The Commodore 64 began its design life in January of 1981 when MOS Technology engineers decided they needed a new chip project. MOS’ Albert Charpentier had been responsible for several of the highly successful VIC-20 chips. “We were fresh out of ideas for whatever chips the rest of the world might want us to do. So we decided to produce a state-of-the-art video and sound chips for the worlds next great video game.”
Commodore DOS, also known as CBM DOS, is the disk operating system used with Commodore's 8-bit computers. DOS/65 is a CP/M like operating system for the Commodore 64.. Unlike most other DOS based operating systems, which are loaded from disk into the computer's own RAM and executed there, CBM DOS is executed internally in the drive: the DOS resides in ROM chips inside the drive, and is run there by one or more dedicated MOS 6502 family CPUs. Thus, data transfer between Commodore 8-bit computers and their disk drives more closely resembles a local area network connection than typical disk/host transfers.
