64E4 - MOS technology 32 bit 68K competitor?

[psxphill]

Jack Tramiel didn't want to spend money. Ever notice why the C-16 had less memory than the C-64? They didn't want to pay for it which means they were stealing from the customer by giving consumers less.

The C-16 had nothing to do with Jack, his last computer was the $99 commodore 264 but he left before it mutated into the $299 plus/4.
 
He spent money on prototypes and cancelled them if there was not enough interest. A new processor would have been too expensive for a punt.
 
After he left, commodore didn't function at all well.

[psxphill]

Why was the SID chip team only given a month to design the SID chip and what happened to them after the first month?

The SID was designed by Bob Yannes and he took a lot longer than a month.
 

Why didn't Commodore fix the hardware in the 1541 making it faster?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km701Z3KQiI slow serial bus vic-20 13:45 c64 19:00

[psxphill]

We know why the 1541 was never fixed. The question was just rhetorical in nature.
 
From what I've read, they had about a month.

It only works as a rhetorical question in your favour if you don't know the reason it wasn't fixed. They were going to fix it, they invested money in fixing it. However they found out too late that a mistake in the production meant that they couldn't fix it. Delaying would have allowed another computer to gain market share that they wouldn't have been able to recover.
 
Wherever you read that they only had a month from starting the SID to finishing it was wrong. Both the SID & VIC-II were loosely scoped projects, they don't appear to have been started with any form of deadline. When commodore decided to do the c64 they needed them reasonably functional to demo at the January CES or they wouldn't get any orders. Without orders they wouldn't know whether to manufacture any, a lot of projects were demo'd at CES but if nobody wanted them then they were killed.
 
In answer to your original question. Bob Yannes did the SID on his own and also worked on the C64 motherboard, he left commodore shortly after they were complete.
 
The engineering team at commodore was always very small. At least for the people that achieved anything.
 

They wanted CP/M on a machine so of course you had to use a Z80. I remember the chips they had to use had something to do with the tank at the MOS building was leaking and something about they didn't want to produce one of the chips?

The Z80 in the C-128 was designed in by accident, CP/M was never a design consideration. It was only because someone in marketing had promised 100% compatibility and the C-64's CP/M cartridge worked less in the C-128 than it did in the C-64. Personally I think they could have argued their way out of it as the CP/M cartridge was so rare. Even if it meant designing a new CP/M cartridge that could be exchanged. But Bil chose to put the Z-80 on the motherboard instead, maybe it was cheaper to do it that way? He might have been forced to remove it, except the compatibility hack for the Magic Voice cartridge also relied on it.
 
The MOS building was shut down by the EPA years later due to the leak, I don't remember anything happening around the time of the C128. AFAIK Commodore manufactured all the C-128 & 16bit Amiga chips that they had a license for. For AGA they had to outsource some of the chips because their fab lines were out of date. They redesigned the CIA on a more modern production process for the CD32 as they had closed the fab completely by then, both CIA's are included in the AKIKO chip.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology#GMT_Microelectronics
 

If you wanted to steal a company, what would you do? You would run it into the ground so the owner couldn't pay his bills. A company that isn't doing good is worth less. Right? The value of a company goes down and you could get a billion dollar company for a steal. Isn't this what happened to Commodore?

There doesn't appear to be anything like that going on with commodore. Fraud to drive the stock price up maybe, however Jack was never tied to it. Possibly because the man who was thought to be responsible (C. Powell Morgan) and another key witness died before the fraud was investigated.
 
http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/chronology_portcommodore.htm
 
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=m4QJke60-oAC&pg=PA114&lpg=PA114&dq=C.+Powell+Morgan+atlantic+acceptance+company&source=bl&ots=XWb7VIzoOr&sig=ex4yT1W5A5dH-FOQwLYgRrRguUk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wqDkUOS3E4WZ0QWx3oCwBw&ved=0CEwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=C.%20Powell%20Morgan%20atlantic%20acceptance%20company&f=false
 
http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/irving_gould.htm

[psxphill]

They wanted CP/M on a machine so of course you had to use a Z80. I remember the chips they had to use had something to do with the tank at the MOS building was leaking and something about they didn't want to produce one of the chips?

