Commodore 64 — the machine Guinness World Records still credits as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, even though nobody, including Commodore itself, ever fully settled on quite how many were actually sold.
Why it matters
Jack Tramiel’s insistence on undercutting every rival on price while still delivering genuinely capable colour graphics and a proper sound chip made the C64 the default home computer for an entire generation, particularly once repeated price cuts through 1983 turned a $595 launch machine into a $300 one within a year. The SID chip alone spawned a chiptune subculture that has outlived the hardware by decades, and the sheer volume sold created a games library deep enough that new C64 releases are still being written today, more than 40 years on.
What to check before you buy
- Ask whether the board has been recapped or the original PLA chip replaced; the PLA is the single most failure-prone chip in a breadbin C64 and isn’t getting any more available
- A black or garbled screen on power-up is more often the PLA or a RAM chip than anything catastrophic
- Check pin voltages on the SID before condemning it as dead — the machine will actually boot with no SID fitted at all, so silence isn’t always a sound-chip problem
- Confirm which variant you’re being offered (early “breadbin” vs later slimline 64C), since parts, repair difficulty and collector value all differ
