It's not until I scroll down to the pricing table to see what they really mean is their machine is half the price while having more features than the rest.
Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive word processor.
But yeah, mostly I played games on it. It was a great gaming machine for its time.
Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.
It's also possible that the ambiguity was intentional.. Ad copy is an art and it did compel me to read all of it to unpack the meaning. Though thinking this through I would assume that everyone interested in computers at the time would know what the prices of other products were so the $595 would immediately be understood as very cheap in comparison
I’m sure you know — but you mean inflation.
That lead me to this:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...
Anyway, that's blasphemy to a Commodore fan, especially an Amiga fan, to whom good system design consists of having amazing custom silicon for which the CPU is a mere mediator. After all, if a faster CPU were really all you needed, the PC wouldn't suck as much as it does!
This school of thought won out in the end, as most of the compute in today's high-performance applications (like AI) is done on the GPU, the CPU's role being to transfer programs and data to the GPU, basically a front-end processor to the actual computer which is made by NVIDIA.
What decade do you think this computer is from?
"Serious co processors" in 1982 wasn't a thing.
It’s a shame that poor management, product fragmentation, and failure to respond to IBM/Microsoft killed the company.
This was the first I’ve heard that Commodore made their own hardware.
Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III business computer). Buyers who knew the real set of alternatives, at and below the C64's price point, might question why they need 64KB RAM, when the popular lower-priced competitors not shown in the table also did fine games and Basic programming (the main uses of home computers) while costing less money.
Then there's structuring "TV Output" as a feature of the C64, which they say the TRS-80 Model III doesn't have. But that's because the TRS-80 has an integrated display monitor, while the C64 includes no display in that price comparison.
I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. But that IBM PC defined industry standard peripheral interfaces for years.
The competitors also had obvious strengths not shown. Want your word processor to be in crisp 80-column text? A real spreadsheet program? Math coprocessor? Better graphics? Option to upgrade to a hard disk drive?
They are computers…for example the C64’s floppy drive had its own CPU. This was also typical for printers…in fact it still is.
There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers.
Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.
It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world—was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direct 1977 competitors, there were abundant human and engineering resources to come up with a fast, inexpensive, and reliable floppy drive and controller; Chuck Peddle at Commodore was certainly no average engineer. And yet, Commodore was still unable to do this in 1984.
Whether one believes in the reality of the existence of the "10X developer", it's hard not to see what Woz did between 1976 and 1978—Integer BASIC, Apple II color graphics, and Disk II—as proof that such a being can exist, even if (as I have written elsewhere) that brilliance straddled the line between optimized and overoptimized. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685888>
And it was all done with a "controller" card build out of like eight chips you could get at Radio Shack. The Disk II really is probably the cleverest single piece of hardware shipped in the microcomputer era.
I've always been surprised that nobody else seems to have experimented with that. 1200 bps modems were nothing to be sneezed at in 1980.
- Many of the design constraints that other companies faced were removed. Apple designed their own drive electronics and drive interface card. Yes, it takes a talented engineer to handle both the analog and digital side of things. On the other hand, there were compromises. The Apple II was stuck doing a lot of the heavy work. Apple also ended up designing a more complex drive controller to go beyond single sided, double density drives.
- On the flip side, Commodore had more design constraints than most. The 1541 was based upon drives from the PET era. The drives also interfaced to the computer in a fundamentally different way. On the surface level, Commodore drives interfaced to the computer over a generic bus (a bit like USB is a generic bus). The drives also handled high level commands over that bus, to the point where they could operate autonomously. I recall a colleague demoing a drive-to-drive copy between two 1541 drives that occurred without the drives being connected to a computer (after the initial setup was done). The commands were also very high level, dealing with file system access rather than block level access.
While it would be easy to claim that Commodore drives were over-engineered, one must also consider that the original designs came from a time when personal computers had 4 kB of RAM, with nearly 1 kB of that being used by a 40x25 text display (many early computers shared memory between the CPU and video). Software like a disk operating system also required at least some RAM and, in the case of the Apple II, was entirely loaded into RAM. In other words, Commodore was offloading some of the work and memory requirements from the computer.
Wozniak was a genius at designing simple hardware, but those designs usually pushed things into hardware. The Disk II is one example. The other classic example is the non-linear addressing of video on the Apple II. It simplified hardware, but more work had to be done in software.