The Z80 in the C-128 was designed in by accident, CP/M was never a design consideration. It was only because someone in marketing had promised 100% compatibility and the C-64's CP/M cartridge worked less in the C-128 than it did in the C-64. Personally I think they could have argued their way out of it as the CP/M cartridge was so rare. Even if it meant designing a new CP/M cartridge that could be exchanged. But Bil chose to put the Z-80 on the motherboard instead, maybe it was cheaper to do it that way? He might have been forced to remove it, except the compatibility hack for the Magic Voice cartridge also relied on it.
 
The MOS building was shut down by the EPA years later due to the leak, I don't remember anything happening around the time of the C128. AFAIK Commodore manufactured all the C-128 & 16bit Amiga chips that they had a license for. For AGA they had to outsource some of the chips because their fab lines were out of date.

[psxphill]

I always thought that they were scared of the popularity of CP/M and wanted a product in case there was competition and I believe the Commodore magazines made mention of it.
 
I think CP/M was more popular overseas.

Bil Herd is on record that he designed it in for the reason I gave. There was nobody at commodore that was working on strategy.
 
CP/M for the Z80 was basically dead way before the C-128 came out. An 8086 would have made more sense as a backup plan.
 

There was fraud. They were a Billion dollar company and they weren't paying their taxes and then the IRS got on them. That is why they registered in the Bahamas with a P.O. Box.

There was no fraud that would drive the cost of the stock down so that it could be bought. They kept having to borrow money to keep going.
 
On the subject of the IRS. 12 years after they were incorporate with the head office in the Bahamas, the IRS decided not to believe them.
 
http://articles.philly.com/1989-01-04/business/26121801_1_commodore-international-tax-bill-commodore-executive
 
In 1990 they started having their stockholder meetings in the Bahamas, which is where Irving Gould lived. So it's likely they stood by this statement.
 
A lot of companies still do stuff like this today and while Starbucks have been shamed into actually paying corporation tax in the UK, there wasn't anything legally that our government could do about it.

[psxphill]

The Z80's clock speed today is up to 50MHZ.

65c02 is available up to 200mhz.
 
http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
 

I wouldn't be so sure of that - in the US maybe, but in the UK CP/M was kept alive for a long time because of the Amstrad CPC 6128 and the very popular Amstrad PCW series. However CP/M was never really advertised as a key feature, it was just a capability the machines came with and that users could use.

I was writing software for an embedded system that ran CP/M up until the end of the 90's. But there are many historical operating systems that people write software for, it doesn't mean the operating system isn't dead. There doesn't appear to have been a large amount of CP/M software written for either Amstrad's, or if there is then I can't find it.
 

That is a recipe for disaster and it is failure on the part of leadership. You have consumers who have money and who can't travel to the CES show because they work, can't afford a plane ticket and a hotel but they can afford a computer who would buy the product but the computer products aren't made available to them. Tell me something. If Commodore came out with a Commodore 128 Slim without CPM and was half the price, do you think people wouldn't buy it if there weren't any orders at CES?

Commodore didn't sell products to the end users, they sold products to distributors and retailers. It wouldn't matter how many people might want to buy the computer, it was how many people wanted to sell the computer. Removing the Z80 and VDC wouldn't half the price. There was a cost reduced version produced, but it was so late to market that it wasn't launched. Everyone wanted an Amiga by then.
 

If they waited or if they came out with another revision, would you have bought it? Would other people have bought it? And what do you think would have happened to the popularity of Commodore if the 1541 was sped up? Exactly.

My parents bought mine in Christmas 1984. It was recommended to them by the owner of the TV shop that they bought it from, I doubt they can remember why he suggested it. I think I got a floppy drive around 1987/1988. If you wanted faster loading then you bought jiffydos or one of the parallel cable systems.
 
You can actually do a hack to use the CIA shift register as well, but you need a 1571 to make use of it. I was thinking of doing a fast serial hack for the 1541, because there is a workround for the VIA bug. However I've run out of free time to do it.