C= +4 4sale

[Marco]

Most of the people who made the plus/4 said it wouldn't sell because of the incompatibility, they were then told a year or so later to make the 128 with C64 compatibility.

I believe the phrase 'I told you so' might have been heard a few times around the C= engineering department. But seriously Bill Herd and Dave Haynie are two names who everyone knows, I'm pretty sure they were involved with both projects.

The irony of the whole TED nonsense was that it was originally menat to be a VIC-20 replacement competing against the ZX-81/Spectrum. That resulted in the C116 which sold to four people and a cow in the Eastern Bloc countries, turns out no one wanted a ZX-81 type computer anymore.

During development of the C116 Tramiel left and the now headles chicken of C= repurposed the whole thing to be a business oriented companion to the C64 - this came out as the plus/4 which no one bought because it turns out no one working in business at the time wanted a 'toy' computer, they liked the biiiig boxes of IBM clones (not to mention the biiiiiiiiiiig price tags and monochrome displays).

The final insult was the C16 which was a C116 in the ugly breadbin case with the same inadequate 16k of RAM and missing 'user port' whatever that is (I'm not much of an 8-bit person). The C16 was dreamt up by some middle-management prat and developed by the C=Japan engineering department (the US engineers apparently didn't even know it existed until it was released).

[Marco]

They were thinking about the sales they were still getting on new C64Cs back then, that was enough incentive at the time to start development on the C65.

You are correct that it was a bad idea though, as it unnecessarily drained engineering resources away from the Acutiator project which should have been the sole focus of Commodore from the time it was first devised.

[Marco]

What the hell? There never was a multi-cpu Amiga design, the next-gen Amiga was the Acutiator architecture that Dave Haynie's team worked on up until the end of '93 when Commodore couldn't afford to pay for new development. It was a massive leap forward for Amiga and would have put them ahead of the game again for another few years with it's AAA chipset but it was not multi-cpu

Furthermore - the only Amigas that sold worth a damn were the 500 and 1200, the 'high-end' machines were a niche within a niche. Anyone who wanted a desktop computer would go and buy a clone.

[Marco]

Acutiator was the codename for a next-gen Amiga - a proper revolutionary change to the Amiga hardware, not the tiny alterations like ECS and AGA, Acutiator was meant to provide a modular architecture upon which they could build any different kind of computer for different markets simply by adding in or taking away chunks of the modular design. It was designed with the AAA chipset in mind but could take AGA aswell if a low cost design was needed.

Commodore never really wanted to push Amiga to their 8-bit customers because they seemed to believe that the 8-bit market would just stay alive hence the C128, C128D, C64C, C64G, C128DCR, C128CR, C64GS and so on. I agree that the purchase of Amiga should have been the death for the entire 8-bit line and they should have pushed the Amiga to their existing 8-bit customers. But there are many, worse mistakes that Commodore made than that.