As for Commodore, well, they were geniuses at botching sophisticated hardware designs. But that's another story.
This is simply because the 1541 was not just a drive, it was a full computer with a 6502 CPU, 2kB RAM and 16kB ROM. You could load software into the RAM through the serial interface, and replace the firmware with any program that you could fit in the 2kB.
C64 uses the same very slow bit-banging method as VIC-20.
If that were true then carts like Fastload wouldn't work using the same hardware and same cabling, to load programs many times faster than the stock C64 code.
The C64 ROM code worked, but slowly. This was also true for the built-in serial routines. When I got a 2400bps modem for my C64, the computer couldn't keep up, there was garbage coming through,I couldn't upload or download, and it was caused by the slow ROM serial code. I hacked my favorite terminal program with my own assembly language bit-banged serial driver, and then the 2400bps modem worked flawlessly. The same is true for the slow disk drive serial code. To my knowledge, that wasn't caused by any flaw in the hardware, it was just slow driver code.
Everyone I knew had a Fastload cartridge, but I was in "the scene", so maybe not the average user back then.
It was still slower due to GCR decoding. Over the last 10 years people have started to write streaming GCR decoders too.
Bob Russell once observed the 1541 was the best computer Commodore ever made.
Commodore tried to solve this twice. The first time was for the Plus/4 series with TCBM drives which connected through the expansion port. The only drive of this type was the 1551, which was very fast, but only worked with the Plus/4 family. Commodore was going to design a TCBM interface for the 64 as well, but it wasn't really necessary as pretty much everyone had a fastloader by then. The 128 has a fixed serial bus and burst mode when combined with the 1571 disk drive, which is also very fast and doesn't require using the expansion port, but by then it was 1985 and the 8-bits were on their way out.
The 1571 is way better than the 1541, IME. It's faster with the 128, it's 100% compatible, it's more reliable and less prone to alignment problems, and it can also read MFM formats. But Bob worked on the 1541, so he loves it. :)
"What did you do back in the 1980s, Grandpa?" "I designed a floppy disk drive that could barely keep up with the Apple ]['s cassette port." "... Oh."
A glass of cold water usually helps.
30 years ago, hallucinating AI was considered a problem. I guess times might have changed.
Payback, as they say, is a b*tch.
The Atari sure had some nice games, though!
The full IBM PC wasn't really a competitor; it was 3x the price and very few families were willing to shell out that kind of money at that point.
Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).
> My friends who had one just played games.
Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!
Odd; the Commodore Datasette is about as reliable as a microcomputer tape storage system can be, far more so than the tin cans-on-a-string designs of Sinclair and TRS-80. Did you attempt to use a regular cassette recorder with a third-party adapter?
My parents even sent it in for repair but it came back as "it's not broken".
3KB of RAM. So little room, I needed to write most of my apps in Machine Code. That was OK. At school, I had an STD Bus-Based 6800, with 256B.
Was a very good learning experience.
I used the 6502 manual. I was taking Machine Code in school at the time (tech school -not "proper" school), and had learned how to trawl the tech literature for guidance.
My teenaged self actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called their offices asking for information on how to program their CPU. Some nice salesperson there took pity on me and sent me their 6809 reference manual along with a quick reference card for free. The manual was quite a sizable book that I wasn't fully ready to understand yet but that reference card was my constant companion. I still have it today. :-)
Sadly I couldn't find a good link to a quick reference card, but there are some copies of the CPU manual on https://archive.org/search?query=6809 . A Wikipedia site is nowhere near as good as a properly typeset and slightly grouped to convey clarity card, but it's still useful https://github.com/Ta0uf19/Motorola-6809-Cheatsheet
https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...
The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show information.
High end workstations of the era gave you decent resolution bitmapped displays long before they focused on colour.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a household that had at various times TRS-80, a PET, CBM8032, VIC-20 and a C64 (plus others, the Casio fx9000P, was nice but I never had the tools to go beyond BASIC) . If you wanted a computer that could do a bit of everything the C64 was a good choice, If you wanted games, it was an excellent choice, but If you wanted to work, characters on screen was what you wanted.
