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Commodore International

Commodore International Corporation was a home computer and electronics manufacturer incorporated in The Bahamas with executive offices in the United States founded in 1976 by Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould. Commodore International (CI), along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Machines (CBM), was a significant participant in the development of the home computer industry, and at one point in the 1980s was the world's largest in the industry.

The company released its first home computer, the Commodore PET, in 1977. In 1982, the company developed and marketed the world's best selling computer, the Commodore 64; its success made Commodore one of the world's largest personal computer manufacturers, with sales peaking in the last quarter of 1983 at $ (equivalent to $}} in ). However an internal struggle led to co-founder Tramiel quitting, then rivalling Commodore under Atari Corporation joined by a number of other employees. Commodore in 1985 launched the Amiga 1000 personal computer — running on AmigaOS featuring a full color graphical interface and preemptive multitasking — which would initially become a popular platform for computer games and creative software.

The company's stance started declining in the late 1980s amid internal conflicts and mismanagement, and while the Amiga line was popular, newer models failed to keep pace against competing IBM PC–compatibles and Apple Macintosh. By 1992, MS-DOS and 16-bit video game consoles offered by Nintendo and Sega had eroded Amiga's status as a solid gaming platform. Under co-founding chairman Irving Gould and president Mehdi Ali, Commodore filed for bankruptcy on April 29, 1994 and was soon liquidated. The company's computer systems, mainly the C64 and Amiga series, retain a cult following decades after its demise.

Since its demise, Commodore's assets have been passed through various companies. Escom, and then Gateway 2000, attempted but were unable to relaunch Amiga on PowerPC in the 1990s. Commodore patents are presently owned by Acer since its acquisition of Gateway 2000, while the trademark, copyrights and other intellectual properties are owned by Amiga Corp., a sister company of Cloanto, since 2019, which acquired it from Amiga, Inc. Hyperion Entertainment has continued development of AmigaOS (version 4) to this day and have released AmigaOne home computers. Provided by Wikipedia