Ads from the July 1983 Issue of Compute!’s Gazette

This particular page of ads is from the first issue of Compute!'s Gazette. Gazette was Compute!'s most successful spinoff and was published for around a decade.

While the Commodore 64 gained a reputation as a games machine because of its outstanding graphics and sound capabilities for the time, at least in the early days it was thought it would have a bigger role in business and education uses.

Commodore was fairly successful in the education market with the Commodore 64 but except for maybe the occasional small business, never really succeeded in the business market. However, as one of these ads shows, when the Commodore 64 was first released, there were companies developing business software for it. And while it wasn't cheap, this software was no doubt much cheaper than DOS or CP/M equivalents.

Of course, entertainment software was big early on for the C64 as well as the ad right next door shows. Some of these are big name games but some are pretty obscure. There was so much software released on the Commodore 64 that you would be hard pressed to ever come up with a complete list and new software continues to be developed today.