The Accolade Ace of Aces (WW2 combat flight sim) wasn't released until 1986.
It seems that this may have been a different Ace of Aces -- perhaps a version of the Nova tabletop game that never got released.
Anybody know anything about this?
Googling that returns below which also says (maybe infers?) the brochure is from 1982.
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264626...
https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/ace-of-aces/
Jim Rothwell (see the gallery image and enlarge it) was supposed to release something called Ace of Aces for the Ultimax, it seems, IIUC.
I didn't know about the Ultimax until 5 minutes ago.
EDIT: Here's the image link:
https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/wp-content/uploads/gtw64/a/a...
I loved the 6809-based Coco but, at the time, I felt it was inferior to the C64 and Atari 400/800 because it had no sprites, far fewer colors, lower resolution, lower clock speed, etc. Because I didn't yet understand computer architecture and simply believed the specs in the brochure, it was only much later, during my computer-industry career, that I grew to understand that the Coco, which I'd felt so insecure about, was really pretty ideal for my young self to learn on. The built-in Microsoft Extended Color BASIC was far superior to the ROM BASIC the C64 shipped with. Perhaps more importantly, the comprehensive, illustrated BASIC manuals Radio Shack commissioned are still legendary for being excellent for beginners to self-teach. And, unlike many of its peers, that ROM BASIC had extensive native commands for graphics, sound and music from day 1.
Once I'd written a bunch of graphic games entirely in BASIC, I advanced to learn assembly language because it was the only way to draw more and bigger objects faster. Fortunately, Radio Shack offered a ROM cartridge-based 6809 editor/assembler that was unreasonably good for a cheap home computer. And the Motorola 6809 CPU, being the little brother of the legendary 68000 was really an 8/16-bit CPU with an elegantly orthogonal instruction set which supported advanced addressing modes and many features neither the 6502 nor Z80 had. Things like re-entrant, relocatable, program counter relative code, separate user and system stacks, a multiply instruction and multiple levels of interrupts. Today it's considered the most powerful 8-bit CPU of that era (in fact, Apple originally intended the Macintosh to use the 6809). Radio Shack even offered a multi-tasking, multi-user, Unix-like operating system for their 8-bit, 64K 'toy' home computer.
Of course, back then I didn't know how good I had it since my only experience was with the computer I owned and I still believed the impression I formed from that beautiful C64 brochure. It wasn't until the mid and late 90s when there were piles of C64s and Ataris at thrift stores for $5 and $10 that I really understood that the C64's 320x200 resolution and 256 colors weren't all available at the same time, at least for regular users (short of advanced programmer tricks and esoteric demo scene hacks far beyond a beginning coder). Once the computers I'd lusted after were nearly free (or actually free when people just gave them to me vs throwing them out), I managed to acquire ALL of the widely available 8-bit and 16-bit computers I'd never been able to afford in the 80s and actually play with them.
Only then did I understand a 0.89 Mhz 6809 was two to three times faster than a 1 Mhz 6502 and that I'd 'grown up' in programming understanding interrupt driven multi-tasking, managing multiple stacks and using index register indirection, which made pointers feel natural when I later learned C on 68000-based computers. Even the lack of hardware sprites in my 'poor Coco' forced me to figure out software sprites using bit masks and XOR in assembler - and I had a blazingly fast CPU to do it with. Even the higher resolution and colors of the C64 and Atari didn't turn out to actually be that much higher than my Coco. Setting aside the amazing tricks demo scene coders eventually figured out on all these machines, in practice, as a beginning assembly language game coder back then I would probably have only used 3-color sprites on a background with an effective 160 x 192 resolution background. My Coco had four colors (although from a more limited palette) at an effective resolution of 128 x 192 and, being entirely software-based, I could do anything with those pixels that I could figure out how to CPU blit in one frame. With no hardware graphics to rely on, work around or trick, it was always just my code and the unforgiving pace of the CRT beam. This kept me focused from day 1 on cycle-counting performance and intense code optimization, which made my practical experience with real-time graphics more Apple II-like - except with 2 to 3 times more CPU power to throw at it. Sure, I didn't have the hardware GFX I'd lusted after in that brochure but those capabilities weren't quite as accessible to novices as I'd assumed - and what I got instead had some pretty sizable advantages I didn't appreciate at the time in shaping and preparing the programmer I would later become.
