Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers' Story

Summary

In January 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and a sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make “the world’s best video game.” In January 1982, a home computer incorporating those chips was introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev. By using in-house integrated-circuit-fabrication facilities for prototyping, the engineers had cut the design time for each chip to less than nine months, and they had designed and built five prototype computers for the show in less than five weeks. What surprised the rest of the home-computer industry most, however, was the introductory price of the Commodore 64: $595 for a unit incorporating a keyboard, a central processor, the graphics and sound chips, and 64 kilobytes of memory instead of the 16 or 32 that were then considered the norm. When the chip-development project started, the Commodore 64 was not at all what the designers had in mind. MOS Technology was a merchant semiconductor house. Its LSI Group, headed at that time by Albert Charpentier, had been responsible for some of the chips that went into Commodore’s VIC-20 home computer, but that project was already well into production. “We were fresh out of ideas for whatever chips the rest of the world might want us to do,” said Charpentier, “So we decided to produce state-of-the-art video and sound chips for the world’s next great video game.” This article was first published as “Design case history: the Commodore 64.” It appeared in the March 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The diagrams and photographs of chips, circuit boards, and screens appeared in the original print version.Charles Winterble, then director of worldwide engineering for Commodore, gave the go-ahead for the chip effort, and Charpentier’s group worked fairly independently until both chips were finished in mid-November 19...