Commodore International

Commodore, the common name used for the company Commodore International, was an American electronics and hardware company headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania that played a leading role in the development of the home computer/personal computer industry in the 1980s. The company is also known under the name of its R&D department, Commodore Business Machines (CBM). Commodore developed and marketed the world's best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64 (1982), but was unable to bring to fruition a competitive improvement for the hardware design of its 16-bit computers, the Commodore Amiga, which were gradually displaced in relation to price and characteristics by the increasingly massive IBM PC and its clones compatible with DOS and Windows. It declared bankruptcy in 1994, its assets being sold to various buyers. The Amiga line sees successive attempts to relaunch it without any positive results, while the Commodore brand goes through various owners until the Dutch Tulip Computers takes over the rights. It markets different peripherals (multimedia keyboards, mice, MP3 players, pen drives, etc.) and consumables under this brand, and uses the rights to market the C64 Direct-to-TV. In 2004 Tulip sold the Commodore brand to Yeahronimo Media Ventures for 22 million euros. The sale took place in March 2005 after months of negotiations.

Since then the new company has focused on gear with special modding for gamers, and introduced a netbook and a pair of PDAs at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show.

Commodore model 4032.

History

It got its start in the company that Jack Tramiel founded in the 1950s, which began by repairing typewriters and then in the early 1970s took control of MOS Technology, owned by Chuck Peddle, and introduced the KIM-1, a simple motherboard computer that was programmed in machine language.

Part of the success of this company is due to the use of the MOS 6502 processor, developed by MOS Technology. Then they developed computers such as the PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore 16, Plus/4 and others.

The subsequent purchase of Amiga Computer brought the release of the Commodore Amiga 1000 model.

In Spain, Commodore products were initially distributed by Microelectrónica y Control, although the subsidiary Commodore S.A. was officially established in June 1987, directly dependent on Commodore International. The new subsidiary, directed first by Santiago de Gracia and later by Miguel Ángel Esteban, assumed the assets and structure of Microelectronics and Control. After Esteban's departure, it became dependent on Commodore Italia, until this subsidiary was definitively closed in September 1993.

Currently Commodore products are well known in Spain and Argentina for the technological impact in the sophisticated and modern design of their products and components. Garbarino S.A. is responsible for the assembly and distribution in the Argentine area, being exclusively sold in the company's own premises, it is a subsidiary of the current Spanish firm of the brand, being the only distributor in the country.