Instead, he decided, the chips would go into a 64-kilobyte home computer to be introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the second week of January 1982. “We were fresh out of ideas for whatever chips the rest of the world might want us to do,” said Charpentier, “So we decided to produce state-of-the-art video and sound chips for the world’s next great video game.”Ĭharles Winterble, then director of worldwide engineering for Commodore, gave the go-ahead for the chip effort, and Charpentier’s group worked fairly independently until both chips were finished in mid-November 1981.Īt a meeting with Charpentier and Winterble late that month, Jack Tramiel, then president of Commodore, decided not to proceed with the video game. Its LSI Group, headed at that time by Albert Charpentier, had been responsible for some of the chips that went into Commodore’s VIC-20 home computer, but that project was already well into production. MOS Technology was a merchant semiconductor house. When the chip-development project started, the Commodore 64 was not at all what the designers had in mind. What surprised the rest of the home-computer industry most, however, was the introductory price of the Commodore 64: $595 for a unit incorporating a keyboard, a central processor, the graphics and sound chips, and 64 kilobytes of memory instead of the 16 or 32 that were then considered the norm. By using in-house integrated-circuit-fabrication facilities for prototyping, the engineers had cut the design time for each chip to less than nine months, and they had designed and built five prototype computers for the show in less than five weeks. In January 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and a sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make “the world’s best video game.” In January 1982, a home computer incorporating those chips was introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev.
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