The Museum
Where these caverns came from — and the giants who built them
Commodore Caverns BBS — The Origin Story
Before the World Wide Web. Before AOL. Before most people had heard the word “online.” There was a C64, a modem, a phone line, and a SYSOP who left the machine running.
In the mid-1980s, Commodore Caverns was a Bulletin Board System — a BBS — running on a Commodore 64 out of the home of SYSOP David Whittington. Users would dial in with their own C64s, wait through the handshake, and drop into a world carved from PETSCII graphics and scrolling text.
A BBS in 1985 was the whole internet compressed into one machine: message boards, file downloads, real-time chat, door games, community. The regulars knew each other by handle. The SYSOP knew everyone. If the line was busy, you called back. If the machine was down, you waited. Running the board meant trusting your C64 to stay up overnight, watching the phone bill, and knowing your users by name.
COMMODORE CAVERNS BBS
SYSOP: David Whittington
Running on Commodore 64
300/1200 baud — call back if busy
****************************************
Welcome back, traveler.
You have [2] new messages waiting.
Commodore Caverns.com is that BBS, reborn. The name is the same. The spirit is the same. The C64 at the center is the same. The technology is different — but the idea isn’t: a place where Commodore people find each other, share what they know, and keep the machines alive.
A History of Commodore International
From a Toronto typewriter repair shop to the best-selling home computer in history. This is how it happened.
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1954Jack Tramiel founds the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company in Toronto, Ontario, initially importing and repairing typewriters. Tramiel — a Holocaust survivor who had been liberated from Auschwitz — builds the business from almost nothing.
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1962The company incorporates as Commodore Business Machines (CBM). Through the 1960s it expands into adding machines and calculators, competing fiercely against Japanese manufacturers by building its own chips.
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1976Commodore acquires MOS Technology, the semiconductor company behind the legendary 6502 processor — the chip that would power the Apple II, the Atari 800, the BBC Micro, and of course the Commodore machines to come. This vertical integration gives CBM a decisive cost advantage.
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1977The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) launches — one of the first complete, ready-to-use personal computers. An all-in-one unit with keyboard, monitor, and cassette drive, it finds an early home in schools and small businesses.
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1980–1981The VIC-20 arrives, the first microcomputer to sell over one million units. Priced under $300 and endorsed by William Shatner in TV commercials, it brings Commodore into living rooms across North America and Europe. The tagline: “Why buy just a video game?”
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1982The Commodore 64 launches at the January Consumer Electronics Show. With 64KB of RAM, the SID sound chip, and the VIC-II graphics chip — all manufactured in-house — it undercuts every competitor on price. Tramiel’s mantra: “Computers for the masses, not the classes.” It will become the best-selling single computer model in history.
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1984After a conflict with CBM chairman Irving Gould, Jack Tramiel resigns and departs. He immediately acquires the consumer division of Atari from Warner Communications, launching Atari Corp. Commodore carries on under Gould but loses its ruthless competitive edge. The C64 keeps selling regardless.
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1985Commodore acquires Amiga Corporation and launches the Amiga 1000 — a machine years ahead of its time, with pre-emptive multitasking, a custom chipset, and colour graphics that leave the PC and Mac in the dust. RJ Mical’s Intuition GUI and the Boing Ball demo stun onlookers at the launch event.
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1986–1989The Commodore 128 launches, extending the C64 platform. The Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 follow, making the Amiga the dominant creative platform in Europe. Graphic artists, video professionals, and demosceners claim the machine as their own.
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1990–1992The Amiga 3000 and later the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 600 arrive as Commodore attempts to modernise the platform. Despite technically superior hardware, chronic underfunding, poor marketing, and management failures prevent the Amiga from capitalising on its advantages as the IBM PC clone market explodes.
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1993The Amiga CD32 launches — the world’s first 32-bit CD-ROM gaming console. It briefly outsells the competition in the UK. Commodore is running out of money.
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April 29, 1994Commodore International declares bankruptcy. The assets — including the Amiga platform — are liquidated. Escom acquires them in 1995. A decade of acquisitions, relaunches, and brand licensing follows, but the original Commodore is gone. The community endures.
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1994–presentThe scene never stops. Demoparties keep running. CSDB catalogs new C64 releases every year. New hardware arrives — the Ultimate 64, the MiSTer FPGA — and new games get written. The Commodore 64 is still the best-selling single computer model in history. Nobody has come close.
The Commodore 64 at a Glance
The numbers behind the legend.
RAM 64 KB
SOUND MOS 6581/8580 SID chip
VIDEO MOS 6569 VIC-II
COLORS 16
LAUNCH January 1982
PRICE US$595 (1982)
SOLD 12–17 million units
The SID chip — designed by Bob Yannes — gave the C64 a sound capability so far ahead of its competitors that it became an instrument in its own right. The demoscene still writes new music for it today.
The Amiga — A Computer Ahead of Its Time
When the Amiga 1000 launched in 1985, it could do things no other personal computer could do.
Pre-emptive multitasking. Stereo 4-channel audio. 4,096 colours on screen simultaneously. A custom chipset — Agnus, Denise, and Paula — that handled graphics and sound entirely independently of the CPU. Video production, 3D rendering, animation: the Amiga owned these workflows through the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Amiga was used for the video effects in SeaQuest DSV, Babylon 5, and The Video Toaster brought broadcast-quality production to desktop studios. Timed events sold on hardware launched in 1985.
Idek Tramielski was born in Łódź, Poland in 1928. Deported to Auschwitz in 1942, he survived forced labour in multiple camps before being liberated by American forces in 1945. He immigrated to the United States, joined the Army, learned to repair typewriters, and in 1954 opened a typewriter repair shop in Toronto.
That shop became Commodore Business Machines. Through sheer competitive ferocity — vertical integration, cost-cutting, and an absolute refusal to be undersold — Tramiel turned CBM from a typewriter importer into a global technology company. His acquisition of MOS Technology in 1976 gave Commodore the in-house chip manufacturing that made the VIC-20 and the C64 possible at prices competitors couldn’t match.
He resigned from Commodore in 1984 after a falling-out with chairman Irving Gould. He immediately acquired Atari Corp, where he continued the same relentless strategy. He retired from Atari in 1996. Jack Tramiel died on April 8, 2012, in Monte Sereno, California.
His legacy is the machine you’re thinking about right now. Without Jack Tramiel, there is no Commodore 64. Without the C64, the home computer revolution looks completely different.
Sam Tramiel followed his father from Commodore to Atari Corp in 1984, serving as President through the company’s most active years. Under his stewardship, Atari Corp released the Atari ST line — a direct competitor to the Amiga — and later the Atari Lynx handheld, one of the first colour handhelds to market.
Like his father, Sam was hands-on and deeply involved in the technical and business decisions that shaped the machines. He continued his father’s tradition of aggressive pricing and fierce competition. Sam Tramiel died in 2021. R.I.P.
Leonard Tramiel, the youngest of Jack’s sons to join the family business, served as Vice President at Atari Corp and was closely involved in software strategy and developer relations during the ST era. He worked alongside his father and brothers to keep Atari relevant in a rapidly changing market.
Leonard later moved into academia, earning a Ph.D. and pursuing research and teaching careers. He has remained a thoughtful voice on the history of the companies his family built.
Robert J. Mical was part of the original Amiga team at Amiga Corporation, where he designed and wrote Intuition — the groundbreaking graphical interface that gave the Amiga its distinctive look and feel. He also wrote the Amiga’s Exec operating system kernel alongside Carl Sassenrath.
After Commodore acquired Amiga, Mical continued working on the platform. He later moved to Atari, where he co-designed the Atari Lynx handheld with Dave Needle. He has since worked at 3DO, Dreamworks, and other companies, and remains one of the most beloved figures in the retro computing community — cheerful, generous, and always willing to share his stories at Amiga events.
Bill Herd led the hardware team that designed the Commodore 128, Commodore’s most sophisticated 8-bit machine, in just a few months under intense deadline pressure. He is famous within the community for his candid, hilarious stories about the chaos and brilliance of working at CBM in the mid-1980s.
His accounts of the engineering floor — the midnight sprints, the component substitutions, the management dysfunction — paint a vivid picture of how the machines got made. He remains deeply involved in the retro scene, speaking at events and maintaining a YouTube presence where he continues to share his encyclopedic knowledge of CBM hardware and the industry behind it.
Dave Haynie was one of Commodore’s most senior hardware engineers, responsible for much of the Amiga’s hardware architecture from the Amiga 2000 through the Amiga 4000. He designed the Zorro II and Zorro III expansion bus systems and was a central figure in the effort to develop the AAA chipset, Commodore’s next-generation graphics platform that was never released before the company collapsed.
On the day Commodore shut down in April 1994, Haynie brought a video camera to the office and recorded “The Deathbed Vigil” — a devastating and moving document of the last hours. It is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand what was lost. He remains active in the Amiga community and continues to document the history he helped create.
James H. Butterfield was, for a generation of Commodore users, the authority. A Toronto-based computer scientist and educator, he became the most prolific and trusted writer on Commodore machines throughout the 1980s — contributing hundreds of articles to Compute! magazine and its sister publications, and writing what many consider the definitive introductory text: Machine Language for the Commodore 64 and Other Commodore Computers.
Butterfield had a gift for making complex things clear. His explanations of machine language, BASIC programming, and the inner workings of the C64 were patient, precise, and accessible — crafted not for specialists but for the curious kid who wanted to understand what the machine was actually doing. He wrote about pokes and peeks, about the SID chip, about monitor programs and memory maps, and he did it with a generosity of spirit that turned readers into programmers.
He was a fixture at Commodore user group meetings across Canada and the US, and a familiar face at the Toronto PET Users Group — one of the earliest and most influential Commodore communities in North America. He was from here. He was ours.
Jim Butterfield died in Toronto on July 29, 2007. He is remembered with deep affection by everyone who learned to program on a Commodore machine with his books open on the desk beside them.
For nearly two decades, Stewart Cheifet was the face of personal computing on public television. As host and executive producer of Computer Chronicles — the PBS series that ran from 1983 to 2002 — he brought the microcomputer revolution into living rooms across America with patience, curiosity, and a rare gift for making technology accessible without dumbing it down.
Every significant development of the era passed through his desk: the launch of the Macintosh, the rise of MS-DOS, the arrival of Windows, the emergence of the internet. He covered it all without hype, interviewing the engineers and entrepreneurs who were building the future while the rest of the world was still catching up. The Commodore 64 appeared on his show. The industry he documented shaped everything that came after.
Without Stewart Cheifet, millions of people would have had no guided entry point into the world these machines were opening up. He mattered — more than most people who weren’t in front of a keyboard ever knew.
Before DOS. Before Windows. Before any of it — there was CP/M, and CP/M was Gary Kildall. As founder of Digital Research Inc., Kildall created the CP/M operating system in the early 1970s, the first widely-adopted OS for microcomputers and the direct ancestor of the operating system environment that personal computing was built on. Every disk directory you’ve ever browsed traces a line back to his work.
He co-hosted Computer Chronicles with Stewart Cheifet in its early seasons, bringing a working engineer’s perspective to the show — technically rigorous, never condescending, genuinely excited about what computers could do. His segments had a different quality than the rest: you were watching someone who had actually built the machines explain them to you.
History has not always been fair to Gary Kildall. The oft-repeated story that he “missed the IBM deal” and lost the PC OS contract to Microsoft is far more complicated than the legend allows — and the legend has obscured how much he actually contributed. The Commodore world ran on CP/M too. Without Kildall’s foundational work, the personal computer revolution would have taken a different shape entirely.
Gary Kildall died on July 11, 1994 — just months after Commodore declared bankruptcy, in the same year that closed a chapter of computing history.
About Commodore Caverns
An independent guide to the Commodore frontier — built by someone who has been here since the beginning.
Commodore Caverns is an independent site dedicated to the Commodore 64 and the culture around it. It’s not a store. It’s not a forum (yet). It’s a guide — a place to find the hardware, the software, the community, and the history.
The Caverns sit inside a larger network: Commodore Universe, an intergalactic hub connecting this site with PETSCII Bedrock (prehistoric pixel art) and Amiga Nexus (future-retro Amiga culture). Three worlds, one orbit.