The C64, in its beige-brown "breadbin" case, is listed by Guinness as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, with sales estimated between 12 and 17 million.
It had a lot of memory for its price, hardware sprites and a famous sound chip, and it had one of the largest game libraries of any home computer. Games came on tape, disk and cartridge.
Sixteen fixed colours. Its 320x200 mode allowed two colours per 8x8 square; most games used multicolour mode, which halved the width to 160 with wide pixels for four colours per square. Eight hardware sprites, which programmers reused down the screen to show many more, and smooth scrolling in hardware.
The SID chip was a small synthesiser: three voices, each with triangle, sawtooth, pulse and noise waves, its own volume envelope, plus a filter and ring modulation. C64 music is still written and played today.