To be clear, I'm not being critical of the C64, today I revere and respect all of these classic machines. They're each great in their own unique way, and each one represents a different vision of what personal computing could be. That's a big part of what I miss about 80s home computing and the reason I've collected over a hundred different models of non-Intel 8-bit and 16-bit home computers over the years (all the commonly available Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, Amiga machines a few dozen more rare 8-bits from around the world). It's just ironic how my teen self misunderstood the specs in that brochure and how it led to an undeserved inferiority complex which existed only in my head.
Yes, it was quite decent and attracted a strong community of advanced hobbyists who were attracted by the 6809 CPU's power. The Coco had quite a lot of third-party hardware upgrades made by hobbyist garage companies and by leveraging these it could be inexpensively upgraded to quite a nice system, much like the Apple II's expansion capability - except the Coco had no internal slots so we had to solder wires to chip pins (another good learning lesson :-)).
Radio Shack wasn't really a full computer company like Atari, Commodore, Apple, Sinclair, etc. They were primarily an electronics retailer who did their own manufacturing to drive down costs but only dabbled in original computer design. While they did a few somewhat unique designs like the Model 1, 2, 3, 4 series of 6502 machines, they tended to stick close to designs based on off-the-shelf chip manufacturer parts and didn't often do custom chips. Some of their computers were even private label rebrands of other manufacturer's computers, like the Model 100/200 and all the Pocket Computers.
Because of this, Radio Shack's Color Computer was a straight off-the-shelf implementation of Motorola's 6809 system reference design - and Motorola had no cool graphics hardware support in their 6847 video chip. However, the upside of no GFX hardware was all that money went to the CPU which was two to three times more expensive than the 6502 or Z80. In fact, Woz wanted to use the 6809's earlier ancestor the 6800 in the Apple I but they were far too expensive at the time. Many don't know that most of the team that created the 6502 actually worked at Motorola designing the 6800 but were frustrated that when visiting customers all they heard was "Great chip, way too expensive" so they left and founded MOSTEK to create a cheaper, less powerful 6800 clone. Their first CPU, the 6501, was actually compatible with the 6800 but Motorola sued them so they changed it enough to be incompatible and called it the 6502. Due in part to the lawsuit sapping their resources, MOSTEK started running out of money before completing the 6502 and that's how Commodore was able to buy their own chip company at a good discount.
The UK had the very similar Dragon 32 and 64 computers (and I have both!). They had the same hardware design but included a hardware serial port chip instead of a software bit-banger port. Software was mostly compatible between the Coco and Dragons as they used the same ROM-based Extended Color BASIC licensed from Microsoft. Dragons were also sold in Spain for a while and very briefly in the US by another company Dragon licensed. I think there was also a Coco-alike in Australia but can't recall the name. I don't think of these systems as Coco clones because they were all based on the same Motorola reference design and Microsoft ROM BASIC, which Motorola created to drive sales of their 6809 chip family (6883 system controller, 6847 display chip and 6821 UART).
No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on.
Just dreadful.
I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways that mattered, and even taking into account the weird key combinations required to write code, and the fact that it wasn't particularly well regarded either, but I think Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum range was actually better. You had drawing commands, you had sound commands (although the PLAY command on the 128K honestly didn't give you that much access to the power of the Yamaha FM soundchip so it still wasn't great, and on 48K you were limited to BEEP). You didn't have sprites but you had UDGs and they were easy to use. And I think it might have run faster - it certainly felt faster.
It did still have some annoying oversights: e.g., want to read the joystick? Well, I can't remember the damned address but in the end I figured out enough to realise I was going to have to PEEK the right location in memory, which I duly did after a quick study of the memory map and trying out a bunch of different addresses.
Anyway, point is I remember being so frustrated when I upgraded/crossgraded from a ZX Spectrum 128K +2A to a C64 with how difficult it was to get anything done in BASIC.
I started on Atari BASIC and that BASIC was pretty bad, too, but even so I made use of it and did all kinds of graphics stuff, and wrote games, etc.
