Commodore pc

[glitch]

Ha!  The Icon - I remember that - the "bionic beaver" was the code name for model we had.  Ahhh good times, but our PET lab was much more fun.  We played Star Trek in ASCII on those.  I think we had about 10 PETs all connected to one pair of disk drives and a printer.  Each year we had a new teacher - most of us knew much more than they did about the setup.  One teacher I had later on was absolutely brilliant - she taught us FORTAN on an old donated DEC PDP/11 with terminals and a teletype machine (look it up young folk) and a paper card reader.  I credit her with sparking my interest in programming seriously and thusly my career!  You never forget the teachers like that.

[Digiman]

I don't know, even while the C64 was on sale Commodore had a lot of respect in the business world. The PET was so sought after that Jack increased the prices to maximise his profit.

I'm not really sure in America what went wrong, all you lot seemed to buy was a rubbish EGA PC instead of Amiga 1000s and well even worse Mac 128k or horror of horrors that child's toy the NES.

Atari I could understand getting hassle from corporate side for the name and its connotations but Commodore before the A500/2000 still had willing corporate customers.

However whatever you say there was only ever 2 nice looking PCs sold in the world in the 80s really. Most PCs had the styling of a breeze block or just rubbish strange looks (like those crappy Apricot PCs)

[glitch]

I know.  There's no comparison in my mind as to which was better.  I loved my A1000 - tried to convert as many as possible...  Sorry, what's a breeze block?

[haywirepc]

My grade school only had ibm pc jr's with cga - total ****.

High school had apple ii with the green monochrome screens, I know alot people are apple fans but by that time I had an amiga 500 and thought those were total **** too. My high school computer teacher let me bring the amiga 500 in, and even he was like wow when he said what the machine could do. I said now you know why I've been telling you all years that apples are ****.

Until soundblasters and vga became cheap on pc, I thought those were total **** too. I still thought they were kinda ****ty because of windows until linux improved enough to be usable as an everyday os.

I never liked the idea of commodore pcs, because amiga blew away a 286 or 386 even in my opinion. Its like royles royce suddenly making dodge darts or something to me... Just kinda dumb. Them making pcs was a total failure
and led to them bleeding cash badly, and probably contributed a great deal
to their death.

[Digiman]

I know.  There's no comparison in my mind as to which was better.  I loved my A1000 - tried to convert as many as possible...  Sorry, what's a breeze block?

Oh those big grey concrete blocks they make garages or offices out of lol it's a UK slang term for them.

Funny thing about the A1000, all they had to do was just call it the Commodore PET1000 and businesses probably would have bought it and they probably would have sold more. Instead of asking "what is an Amiga" it would be something like "So what is different between the old 8 bit and new 16 bit PET?" see job done.

IMO the Atari ST is basically a 16 bit PET (which is why the games are so...erm....how to be kind to the poor custom chip deprived Atari hehe) and had Atari actually sold the more expensive Mega ST's under a new brand name not Atari badges they also would have sold more. Musicians however are artistic people so I doubt many cared about the badge on the case after trying out Cubase/Steinberg etc.

[Digiman]

My grade school only had ibm pc jr's with cga - total ****.

High school had apple ii with the green monochrome screens, I know alot people are apple fans but by that time I had an amiga 500 and thought those were total **** too. My high school computer teacher let me bring the amiga 500 in, and even he was like wow when he said what the machine could do. I said now you know why I've been telling you all years that apples are ****.

Until soundblasters and vga became cheap on pc, I thought those were total **** too. I still thought they were kinda ****ty because of windows until linux improved enough to be usable as an everyday os.

I never liked the idea of commodore pcs, because amiga blew away a 286 or 386 even in my opinion. Its like royles royce suddenly making dodge darts or something to me... Just kinda dumb. Them making pcs was a total failure
and led to them bleeding cash badly, and probably contributed a great deal
to their death.

Thing is by 386 days the underwhelming update from 020 to 030 by Motorola was hurting Commodore as the Amiga chipset is no help when rendering graphic fonts or rendering 3D images etc. But yes same for most of us, in the late 80s I had an Amiga 1000 at home but at college we had a 286 PC with EGA. Used to tell my Computer Science teacher that he was an idiot if he thought his £3000 PC was better than my £400 A1000 I had at home (OK add £200 for Sony SCART monitor/TV) but you know how it is, some people are just set in their ways. Even Apple couldn't break the cycle because if it wasn't for iPod Apple would have filed for bankruptcy last century the way their sales were going.

The PC was double the height, had a horribly industrial feeling keyboard, a mouse from MS (sh1t) and made as much noise as a fan on a V8 engine *bletch* and when I got home I'd switch on my 1000 which beeped in that classy manner and had a slight hum from the PSU fan and removed the excellent keyboard from under the slim elegantly designed case. HTH did it lose to such crap!

[Digiman]

Oh yeah and there were these 8088 4mhz/5mhz babies with SID chips Commodore created in 1983, so make that 3 good looking PCs

OK OK I know it's not a PC as such but I bet you could hack PC-DOS to run on its 5mhz 8088 with a suitable BIOS emulator instead of the CSG ROMs inside it. Still the SK series of Super PETs are some of the most beautiful computers humans ever made. Lovely

[Lurch]

Dell was on fire during the 90's. Gateway started to flounder later on in the 00's. Use to work for them until I was made redundant, they had some cool stuff under development that we had a sneak look at, at the time.

