The Commodore 64 is the best-selling single personal computer model of all time. A pre-production Commodore 64 was first introduced at the winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1982 by the manufacturer, Commodore International. It was later released in August 1982 at a price of US$595. The Commodore 64 is commonly referred to as the C64 (sometimes written C= 64 to mimic the Commodore company logo) and occasionally known as CBM 64 (Commodore Business Machines Model number 64), or VIC-64. It has also been affectionately nicknamed the "breadbox" and "bullnose" due to its shape.
The C64 features 64 kilobytes (64×210 bytes) of RAM with sound and graphics performance that were superior to IBM-compatible computers of that time. During the Commodore 64's lifetime (between 1982 and 1994), sales totalled around 17 million units.
Part of its success was due to the fact that it was sold in retail stores instead of electronics stores, and that Commodore produced many of its parts in-house to control supplies and cost.
Approximately 10,000 commercial software titles were made for the Commodore 64 including development tools, office applications, and games. The machine is also credited with popularizing the computer demo scene. The Commodore 64 is still used today by some computer hobbyists, and emulators (see here for a list) allow anyone with a modern computer (or even smartphones) to run these programs on their desktop (with varying degrees of success and functionality).
