (Bagnall 62).
 =Learning Through Play=