Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers' Story

(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

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

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/

> 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.

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