The story
Founded by Jack Tramiel on Oct 10, 1958.1
History
Commodore Business Machines (Canada) Ltd. (1954–1976)
Jack Tramiel and Manfred Kapp met in the early 1950s while both employed by the Ace Typewriter Repair Company in New York City. In 1954, they partnered to sell used and reconditioned typewriters and used their profits to purchase the Singer Typewriter Company. After acquiring a local dealership selling Everest adding machines, Tramiel convinced Everest to give him and Kapp exclusive Canadian rights to its products and established Everest Office Machines in Toronto in 1955.
By 1958, the adding machine business was slowing. Tramiel made a connection with an Everest agent in England who alerted him to a business opportunity to import portable typewriters manufactured by a Czechoslovak company into Canada. On October 10, 1958, Tramiel and Kapp incorporated Commodore Portable Typewriter, Ltd. in Toronto to sell the imported typewriters. Commodore funded its operations through factoring over its first two years but faced a continual cash crunch. To bolster the company's financial condition, Tramiel and Kapp sold a portion of the company to Atlantic Acceptance Corporation, one of Canada's largest financing companies, and Atlantic President C. Powell Morgan became the chairman of Commodore. In 1962, the company went public on the Montreal Stock Exchange, under the name of Commodore Business Machines (Canada), Ltd.
With the financial backing of Atlantic Acceptance, Commodore expanded rapidly in the early 1960s. It purchased a factory in West Germany to manufacture its typewriters, began distributing office furniture for a Canadian manufacturer, and sold Pearlsound radio and stereo equipment. In 1965, it purchased the furniture company for which it served as the distributor and moved its headquarters to its facilities on Warden Avenue in the Scarborough district of Toronto. That same year, the company made a deal with a Japanese manufacturer to produce adding machines for Commodore, and purchased the office supply retailer Wilson Stationers to serve as an outlet for its typewriters.
In 1965, Atlantic Acceptance collapsed when it failed to make a routine payment. A subsequent investigation by a royal commission revealed a massive fraud scheme in which the company falsified financial records to acquire loans funneled into a web of subsidiaries where C. Powell Morgan held a personal stake. Morgan then pocketed the money or invested it in several unsuccessful ventures. Commodore was one of the Atlantic subsidiaries directly implicated in this scheme. Despite heavy suspicion, the commission could not find evidence of wrongdoing by Tramiel or Kapp. The scandal left Commodore in a worse financial position as it had borrowed heavily from Atlantic to purchase Wilson, and the loan was called in. Due to the financial scandal, Tramiel could only secure a bridge loan by paying interest well above the prime rate and putting the German factory up as collateral. Tramiel worked with a financier named Irving Gould to extricate himself, who brokered a deal to sell Wilson Stationers to an American company. Commodore now owed Gould money and still did not have sufficient capital to meet its payments, so Tramiel sold 17.9% of the company to Gould in 1966 for $500,000 (equivalent to $3.68 million in 2024). As part of the deal, Gould became the company's new chairman.
Tramiel saw some of the first electronic calculators through his Japanese contacts in the late 1960s. He pivoted from adding machines to marketing calculators produced by companies like Casio under the Commodore brand name. In 1969, Commodore began manufacturing its electronic calculators. Commodore soon had a profitable calculator line and was one of the more popular brands in the early 1970s, producing both consumer and scientific/programmable calculators. However, in 1975, Texas Instruments, the leading supplier of calculator parts, entered the market directly and put out a line of machines priced at less than Commodore's cost for the parts. Commodore obtained an infusion of cash from Gould, which Tramiel used beginning in 1976 to purchase several second-source chip suppliers, including MOS Technology, Inc., to assure his supply.
In 1976, Commodore Business Machines (Canada) Ltd. was dissolved and replaced by the newly formed Bahamian corporation Commodore International, which became the new parent of the Commodore group of companies.
Entry into the computer market and success (1977–1984)
Chuck Peddle convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were a dead end business and that they should turn their attention to home computers. Peddle packaged his single-board computer design in a metal case, initially with a keyboard using calculator keys, later with a full-travel QWERTY keyboard, monochrome monitor, and tape recorder for program and data storage, to produce the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor). From PET's 1977 debut, Commodore was primarily a computer company.
