C= +4 4sale

[Amiduffer]

The local junk pile Urban Ore featured an old Commodore Plus/4 in original box with power supply for $20.

PMail me if you want to collect it for your computer museum. I'll only ask you to pay the $20 and shipping about $5.

The Old Computer site didn't have much good to say about it. Did anyone ever purchase such a beast?old computers C= +4

[B00tDisk]

Amiduffer wrote:
The local junk pile Urban Ore featured an old Commodore Plus/4 in original box with power supply for $20.

PMail me if you want to collect it for your computer museum. I'll only ask you to pay the $20 and shipping about $5.

The Old Computer site didn't have much good to say about it. Did anyone ever purchase such a beast?old computers C= +4

Ah yes, the +4.  Compatible with nothing, and an upgrade over...nothing!  (Unless you had a VIC-20).  Heh.  I'll give this one a miss even for nostalgia's sake.  (Although it has to be said - at least the +4 won't have a battery leak all over it's mobo!)

[nagaflas]

The funny thing about the Commodore Plus 4 is that it had more potential as an emulated machine than it did when it was being produced.

I wonder how many people lost their jobs at Commodore over the Plus 4...

[Amiduffer]

nagaflas wrote:
The funny thing about the Commodore Plus 4 is that it had more potential as an emulated machine than it did when it was being produced.

I wonder how many people lost their jobs at Commodore over the Plus 4...

Is the Plus/4 mentioned in the new Commodore book?

[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).

[Floid]

Correct me if I'm wrong (since I'm distant from my copy at the moment), but didn't Herd say he had a 'well, duh!' moment about compatibility while demoing something from the +4 family?  Of course, once the obvious hit, Engineering then did begin to bug management about it (leading to the 128, which got some weird looks for its chip count).

The impression I got was that the compatibility concept was late to bloom at Commodore not, as we might expect, from mismanagement, but rather from the outright lack of involvement from management or sales that left  Engineering to be a computer scientists' playground -- lots of fun, try not to lose an eye. ;-)  Of course, since management or sales could rarely articulate a need that made sense, they ended up taking whatever Engineering had to demo and then trying to cram it into a product-shaped hole.

[Or, in short, imagine if Linux's only route to the world was through Lindows.]

[ziggy53]

PM sent.

[Tomas]

Ah yes, the +4. Compatible with nothing, and an upgrade over...nothing! (Unless you had a VIC-20). Heh. I'll give this one a miss even for nostalgia's sake. (Although it has to be said - at least the +4 won't have a battery leak all over it's mobo!)

The really sad part is that this piece of {bleep} came out only a year before the Amiga.. Commodore did alot of big mistakes even back in the 80s :pissed:

I am sure this can be a nice collectors item though due to it being rare.

Same {bleep} with the c65.. It would be a failure even if it made it to the public, due to the fact that it was supposed to come out as late as 1991 and still being way behind the Amiga. I really wonder what they were thinking...

[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.

[jdiffend]

I have a Plus/4 I picked up cheap for collectable purposes and to be honest... it had a great keyboard.  LOL Too bad that's all it has going for it.

Actually, if I remember correctly it did have a couple of hardware improvements over the C64 but they were minor and totally countered by the lack of compatibility.

The biggest problem it had other than not running C64 software was that the built in software (it's major selling point) was barely usable.

The entire line C16 through Plus/4 and the unreleased 264/364 (I think) was handled very poorly.
The high end machines were already starting to drive new sales rather than the low end cheapies but they insisted on releasing the low end models and canceling the high end ones.

Commodore never learned even with the Amiga.  They always tried to make the next C64 (A600) but killed leading edge tech like multi-cpu, DSP, etc...  
If the miggy had continued to draw attention that way instead of as "a game machine" it might have survived.  Imagine a multi-cpu OS in the late 80s or early 90s.  It wouldn't have mattered that Motorola was behind Intel in MHz.    But this was about the Plus/4 wasn't it...

[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.

[Tomas]

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.

My opinion is that they should have pushed the Amiga as the next generation machine.

And what is the Acutiator project? never heard of it..

[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.

[odin]

Marco wrote:
What the hell? There never was a multi-cpu Amiga design,

Hmm, what about the Gemini project. Wasn't that about a multi CPU Amiga system?

[Amiduffer]

I went back to Urban Ore today and some lucky collector snagged the Plus/4, so anyone desperately wishing for it is out of luck. If I had room enough in my tiny little room, I would have grabbed it when it was there and held it. Sorry.

 :horse:

Although, if you want to rant about f'ed up Commodore management, you're welcome to continue. :lol: