Commodore Technologies
Established: May 19, 1954 (as Commodore Portable Typewriter Company)
Headquarters: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Divisions:
- Commodore Home Entertainment Systems (home computers)
- Commodore Business Systems (business, commercial and industrial computer systems)
- Commodore Components (components)
- Commodore Audio Development (audio components and software)
- Commodore Advanced Research (research and development)
- Fairchild Semiconductor (semiconductor manufacturing)
- Alienware Technology (gaming computers)
- Bethesda Softworks (video game development and publishing)
Commodore Technologies, one of the Canadian "Technology Gems" (along with such companies as Research in Motion, Nortel Networks, Pacific Alliance, Mitel Telecommunications, ATI Technologies, Bennett Technocraft, Dalsa Technologies and IMAX Corporation) was like so many other examples of Canadian companies, a small-scale beginning started by a hustling entrepreneur (Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel in this case) which swelled rapidly into something much greater than what its creator had ever originally created it to be. Beginning as a small company to repair business machines, thanks to partners Irving Gould, Mehdi Ali and Matthias Kendrick, Commodore began to manufacture typewriters in Canada in 1956, but that business shifted first as the company shifted from the production of typewriters to adding machines and then to digital calculators, beginning production of calculators at its North York, Ontario, factory in 1970. After their parts supplier, Texas Instruments, entered the market themselves with a comparable (but considerably cheaper) product in 1975, Commodore shifted production to actual computers, helped along by the company's merger with Pennsylvania-based semiconductor company MOS Technology in 1977. MOS' founder, Chuck Peddle, promptly convinced Tramiel, Gould and Kendrick to leap into the computer business, launching the Commodore PET in 1977.
The PET was a revelation, as it is widely considered to be the first all-in-one computer, and it was a huge hit in Canadian business and educational sectors and rapidly expanded its market share in the Commonwealth, United States and Europe, and the introduction of the Commodore VIC-20 in 1980 and the wildly-successful Commodore 64 in 1982 made the company into a global juggernaut, even as the infamous video game crash of 1983 wrecked a sizable portion of the consumer electronics market. The market share war of the early to mid 1980s saw Commodore sell millions of computers, but after a series of major disagreements with Gould and Kendrick, Tramiel quit his own company in March 1984. But Tramiel's replacement, Kerry Shaw, proved to be a visionary in his own right.
Commodore and rival Atari fought bitterly over the introduction of personal computers in the 1980s, but the fast-selling Commodore 64 remained on the market until 1990 and the Commodore entry, the Commodore Amiga, the company under Shaw spent massively on R&D, initially catching flak from Gould for this (though Kendrick was a staunch supporter of the company's efforts) but producing ever-better versions of the Amiga and, in 1988, introducing the Amiga 2000, which was PC-compatible and was able to use many additional components, a decision that ended up being hugely beneficial. Under Shaw Commodore's dreadful customer-service history improved dramatically, and in the midst of Nintendo's infamous 1980s developer practices, the company openly supported numerous developers of both business and game software. The company bought up British-based Sinclair Research in 1986 and, in what was seen at the time as a massive coup for the firm, Fairchild Semiconductor in 1987. Fairchild's designers, supported by the "Ten from the Heavens" young designers from the famed Computer Science Laboratories at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, developed the CAT-G and CAT-A (Commodore Advanced Technology - Graphic / Audio) separate graphics card system. Revolutionary on its launch in 1992, the CAT-G and CAT-A systems quickly became the standard by which others were judged, and the company would continue to work on both its workstations and its graphics systems for much of the rest decade.
Atari and Commodore buried their hatchet in 1993 shortly after the famous "Montreal Rendevous" in September 1992 where Atari and Sony (along with Bennett Technologies, which became Bennett Technocraft in 1998) agreed to work on the joint venture that would become the internally nearly-identical Sony Playstation and Atari Jaguar, which both hit the market in North America in November 1994, and with the Jaguar using a variant of the CAT-G, the CAT-GV1, for its graphic system (which was an advantage even against the Playstation, whose proprietary GPU was known for being powerful) the company's 1980s rivalries seemed to be in the past. Commodore abandoned the AmigaOS in 1996 after witnessing the success of Microsoft Windows 95, a decision that reduced software costs considerably, though the software division of Commodore continued to redeem themselves on multiple occasions, most of all with the AudioTechnica music player program in 1997 and supporting Corel's efforts at a second complete office software suite to rival the Microsoft Office set. Following a landmark court decision against Microsoft's software packaging by the Canadian courts in April 2000, Commodore PCs began to be delivered without the Microsoft bundles, adding the Corel OfficeSuite office software set, AudioTechnica music players and (famously) the first variants of the Mozilla Firefox open-source web browser. Many higher-end systems were delivered with Corel PaintshopPRO as well.
Such was the capabilities of the CAT-GV1 that Sony, Atari, Bennett and Commodore co-operated on the CAT-GV2 and its integration with the Sony Playstation 2 and Atari Avenger twins, introduced in 2000. Again, the CAT-GV2 was a resounding success, even as the Microsoft XBox, which launched the year after the Playstation 2 and Avenger, put a sizable dent into the sales of the Sony and Atari consoles. By 2001, Commodore's computers had shifted into the higher-end markets, taking advantage of the company's advanced electronic components, a situation added to when Commodore bought gaming-computer maker Alienware in June 2003, and re-entered the computer-on-TV market first famously created by the original VIC-20 and C64 in the early 1980s with the Commodore C256 "Avatar" in October 2005, a similar-design setup to the 1980s classics but with a specialist graphics processing system meant for use on plasma and liquid-crystal televisions. The second-generation of the Commodore Advanced Technology series, the Commodore Science of Computers Series (CSCS), came out in February 2006 with the CSCS-G1 and CSCS-A2, dramatically improving the abilities of the company's by-then core business of graphics and audio technology components for computers as well as complete computers. Kerry Shaw retired in June 2006, passing the leadership of the company to Advanced Division head Dr. Melissa Starahl and David Kendrick, Matthias' son. David Kendrick proved a competent manager and a charismatic leader for the company, while Dr. Starahl continued the Shaw-era focus on technical development. Kendrick stunned many by buying the Bethesda Studios game company in September 2006 (Shaw knew of this plan before his retirement and had no objections), a decision that initially caused waves until Bethesda's introduction of Fallout 3 in March 2008, which sold nearly 850,000 copies in its first month after release and firmly establishing Bethesda as a division of the Commodore empire. In the decade following its acquisition by Commodore, Bethesda's projects - including the Fallout series but also Heavy Rain, The Last of Us, No Man's Sky, Detroit: Become Human and Deus Ex: Human Revolution made Bethesda into a major division of the company by the end of the 2010s.
As of 2019, Commodore remains in the Waterloo, Ontario headquarters it has occupied since 1986 (the famed 'Commodore Shards') , and the company's 28,800 employees are almost entirely in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Israel, South Africa and the United States, with the vast majority of the company's semiconductor manufacturing being in the United States and Canada, though the majority of the company's metallic components production and a lot of its chip manufacturing is done in South Africa, with virtually all of the company's games division is in Canada, the United States and Great Britain. The company sells its products all over the world but is strongest in Canada and the Commonwealth of Nations countries.