Had a Commodore 486-sx25 back in the day was a couple of $1000 and later on bought a Sound Blaster card for $500, top of the line stuff. NZD of course.

Was a huge leap up from my A500, although have more of a bond with the A500 and missed that more when I sold it.

[Lurch]

This was my baby

http://www.richardlagendijk.nl/cip/computer/item/pc486sx25/en

Was installed by a guy from David Reid at the time, and I could remember thinking to myself I wanted and could do his job a lot better.

Ran a BBS on it for years, if I could rewind time I would.

LOL compare that to my existing machine http://www.sony.co.nz/product/sve17115fg .... man we've come a long way :-)

[Digiman]

Looks like a 4000 as I suspected, but they also did the same case with the 386 too. Here is the PC-1

http://www.richardlagendijk.nl/foto/cip/computer_pc1_01.jpg

Well I had a 17" Sony laptop in silver a bit like that, was a 1.7ghz Centrino with 128mb ATI X600 graphics (so not a toy laptop like shared memory graphics today) and as an ex laptop dealer I can honestly say they had the nicest screens of any laptop ever, it was like a 17" plasma screen so bright and glossy, great for watching HD stuff on.

I looked on that site but could not see the Commodore Pentium 75mhz PCs that Escom were selling in the shop local to me at the time.

[danwood]

Yes they must have been quite popular in uk. Were there not an Amiga Magazine that keep up until around 2000?

2002 I believe!  AmigaActive was the last Amiga mag available on the news-stands.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Yes, Commodore had a great presence in Canada.  Their head office building on Pharmacy Ave. is still in existence - logo and all.  Don't forget their relationship with the University of Waterloo - co-designing and building the SuperPET 9000 - awesome dual processor goodness!

Ha!  Any pics of their head office floating around the net anywhere?

[RobertB]

Looks like a 4000...

The PC-1's case is smaller than the A4000's case.

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug

[shaf]

Here's are really interesting comment about the Commodore PC used by the Toronto School Board. As Pc Clones were getting cheaper The TSB requested that their Service Vendor (I won't give the name but for a while I worked for then) replace all the PCB's in CBM PC10-III systems so it would appear that they wre still CBM Systems.

After we tried to retrofit one we determined that it was not cost effective.

[pwermonger]

I don't know, even while the C64 was on sale Commodore had a lot of respect in the business world. The PET was so sought after that Jack increased the prices to maximise his profit.
 
I'm not really sure in America what went wrong, all you lot seemed to buy was a rubbish EGA PC instead of Amiga 1000s and well even worse Mac 128k or horror of horrors that child's toy the NES.
 
Atari I could understand getting hassle from corporate side for the name and its connotations but Commodore before the A500/2000 still had willing corporate customers.

Commodore had stopped pushing PETs for business around the time of the VIC-20 due to the idea they had that they could not supply support on the level that Fortune 500 companies required which they would get from companies like IBM who were used to dealing with those level of companies. Thats 'what went wrong' in America.
 
The idea was they would make the money in the consumer market to build the support structure required to deal with companies at that level then go back into the Business market but the people laying those plans left Commodore well before the Amiga, when they had a computer that could have done very well in Business again.
 
That the PET sold so well in America gave Commodore the idea that they had priced it too low and caused them to release it at a higher price in Europe.
 
Its true the Amiga was a lot better oriented to compete in business than the Atari especially once the 2000 came out. But Commodore lost the business name having so long not really pushed a 'business' computer and never really made the case to businesses as to what an Amiga could do for them and their productivity. Remember, no one knew what Multitasking could do back then since neither the PC most people had nor Mac could do it.

[smerf]

@lassie,

Little do you know it, but Commodore at that time was taking money made from the Amiga and investing it into first the PC-10, then the PC-20, I quit working for Commodore at that time because I couldn't get any of the best sellers in like the Amiga 500, and had to order the Amiga 2000 which took from 3 to 6 months to get in. If I did get lucky and one time I did, they sent me in 3 spanking new Amiga 3000, which lasted in the store about one half day, now with the Amiga's selling that good, what do you think Commodore wanted me to push for sales, why of course the PC-10 & 20's which were real businees machines (sarcastically said) but I know one hard hat wearing individual at Amiga Org who would probably of bought one, no come to think of it he probably would of bought the Apple II that was out at that time, or knowing he isn't cheap the mighty first Mac, with the great black and white screen, with the smiley face. I remember the Mac salesman saying of course the Amiga looks impressive, it has color, sound, great graphics but it is a game machine, look at the Mac this baby is strictly professional, (now how could he say that, when you first turn it on it comes up with this sick looking smiley face) and the black and white screen is for doing business work, color just wouldn't look right doing professional work like spread sheets, data bases and word processing, would write a letter with red ink on a black sheet of paper?

See if you want to be professional buy a Mac, if you want to play silly old games and listen to looney tunes, get an Amiga.

Funny thing is though, I was salesman of the year three years running when the Amiga first came out, then it was harder to get Amiga's in from Commodore, and they expected me to sell PC 10 and 20's (boring). So just think Commodore invested all the profits into PC machines, putting another nail in the coffin of the Amiga.

smerf

sad but true.