Commodore had been reorganized the year before into Commodore International, Ltd., moving its financial headquarters to the Bahamas and its operational base to West Chester, Pennsylvania, near the MOS Technology site. The operational headquarters, where research and development of new products occurred, retained the name Commodore Business Machines, Inc. In 1980, Commodore launched production for the European market in Braunschweig, Germany. This site once employed up to 2000 employees, and in February 2017 an exhibition room for about 200 Commodore products was opened here to commemorate its past.
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By 1980, Commodore was one of the three largest microcomputer companies and the largest in the Common Market. The company had lost its early domestic-market sales leadership, however by mid-1981 its US market share was less than 5% and US computer magazines rarely discussed Commodore products. BYTE stated "the lack of a marketing strategy by Commodore, as well as its past nonchalant attitude toward the encouragement and development of good software, has hurt its credibility, especially in comparison to the other systems on the market". Writing for Programming the PET/CBM, Raeto Collin West wrote "CBM's product manuals are widely recognized to be unhelpful; this is one of the reasons for the existence of this book."
Commodore re-emphasized the US market with the VIC-20. The PET computer line was used primarily in schools, where its tough all-metal construction and ability to share printers and disk drives on a simple local area network were advantages, but PETs did not compete well in the home setting where graphics and sound were important. This was addressed with the VIC-20 in 1981, which was introduced at a cost of US$299 (equivalent to $871.00 in 2024) and sold in retail stores. Commodore bought aggressive advertisements featuring William Shatner asking consumers, "Why buy just a video game?" The strategy worked, and the VIC-20 became the first computer to ship more than one million units, with 2.5 million units sold over the machine's lifetime, which helped Commodore's sales in Canadian schools. In promotions aimed at schools and to reduce unsold inventory, PET models labeled 'Teacher's PET' were given away as part of a "buy 2 get 1 free" promotion. As of calendar year 1980, Commodore sales were $40 million, behind Apple Computer and Tandy Corporation in the market.
In 1982, Commodore introduced the Commodore 64 (C64) as the successor to the VIC-20. Due to its chips designed by MOS Technology, the C64 possessed advanced sound and graphics for its time, and is often credited with starting the computer demo scene. Its US$595 (equivalent to $1,632 in 2024) price was high compared to that of the VIC-20 but was much less expensive than any other 64K computer. Early C64 advertisements boasted that "You can't buy a better computer at twice the price", with Australian adverts in the mid-1980s using the slogan "Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you."
In 1983, Tramiel decided to focus on market share and cut the price of the VIC-20 and C64 dramatically, starting the home computer war. TI responded by cutting prices on its 1981 TI-99/4A, leading to a price war involving most vendors other than Apple Computer, including Commodore, TI and Atari. Commodore began selling the VIC-20 and C64 through mass-market retailers such as K-Mart, in addition to traditional computer stores. By the end of this conflict, Commodore had shipped around 22 million C64s, making the C64 the best-selling computer, until the Raspberry Pi overtook it in 2019.
At the June 1983 Consumer Electronics Show, Commodore lowered the retail price of the C64 to $300, and stores sold it for as little as $199. At one point, the company was selling as many computers as the rest of the industry combined. Prices for the VIC-20 and C64 were $50 lower than Atari's prices for the 600XL and 800XL. Commodore's strategy was to, according to a spokesman, devote 50% of its efforts to the under-$500 market, 30% on the $500–1000 market, and 20% on the over-$1,000 market. Its vertical integration and Tramiel's focus on cost control helped Commodore do well during the price war, with $1 billion in 1983 sales. Although the company and Tramiel's focus on cost cutting over product testing caused hardware defects in the initial C64, some resolved in later iterations. By early 1984, Synapse Software, the largest provider of third-party Atari 8-bit software, received 65% of sales from the Commodore market, and Commodore sold almost three times as many computers as Atari that year.
Despite its focus on the lower end of the market, Commodore's computers were also sold in upmarket department stores such as Harrods. The company also attracted several high-profile customers. In 1984, the company's British branch became the first manufacturer to receive a royal warrant for computer business systems. NASA's Kennedy Space Center was another noted customer, with over 60 Commodore systems processing documentation, tracking equipment and employees, costing jobs, and ensuring the safety of hazardous waste.