I did all kinds of stuff in BASIC on the C64 between 1986 and into the 90's. But, after a few months of learning all about BASIC, I went right into Assembly language. The C64 manual taught BASIC, but it also had the memory map and documentation about all the 6510 opcodes, registers, custom chips, and even a schematic of the computer in the back. It was incredible compared to all other computers at the time, because it was made for DIY, you could go as deeply as you wanted with it.
https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...
I created so many cool things with the C64, got into the Demoscene, and made crack intros, etc. I even wrote some code to do 3D vector rotations in C64 BASIC and displayed the data with an assembly language line drawing routine.
I don't know you, but if you couldn't do amazing things with the C64, that says more (to me) about you than it does the C64. And like all machines, the system is what it is, you either make use of it or you don't.
It wasn't until my dad sold the C64 and upgraded the family to a C128 (with a built in assembler/monitor) that I finally got to try my programs, but by that time, the 8 bit world was winding down and everyone was moving to PCs. To this day I wish C64 shipped with the 64MON cartridge.
I did my own BASIC programming, and I was satisifed with experimenting at that level. It was the systems architecture that enthralled me, though. Just to peruse the diagrams of how RAM and ROM were laid out; the bank switching; registers and I/O routines; programming the SID chip; sprites and colors and fonts.
By the time I went into college I was quite well-primed for subjects like systems architecture, and the upgrade path at home from 286 to Windows PCs was bittersweet, as I left behind those raw system internals for more opacity and high-level sysadmin tasks. But I never forgot the 6502 and 6510 that started it all for me.
Is there a port to the 6502, or did they run a computer in a cartridge to do that?
CP/M Plus on the 128 was much more useful because the 1571 could read MFM disks, though it was hobbled by its architecture and ran slower than it should have.
This by itself is no great obstacle; even aside from the nonstandardization of CP/M 5.25" disk formats, CP/M on Apple II has the same GCR/MFM issue but the SoftCard and its many clones were among the most popular accessories, and consequently no shortage of software available on the Apple II disk format.
No, the issue with the C64 CP/M cartridge is that it sucked, like almost everything else Commodore designed. Even assuming that someone in 1985 or 1986 wanted to run Turbo Pascal or WordStar on the 128 as opposed to buying an inexpensive PC clone or a used Kaypro or Osborne, the 128 implementation is so slow that it is more or less unusable for regular use.
I had a similar experience when I got to college and my roommate and I compared our computers- I had a PC and he had an Amiga, and when he explained what it could do it was clearly superior, but it just didn't "feel right" to me.
I just had a Tandon 286 PC with a 287 coprocessor (yes, probably twice the price compared to an Amiga). But it did run Matlab pretty well, as well as WordPerfect - all I needed for my study.
[0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=1982...
This is one of the best takeaways from this ad. Because they owned MOS, Commodore had an advantage over their competitors that is commonly replicated today.
Buy it for twice the price.
So it should have cost $298 then?
Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you) (for twice the price)
But it should be read:
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you for twice the price)
Rephrased:
No one else makes a machine that can do what ours does, even if they charge twice as much!
[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-12/page/n281
A non American operation breaking into the American market is far harder than the other way round, and relays on a lot of experience with how to market to Americans.
How quaint!
Then I had a 486 vga pc that could barely scroll a game at 60fps (except for ones like jazz jackrabbit with its hardware scrolling wizardry) and I coveted the Amiga with its smooth scaling and rotation and 4 channel samples.
Wait, the what now? Now I’m off to learn what a Max Machine is.
hobbitstan•9mo ago
This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in the gaps.
Tech these days has long lost it's magic. The 'AI' boom tried to recreate the buzz with nonsensical claims that it has failed to deliver. It's all smoke and mirrors these days.
I think the last time I was truly wowed was when Shazam appeared. That was 23 years ago.
shever73•9mo ago
b112•9mo ago
It needs to be rare, or new, to be a treat.
I think now, there's always a computer near me. How can it still be special?
Even the change in sound and graphics was astonishing, now it's minor tweaks.
unyttigfjelltol•9mo ago
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
macintux•9mo ago
z0r•9mo ago
Your comment has prompted my response because it reminded me that I thought Shazam was great too, and it made me think of what more recent incredible technological experiences I've had. I don't know if you've tried on a VR (or more accurately AR) headset recently but the engineering is really something.
timknauf•9mo ago