Well. at that time it was quite different on many ways.
Besides having money to market and big organisations on many
countries they had something I really miss.. Commodore Developer
Support.
Commodore had bunch of people taking care of developers and (with a
decent yearly fee) actullay deliver a lots of useful info. I was there
(among so many others) being priviledged to see early releases of OS
(at that time, they were delivered on disks, cause modem DL was not
option). There were private UUCP based mail system for direct dev
talk. Thick files of printed material etc..
Of course things would be different these days.. No need to long
distance modem connections, nor sending paper documents anymore. But
what was good at that time was people runnign it.. Those people at
CATS and other support organizations I miss the most. They did helluva
good work to make this important info available to Developers.