Departure of Tramiel, acquisition of Amiga and competition with Atari (1984–1987)
By early 1984, Commodore was the most successful home computer company, with more than $1 billion (equivalent to $2.55 billion in 2024) in annual revenue and $100 million (equivalent to $255 million in 2024) in net income, whilst competitors had large losses. The company's revenue of $425 million in the fourth calendar quarter of 1983 more than doubled its revenue of $176 million a year earlier. Although Creative Computing compared the company to "a well-armed battleship [which] rules the micro waves" and threatened to destroy rivals like Atari and Coleco, Commodore's board of directors, affected by the price spiral, decided to exit the company. In January 1984, an internal power struggle resulted after Tramiel resigned due to disagreements with the board chairman, Irving Gould. Gould replaced Tramiel with Marshall F. Smith, a steel executive without a computer or consumer marketing experience. Tramiel's departure at the moment of Commodore's greatest financial success surprised the industry.
In May 1984, Tramiel founded a new company, Tramel Technology, and hired several Commodore engineers to begin work on a next-generation computer design. That same year, Tramiel discovered Warner Communications wanted to sell Atari, which was rumored to be losing about $10,000 a day. Interested in Atari's overseas manufacturing and worldwide distribution network for a new computer, he approached Atari and entered negotiations. After several talks with Atari in May and June 1984, Tramiel had secured funding and bought Atari's Consumer Division (which included the console and home computer departments) in July. In July 1984 Tramiel bought the consumer side of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications and released the Atari ST earlier in 1985 for about $800. As more executives and researchers left Commodore after the announcement to join Tramiel's new company Atari Corp., Commodore followed by filing lawsuits against four former engineers for theft of trade secrets in late July. This was intended, in effect, to bar Tramiel from releasing his new computer. One of Tramiel's first acts after forming Atari Corp. was to fire most of Atari's remaining staff and to cancel almost all ongoing projects to review their continued viability. In late July to early August, Tramiel representatives discovered the original Amiga contract from the previous fall. Seeing a chance to gain some leverage, Tramiel immediately used the agreement to counter-sue Commodore on August 13.
The remaining Commodore management sought to salvage the company's fortunes and plan for the future, and did so by buying a small startup company called Amiga Corporation in August 1984 for $25 million ($12.8 million in cash and $550,000 in common shares). Amiga became a subsidiary of Commodore, called Commodore-Amiga, Inc. During development in 1981, Amiga had exhausted venture capital and needed more financing. Jay Miner and his company had approached their former employer, the Warner-owned Atari, who paid Amiga to continue development work. In return, Atari received the exclusive use of the design as a video game console for one year, after which Atari would have the right to add a keyboard and market it as a complete Amiga computer. The Atari-Amiga contract and engineering logs identify the Atari-Amiga product was designated as the 1850XLD. As Atari was heavily involved with Disney at the time, it was later code-named "Mickey", and the 256K memory expansion board was codenamed "Minnie".
Still suffering serious financial problems, Amiga sought more monetary support from investors that entire spring. At around the same time that Tramiel was negotiating with Atari, Amiga entered into discussions with Commodore. The discussions ultimately led to Commodore's intentions to purchase Amiga outright, which Commodore viewed would cancel any outstanding contracts – including Atari Inc.'s. Tramiel counter-sued on the basis of this interpretation, and sought damages and an injunction to bar Amiga and effectively Commodore from producing any resembling technology, to render Commodore's new acquisition and the source for its next generation of computers useless. The resulting court case lasted several years.
Commodore introduced a new 32-bit computer design to market in the fall of 1985 named the Amiga 1000 for US$1,295, first demonstrated at the CES in 1984. An Atari-Commodore rivalry continued throughout the life of the ST and Amiga platforms. While the rivalry was a holdover from the competition between the C64 and Atari 800, the events leading to the launch of the ST and Amiga served to further alienate fans of each computer, who disagreed as to which platform was superior. This was reflected in sales numbers for the two platforms until the release of the Amiga 500 in 1987, which led the Amiga sales to exceed the ST by about 1.5 to 1, despite reaching the market later. However, neither platform captured a significant share of the world computer market, with only the Apple Macintosh surviving the industry-wide shift to Intel-based x86 computers using Microsoft Windows.
Commodore and Atari both sought to compete in the workstation market, with Commodore announcing in 1988 a Transputer-driven system based on the Amiga 2000 in response to the Atari Transputer Workstation. Similarly, a Unix workstation based on the Amiga 2000, featuring the 68020 CPU, was detailed as Atari announced developer shipments of its own 68030-based Unix workstation within a claimed "to or three months". Atari's workstation, the TT030, eventually arrived in 1990 without a version of Unix available, this only eventually becoming available to developers in late 1991. Commodore's workstation arrived in 1990 in the form of the Amiga 3000UX.
