BydoEmpire

I have always been an Atari 'fanboy', but the C64 was and still is an admirable rival to the 8-bits.

Yes, and possibly the first magazine mention about the C64 was in InfoWorld on February 1. For being a weekly newspaper, that still is three weeks after CES ended before they had a report ready. Most other magazines with longer lead times took between March and August (!) to fully report from CES in January, though the ones that waited could also add more details that leaked out over time. Apparently Commodore didn't want to give out very much information in advance which some magazine editors reflected on.

The first comparison advertisement, i.e. where Commodore lined up the C64 against the Atari 800, Apple II, TRS-80 etc was in June 1982 from what I could tell. The machine went on sale in the US in July or August, I think. Second half of September in the UK, though the original plan was to not release the C64 in Europe until early 1983.

Perhaps the most interesting part of information I found yesterday was two magazines writing about the ZX Spectrum which was launched in April 1982, and how that more or less had taken Commodore by surprise. As you may know, the Max Machine a.k.a. Ultimax a.k.a. VIC-10 was planned to be a cut-down version of the C64 but supposedly the Spectrum launch made Commodore consider dropping the Ultimax in advance and try to cut the C64 price as much as possible. Now the Ultimax briefly made it to Japan but not elsewhere so in practice the magazines were right, but perhaps for other reasons than ZX Spectrum competition. It is possible though that the TED project was initiated around the summer of 1982 (developer prototypes were ready by August 1983), as a result of the Spectrum launch.