The Commodore 64
From Maze
(Difference between revisions)
(→The Commodore behind the Commodore 64) | (→The Commodore behind the Commodore 64) | ||
| Line 9: | Line 9: | ||
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). | 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 (Bagnall 62). Thus was born the project that would become the 8-bit Commodore PET, the first computer under a thousand dollars to include a monitor. The computer's name is a sign of the times; Sousan came up with the PET name to capitalize upon the pet rock craze of the late seventies, and only afterward did Peddle suggest '''P'''ersonal '''E'''lectronic '''T'''ransactor as a way to explain the PET's name logically (Freiberger 13). | + | 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 (Bagnall 62). Thus was born the project that would become the 8-bit Commodore PET, the first computer under a thousand dollars to include a monitor. The computer's name is a sign of the times; Sousan came up with the PET name to capitalize upon the pet rock craze of the late seventies, and only afterward did Peddle suggest '''P'''ersonal '''E'''lectronic '''T'''ransactor as a kind of "backronym" to explain the PET's name logically (Freiberger 13). |
=Learning Through Play= | =Learning Through Play= | ||