Decline and later years (1987–1994)
Commodore suffered a poor reputation with its dealers and customers, and upon the 1987 introduction of the Amiga 2000, Commodore retreated from its earlier strategy of selling its computers to discount outlets and toy stores and favored authorized dealers. Adam Osborne stated in April 1981 that "the microcomputer industry abounds with horror stories describing the way Commodore treats its dealers and its customers." Commodore under Tramiel had a reputation for cannibalizing its own products with newer ones; Doug Carlston and others in the industry believed rumors in late 1983 that Commodore would discontinue the C64 despite its success because they disliked the company's business practices, including its poor treatment of dealers and introducing new computers incompatible with existing ones. A Boston reseller said, "It's too unsettling to be one of their dealers and not know where you stand with them." After Tramiel's departure, Ahoy! wrote that he "had never been able to establish excellent relations with computer dealers... computer retailers have accused Commodore of treating them as harshly as if they were suppliers or competitors, and as a result, many have become disenchanted with Commodore and dropped the product line". Software developers also disliked the company, with one stating that "Dealing with Commodore was like dealing with Attila the Hun." At the 1987 Comdex, an informal InfoWorld survey found that none of the developers present planned to write for Commodore platforms. As for Commodore's own software, InfoWorld stated in 1984 that "so far, the normal standard for Commodore software is mediocrity".
Commodore almost went bankrupt in early 1986, obtaining a one-month extension on repaying $192 million in loans that it had defaulted on in June 1985. Tramiel's successor, Marshall F. Smith, left the company in 1986, as did his successor Thomas Rattigan in 1987 after a failed boardroom coup. The head of Blue Chip Electronics, a former Commodore employee, described the company as "a well-known revolving door". Commodore faced the problem when marketing the Amiga of still being seen as the company that made cheap computers like the C64 and VIC. The C64 remained the company's cash cow but its technology was aging. By the late 1980s, the personal computer market had become dominated by the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh platforms. Commodore's marketing efforts for the Amiga were less successful in breaking the new computer into an established market compared to the success of its 8-bit line. The company put effort into developing and promoting consumer products that would not be in demand for years, such as an Amiga 500-based HTPC called CDTV.
As early as 1986, the mainstream press was predicting Commodore's demise, and in 1990 Computer Gaming World wrote of its "abysmal record of customer and technical support in the past". Nevertheless, as profits and the stock price began to slide, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Top 100 Businesses Annual continued to list several Commodore executives among the highest-paid in the region and the paper documented the company's questionable hiring practices and large bonuses paid to executives amid shareholder discontent.
Commodore failed to update the Amiga to keep pace as the PC platform advanced. CBM continued selling the Amiga 2000 with 7.14 MHz 68000 CPUs, even though the Amiga 3000 with its 25 MHz 68030 was on the market. Apple, by this time, was using the 68040 and had relegated the 68000 to its lowest-end model, the black and white Macintosh Classic. The 68000 was used in the Sega Genesis, one of the leading game consoles of the era, Computers fitted with high-color VGA graphics cards and SoundBlaster (or compatible) sound cards had also caught up with the Amiga's performance, and Commodore began to fade from the consumer market.
Commodore International Corporation (2025–present)
On July 31, 2025, a group led by Christian "Peri Fractic" Simpson acquired all 47 surviving original Commodore trademarks dating back to 1983, including the "C=" and "Commodore". They were bought reportedly for a "low seven-figure sum" from Commodore Corporation B.V., which had inherited them from Tulip. Simpson and others incorporated a new Commodore International Corporation in the state of Delaware on June 9, 2025. Simpson teased the purchase two days earlier in a video uploaded on his YouTube channel Retro Recipes.
On July 12, 2025, Commodore announced its first product, the Commodore 64 Ultimate, an FPGA-based system that replicates the functionality of the Commodore 64 with a few modern enhancements. Funded using a direct pre-order system, it was released to consumers in December 2025. The company announced the 64C Ultimate Slimline on April 28, 2026 as a similar FPGA recreation of the 1986 redesigned Commodore 64. In June 2026, Commodore announced the Callback 8020 flip phone, designed to be a digitally minimalist "detox" phone.
The company entered a cross-licensing agreement in August 2026 with Amiga Corporation, the owner of the Amiga trademarks and source codes, allowing the old 8-bit code to be legally used by Commodore in computers. In return, Commodore allows Amiga Corporation to legally use the Commodore name and logos.
From Wikipedia’s article on Commodore International, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4