The Commodore 64 sells a capable computer at a mass-market price

What happened

Owning a chip manufacturer let Commodore build the machine cheaply and then cut prices whenever a competitor came close. Inside were two purpose-designed parts: a video chip with hardware sprites and a scrolling-friendly display, and a synthesizer chip with three voices and filtering that musicians treated as an instrument in its own right. Sixty-four kilobytes of memory was generous for the money. Sold in the same shops as televisions and toys rather than through specialist dealers, it reached households with no intention of learning to program.

The result was an enormous audience for cheap software. Games arrived on cassette in Europe and disk in North America, from professional studios and from individuals, priced low enough to be an impulse purchase. Copying was rampant, which spread both games and the elaborate cracking scenes that added their own animated introductions, an activity that grew into the demoscene. Composers working within the sound chip's limits produced music still performed and reissued today, and the machine stayed commercially viable for roughly a decade.

The world at the time

Price wars were tearing through the home computer market, with several manufacturers selling below cost to hold shelf space. Buyers faced a confusing field of incompatible machines and often chose by price alone. Meanwhile the American console business was heading into a crisis that pushed some game buyers toward computers instead.

What it changed

Sales usually placed in the tens of millions make it one of the best-selling computer models ever, though records from the period are incomplete enough that precise totals remain disputed. Its user base sustained magazines, mail-order catalogs and clubs, trained many working developers, and left a music and graphics aesthetic still imitated deliberately.