Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 (C64 for short, colloquially 64 or “bread box”) is an 8-bit home computer with 64 KB of RAM.
Since its introduction in January 1982 at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, the Commodore-built C64 was extremely popular in the mid to late 1980s as both a gaming computer and for software development. It is considered the best-selling home computer in the world – sales estimates range between 12.5 and 30 million units. The C64 offered a lot of technology and good expandability at an affordable price (after the introductory phase).
Unlike modern PCs, the C64 did not have any internal mass storage devices, as was common with home computers at the time. All programs had to be loaded from external drives, such as the Datasette cassette drive or the 5¼” floppy disk drive VC1541, or from a cartridge. Only basic functions such as the Kernel, the BASIC interpreter and two screen character sets were stored in three ROM chips with storage capacities of eight KB (twice) and four KB (only 1).
