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Foundation.
The company that would become Commodore International was started in 1954[1] in Toronto by Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel. He had already run a small business repairing typewriters for a few years while living in New York and driving a taxicab, but managed to sign a deal with a Czechoslovakian company to manufacture their designs in Canada, and moved to Toronto to start production. By the late 1950s a wave of Japanese machines forced most North American typewriter companies out of business, but Tramiel instead turned to adding machines.

The Demise Of Commodore

In the 1970s and early 80s, the computer press had often sought Commodore (one of the industry's leading players), and its colorful management for information. The VIC-20 and C64, although aggressively marketed, were arguably more successful because of their price than their marketing. After Tramiel's departure, Commodore executives shied away from mass advertising and other marketing ploys, fearful of repeating past mistakes. Commodore also retreated from its earlier strategy of selling its computers to discount outlets and toy stores, and now favored authorized dealers. By the late 1980s, the personal computer market had become dominated by the IBM PC compatible and Apple Macintosh platforms. Commodore's marketing efforts for the Amiga were less competitive and seemed half-hearted and unfocused. The company also concentrated on consumer products that would not see a demand for another few years—including a digital TV system called CDTV. In the early 1990s, CBM continued selling Amigas with 7–14 MHz 68000-family CPUs (even though Amiga 3000 with 25 MHz 68030 was in the market by that time), when PCs with 33 MHz 486's, high-color graphics cards and SoundBlaster (or compatible) sound cards offered comparable, and eventually higher, performance, albeit at higher prices. By way of contrast, when introduced in 1985, the Amiga had competed favorably against 286-based systems with EGA graphics and rudimentary sound capabilities that frequently cost 2–3 times as much. In 1992, the production of the A600 seemed like a backward move; it replaced the A500, yet it removed the numeric keypad, Zorro expansion slot, SCSI capability, and other functionality in favor of PCMCIA and a theoretically cost-reduced design. It was basically unexpandable and lasted less than a year. Productivity developers moved to PC and Macintosh, while the console wars took over the gaming market. David Pleasance, managing director of Commodore UK, described the A600 as a 'complete and utter screw-up'. (Smith, 1994) In late 1992, Amiga hardware began to reach parity with PCs with the release of the A4000 and A1200 computers, which featured an improved graphics chipset, the AGA. By this point, both the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh had a much larger market share than the Amiga platform. As software developers shifted to these platforms, the Amiga lost value for mainstream consumers. The custom-designed and custom-built AGA chipset also cost Commodore considerably more than the commodity chips used in IBM PCs, further reducing Commodore's profit margins. Common wisdom was that even though the AGA clearly improved upon the original chipset (OCS), it never returned to Amiga the clear dominance of multimedia computing that it once promised. Software piracy has often been given by trade publications and user groups as the reason for the Amiga's demise, but this view is controversial. For information on the specific challenges in the Amiga market of the time, see the Amiga Software article. In 1994, the 'make or break' system, according to Pleasance, was the 32-bit CD-ROM-based game console: the CD32, but it was not sufficiently profitable to put Commodore back in the black. By 1994, only its operations in Germany and the United Kingdom were still profitable. Commodore declared bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, and its assets were liquidated. The former site of Commodore's operational headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, now houses the headquarters and broadcast studios of leading cable retailer QVC, Inc. (On November 26, 2004, QVC became the first retailer to sell the DTV, a "C64 in a joystick" designed by Jeri Ellsworth.) The company's computer systems, especially the C64 and Amiga series, retain a cult-following among their users years after its demise.
List of Commodore Systems



Amiga Series (where i became interested in the Company)

  • Amiga CD32 Basically a 1200 based console
  • Amiga CDTV this was a Amiga 500 with a CD rom drive and it was black, it was actually well before its time.