Commodore, years ahead of the competition.

The Commodore 64 really was years ahead of the competition when it was released in 1982. It was released a year after the PC and several years after the first Atari 8-bit and Apple II models. However, in terms of graphics and sound, it was more than a step above.

However, the real way in which the C64 was so far ahead of the pack was price. The Commodore 64 was much less expensive than the other models I mentioned and was slightly better to much better depending on exactly which features you were comparing. When it came to using the Commodore 64 for business purposes there were still a couple of drawbacks though...

The big one is that the Commodore 64 only had a 40 column display. For productivity tasks such as word processing, creating spreadsheets, etc. an 80 column display is much better. The other drawback was available memory. When the Commodore 64 was initially released, 64K matched even the IBM PC in terms of stock RAM. However, while the PC steadily increased the default amount of RAM over the years, the Commodore 64 remained steady at 64K.

The Commodore 128 would address these limitations while remaining compatible with the C64. However, by that time (1985), it was too little too late. Commodore introduced the Amiga to remain years ahead of the competition and would have several more very successful years but the writing was on the wall...

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