Description

The Commodore 64 was the best selling computer of the 1980s in most countries but faced significant competition in the UK and ultimately came second to the ZX Spectrum. The design was similar to the VIC-20 but was not backwards compatible, the C64 was significantly more powerful and had nearly 20 times as much RAM. In the United States most C64 users had floppy disk drives which had gone down in price, unlike the UK where the vast majority of people were still using tapes due to floppy disk drives being extremely expensive. While games took longer to load on the C64 it was a more pleasant experience due to the SID chip which allowed music to play while the games loaded as opposed to the screeching sounds of the ZX Spectrum, the SID chip allowed people to create their own music through code and was more advanced than the sound chips found in any other major computers or consoles of that time. Despite this immense power it struggled to overtake the Spectrum in the UK due to the Spectrum’s affordability, in the United States the C64 managed to win because it was the first computer sold in regular shops and the American version of the ZX Spectrum was a flop. The Commodore 64 managed to take what the VIC-20 had started and expand upon it with it being many people’s introduction to computing.