Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers' Story

[crb]

(1985)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895210

If you're interested in the history of Commodore, I thoroughly recommend the Commodore International Historical Society at https://commodore.international/. Dave has pulled together many of the people who were there at the time. For example, here's an Amiga panel from the recent VCF East: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_AYDkuMg-U

[pjmlp]

And the part 2 of the Amiga Panel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvTOFYykBTQ

There is an older one from VCF, which were a couple of sessions, where I was proven wrong, some of the engineers actually wanted the Amiga to be UNIX like first, the way it turned out to be was a sequence of decisions that eventually made it the way it was in the end. Thankfully, as it had plenty of cool ideas, many of which never got out of the Amiga into other platforms.

Looking forward to watch these.

[leoc]

There are also Brian Bagnall's Commodore history books, of course.

[sohkamyung]

I'm currently reading "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" by Jesper Juul [1]. An interesting look at the history and influence of the C64 in games, the Demoscene and as a retro computer. He also has a companion website [2].

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5883/Too-Much-FunThe-...

[2] https://jesperjuul.net/c64/

[jandrese]

> Running a 5-micrometer-technology chip at an 8-MHz clock rate caused it to dissipate a great deal of power—nearly 1.5 watts.

So quaint in our era of 500w graphics cards.

[rasz]

There was Ensoniq speaker panel at VCF East 2025 (last month). Should be uploaded to https://www.youtube.com/@vcfederation/videos at some point.

[hggh]

The original article: https://archive.org/details/commodore64_mar1985