Commodore adverts

Ronnie Barker and the Commodore PET Adverts

At the same time as William "Captain Kirk" Shatner was advertising for Commodore in the US, the UK saw TV's Ronnie Barker pressed in to service, with various nods towards Barker's...

The First Honest-to-Goodness Full Color Computer - William Shatner

The US counterpart to Ronnie Barker, who had been pressed in to service advertising Commodore PETs in the UK with his trademark punnery and word-play, was none other than William ...

VIC-20 Colour Computer - What VIC-20 Can Do For You

This nice gate-fold sales material was made for the VIC-20 a few months after its UK launch. It's full of archetypal 80s people looking at screens, and the blurb contains informa...

Sinclair Owners - We'll give you £50 trade-in when you trade-up!

This is a curious attempt from Commodore to woo users of the ZX80 and ZX81 - small, low-memory and purely home computers that plugged into the television and could by held in one ...

Silicon Office: Now you can do all the filing with one finger

This is a slightly disturbing advert produced by Commodore in partnership with (or sponsorship of) Bristol Software Factory, for the latter's Silicon Office product. It's along t...

Your starter for £150 - the Commodore VIC-20

Commodore was fairly unconventional in its approach to selling computers: rather than just using the traditional tech outlets like Radio Shack, or electronics and nerd magazines, i...

At £299 it's very little. At 64K it's very large

The Commodore 64 was the company's replacement for its VIC-20 machine, the limited but popular home computer which was the first to sell more than 1 million units. Designed by a ...

It's only £695. And that's the last reason you should buy it.

The Commodore 500 was part of the CBM-II Series - an attempt to produce an update for the original Commodore PET and seen as the company's last chance to break the business market...

Home is the last place you should learn about a home computer

Even though the Commodore 64 was on the market, there was still plenty of demand for the VIC 20, launched two years before in 1981 (or three if you count Japan, where it was test-...

Commodore 700: It's a picture - and it's worth a thousand words

With a case popularly believed to have been designed by Ferdinand Porsche, but which was actually designed by Commodore's regular industrial designer Ira Velinsky, an on-board 650...

Commodore VIC-20 - Let Commodore expand your horizons

Even though the Commodore 64 had been launched the year before, the VIC-20 was still shifting units - it would end up selling over 2.5 million before it was discontinued in 1985, ...

If only he'd bought a Commodore computer

The Commodore 700, and its cheaper sibling the 500, were short-lived entrants in Commodore's business range. Confusingly named as the B128, B256 or CBM 128/256-80 in the US or the...

The Commodore 64. Under $600

It's another Commodore advert, from August 1983, playing to Jack Tramiel's famous adage "Computers for the masses, not the classes". The origin of this famous quote dates back to...

The Commodore 8296 Business Computer puts power at your command

Released in 1983, the 8296 was the last of the PET line - the world's first personal computer, which had been first shown at Chicago CES in January 1977. Commodore had already tr...

The Commodore 64 is compact and nippy. But its memory... well that's a little different.

Commodore was clearly milking the "elephants have a long memory" thing as this advert for the Commodore 64, first launched at the Hanover Computer Fair in April 1982, shows. It ...