page_title: Commodore International
section_title: Founding and early years
hierarchical_section_title: Commodore International / History / Founding and early years
context_page_description: Commodore International was an American home computer and electronics manufacturer founded by Jack Tramiel. Commodore International, along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Machines, participated in the development of the home–personal computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The company developed and marketed the world's best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64, and released its Amiga computer line in July 1985. With quarterly sales ending 1983 of $49 million, Commodore was one of the world's largest personal computer manufacturers.
context_section_description: The company that would become Commodore Business Machines, Inc. was founded in 1954 in Toronto as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company by Polish-Jewish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel. For a few years, he had been living in New York, driving a taxicab, and running a small business repairing typewriters, when he managed to sign a deal with a Czechoslovakian company to manufacture their designs in Canada. He moved to Toronto to start production. By the late 1950s, a wave of Japanese machines forced most North American typewriter companies to cease business, but Tramiel instead turned to adding machines.
  In 1955, the company was formally incorporated as Commodore Business Machines, Inc. (CBM) in Canada. In 1962, Commodore went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), under the name of Commodore International Limited. In the late 1960s, history repeated itself when Japanese firms started producing and exporting adding machines. The company's main investor and chairman, Irving Gould, suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to understand how to compete. Instead, Tramiel returned with the new idea to produce electronic calculators, which were just coming on the market.
  Commodore soon had a profitable calculator line and was one of the more popular brands in the early 1970s, producing both consumer as well as scientific/programmable calculators. However, in 1975, Texas Instruments, the main supplier of calculator parts, entered the market directly and put out a line of machines priced at less than Commodore's cost for the parts. Commodore obtained an infusion of cash from Gould, which Tramiel used beginning in 1976 to purchase several second-source chip suppliers, including MOS Technology, Inc., in order to assure his supply. He agreed to buy MOS, which was having troubles of its own, only on the condition that its chip designer Chuck Peddle join Commodore directly as head of engineering.
  Through the 1970s, Commodore also produced numerous peripherals and consumer electronic products such as the Chessmate, a chess computer based around a MOS 6504 chip, released in 1978.
  In December 2007, when Tramiel was visiting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, he was asked why he called his company Commodore. He said: "I wanted to call my company General, but there's so many Generals in the U.S.: General Electric, General Motors. Then I went to Admiral, but that was taken. So I wind up in Berlin, Germany, with my wife, and we were in a cab, and the cab made a short stop, and in front of us was an Opel Commodore." Tramiel gave this account in many interviews, but Opel's Commodore didn't debut until 1967, years after the company had been named.
caption: Original Commodore logo: all-lowercase company name (1962–1984)