>Doing business with Gates was decent, Tramiel said. "He came to see me, tried to sell me Basic, and he told me that I don't have to give him any money, all I had to give him was $3 per unit. I told him I was already married," Tramiel said.

>Tramiel instead told Gates he'd pay a flat fee of $25,000, rejecting the idea of paying $3 for each Commodore 64 sold. "In about six weeks [Gates] came and took that $25,000. Since then he did not speak to me," Tramiel said.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2813900/innovators-rem...

It might also have contributed to the success of C64 by "encouraging" early use of machine language. BASIC is great, but to truly make C64 shine you do need assembly language.

Notably, it was also pretty trivial to expand BASIC capabilities. A lot of utilities did just that, like adding graphics commands and sprite extensions. Simons' BASIC is probably the most comprehensive example, and it also came as a cartridge.

There are many things that are unfortunate about the way the C64 was shipped. For Commodore, the entire point of the C64 was to slap it together and shove it out the door as quickly and cheaply as possible, to try and capitalize on the unexpected success of the VIC-20, which was itself slapped together when the VIC graphics chip didn't sell.

What's fascinating about the C64 is just how right that "slap it together and shove it out the door" strategy was.

Market price and timing were absolutely key to the C64's early success. All those bugs and missing features? The 3rd party developers would quickly take care of that.

The products that Commodore tried to make good, better than "shove it out the door" quality, like the Plus/4 and C128, were complete duds. Much better design, much better software, and irrelevant.

https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-the-atari-basic-sourc...

See appendix B, memmove() was broken.