Commodore 64 and 128

Commodore 128 was the first cartridge computer I used well before Atari. I was about to leave England for good and was packing things home. One of the big stores (may be now defunct Australian Woolworth) dumped a Commodore for 1/4 the price. I disregarded both Sinclair and Amstrad and bought it. It had a cassette player running along with it on which I could write small programs. Unfortunately, with in six months due to Voltage Problem in Ceylon the transformer (power supply) packed up and my coding exercise abruptly stopped, since I could not find a replacement. 

I thought I got a Sinclair instead.

It started in 1974 with MOS technology.

Then copyright issues with Motorola and KIM-1 chip was born.

It was called 6502.

Commodore PET was born which looked like Apple II.

1977

Apple II

Commodore PET

TRS-80

DOS operating system.

4K RAM and Static RAM.

Not Dynamic or DRAM.

IK RAM for the operating system and 3K for the User. 

One has to use a cassette drive to store data.

1979

Disk Drive came in.

No Graphic mode.

Black and white characters.

No sounds.

Later designed Keyboard had many graphic characters.

Later model upgraded the RAM to 96K and included speaker.

Larger screen and green characters.

It had lot of simple games.

Commodore VIC 20

Started in 1977.

Released in 1980.

6560 Chip.

Called Video Interphase chip.

Added the Commodore key to the keyboard.

DIN port was added.

Game Joysticks were added.

Could use 8 to 16 colours.

No Graphic yet and graphic need more memory and one has to overcome this problem by using test characters as figures. 

Ingenuity in thinking.

RAM expanding Cards were used.

By the time it was discontinued in 1985 it sold 2 million computers.

Had an excellent manual for coding in Microsoft Basic.

Commodore had a digital cassettes drive while others including Apple II used analog audio cassette drives.

Along the line introduced a printer.

A dot matrix printer.

Linus Torvalds and Elon Musk use ViC 20 as kids.

Commodore 64

8563 Chip

64 comes from massive upgrade of R from 8 to 64.

Moore's Law applies here.

All 2 into its power of Binary System.

John Maddock the Linux Global Director is very unhappy with binary system and he wants better chips.

I have discussed it here under Maddog.

64K to begin with doubling VIC 20.

Split the chip to two

VIC II and SID that is Video and Sound Chips.

It has two game Joysticks.

Higher Resolution

Bit Map Graphic

16 colours 

Raster Interrupts

Smooth Scroll option

8 Hardware Sprites 

Cheap DRAM instead of Static RAM.

Kernel is spelled correctly as Kernal.

Only 38 RAM is abaible for programming.

Rest are allocated for the different chips in the motherboard.

6510 Chip was born by getting rid of unused pins in the 6560 Chip.

Had a sophisticated sound chip that lured every gamer at that time in spite of the poor graphic quality.

Problem with commodore was it's software capability.

16 bit computers dominating the market place.

1. Amiga

2. MS DOS

3. Apple 

Commodore had many products including Musical Key Board.

Finally it would up operations in 1994.

Internet compatible with modem but still lacked. Mouse.

Commodore 128

This is the computer I bought at discount price before I left United Kingdom for good. It's power pack busted due to poor Power Supply of Ceylon.

I have up computing until I discovered Linux in year 2000.

In between I used Windows as requirement for work in the Office ( University) but I hated it.

It had 128 RAM.

Design was completely different and bigger but keyboard had problems.

Lead developer went to join Atari the competitor in Taiwan.

It was a nightmare for the middle management.

I am glad I left UK and Commodore in 1988.

I did not have to suffer the consequences for the Commodore Users World Wide.

Just a coincidence and happy accident.

It was useless for video games and that may have been the reason for give away price. For a give who was itching fir computer it was considered a bonus some computer grace.

8080 chip

Z80 chip

CPU/M was the software that ran on these two chips.

However Commodore sold 4 million devices in spite of poor game capability and poor software functionality.