I was just a little kid then, and the C64 was a neat micro, but today I can see some questionable things about their comparison matrix in the ad.
Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III business computer). Buyers who knew the real set of alternatives, at and below the C64's price point, might question why they need 64KB RAM, when the popular lower-priced competitors not shown in the table also did fine games and Basic programming (the main uses of home computers) while costing less money.
Then there's structuring "TV Output" as a feature of the C64, which they say the TRS-80 Model III doesn't have. But that's because the TRS-80 has an integrated display monitor, while the C64 includes no display in that price comparison.
I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. But that IBM PC defined industry standard peripheral interfaces for years.
The competitors also had obvious strengths not shown. Want your word processor to be in crisp 80-column text? A real spreadsheet program? Math coprocessor? Better graphics? Option to upgrade to a hard disk drive?
There was a specific reason with the TI: Tramiel was still smarting over how they screwed him with calculator chips. Meanwhile, their home computer unit was suffering millions of dollars in losses due to greedy mismanagement and the VIC-20 was driving the 99/4A into the ground as a practical loss leader. As far as Tramiel was concerned, even acknowledging the 99/4A's existence was too good for them.
Yep, and in 1986 I had just interned at a NASA lab where they were investigating multiprocessors, which at the time was a wild and crazy idea. I had the epiphany that I could bit-bang a driver between a C64 and one or more 1541s and make my own little multiprocessor, so I did. I made it all the way to the International Science Fair and ended up getting a college scholarship. I've written a lot of code but I'm probably the proudest of that couple of hundred lines of 6502 assembly I wrote when I was 17.
The disk drive uses a serial protocol and it actually has 8k of RAM and a 6502 CPU.
There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers.
Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.
Paperclip (word processor) had an 80 column preview mode, which showed your text in hi-res 80 columns. It seemed like magic at the time and made ten year old me feel like I was performing serious business.
The IBM PC wasn't really a family computer like the C64 was. It was a business machine that could be fun for the family when dad or mom were done with work.
It's a fair cop against the II+ but there are other things in the comparison which are mildly hinky. I find their characterization of POKEY a little unfair, even though I think SID is superior, and the CP/M option on the C64 was nearly useless because the 1541 didn't read MFM formats. (Much more useful on the C128, but you needed a 1571 disk drive, and by 1985 CP/M was on its way out.) The keyboard criteria are also somewhat of an Apples-to-Commodores comparison, so to speak. Still, it's hard-hitting ad copy and it was Tramiel's Commodore -- he was determined to win, by golly.
But there was the Apple 80 column card option with full ascii. Add USCD Pascal and suddenly it morphed from plaything to a programming-for-computer-science trainer.
I bought my C64 very late - around 1991/1992. It was in Poland where I bought a used one from my friend. Back then, Eastern Europe was a decade behind the Western side of Europe. Two years later, I purchased a used disk drive. So, for two years, I could only run cartridges like Boulder Dash (I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games"). But from that boredom, I started programming in BASIC, always dreaming about creating the perfect text based game ;p
>(I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games")
Odd; the Commodore Datasette is about as reliable as a microcomputer tape storage system can be, far more so than the tin cans-on-a-string designs of Sinclair and TRS-80. Did you attempt to use a regular cassette recorder with a third-party adapter?
I think there were alignment programs for the Datasette. It played a constant tone or signal that would show whether the head was properly aligned. I think it was on on cartridge that I didn't have. And actually as a young kid I didn't know about this alignment thing. Learned years later after switching to Amiga 500.
Similar to me, but years earlier in the US. The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive. My friends who had one just played games. I had to learn to program instead.
> The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive.
Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).
> My friends who had one just played games.
Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!
It's interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, combined with the features that they chose to highlight.
The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show information.
High end workstations of the era gave you decent resolution bitmapped displays long before they focused on colour.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a household that had at various times TRS-80, a PET, CBM8032, VIC-20 and a C64 (plus others, the Casio fx9000P, was nice but I never had the tools to go beyond BASIC) . If you wanted a computer that could do a bit of everything the C64 was a good choice, If you wanted games, it was an excellent choice, but If you wanted to work, characters on screen was what you wanted.
We had both an Apple II+ and a Commodore 64 at school when I was about 10 and I just couldn't get into the C64- the slow disk drive (IIRC it's the bus that's the bottleneck) meant minutes of waiting for programs to start. While the Apple II+ would usually load things very quickly. In many ways the Apple was inferior (see the comparison chart in the linked article) but everything about it just felt "right" to me.
I had a similar experience when I got to college and my roommate and I compared our computers- I had a PC and he had an Amiga, and when he explained what it could do it was clearly superior, but it just didn't "feel right" to me.
I had a university friend with an Amiga and another with a similar setup with the Commodore. They had stacks of floppy disks with one game more beautiful than the other. Both spend most of their time gaming and one ended up 8 and the other 9 years before finishing their masters.
I just had a Tandon 286 PC with a 287 coprocessor (yes, probably twice the price compared to an Amiga). But it did run Matlab pretty well, as well as WordPerfect - all I needed for my study.
Can someone explain the English of this slogan? It makes no sense to me. The thing being advertised is "what nobody else can give you". If I consider that to be "it", then the slogan becomes:
Buy it for twice the price.
So it should have cost $298 then?
Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
I had the same reaction, and had to read it three or four times to make sense of it. (Native speaker, with a degree in English.) I think it’s a very hard-to-follow sentence construction.
Funny how the ad compares the C64 only with machines that actually cost more than twice back in '82, and conveniently neglects to compare it with the ZX Spectrum, a clearly better machine, which was released earlier and cost less than a third of the C64.
American only buys things with American flags on (usually made in China).
A non American operation breaking into the American market is far harder than the other way round, and relays on a lot of experience with how to market to Americans.
Strange to realize that that's cost of a modern top-end workstation - a reminder that even after correcting for inflation, the absolute cost of technology has decreased significantly.
You can buy a pretty good computer for US$2000, but a "top end" workstation today would be something like a maxed out Mac Studio or a Windows PC with a RTX 6000 in it, in which case you're paying more like US$10,000.
Readit News
Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III business computer). Buyers who knew the real set of alternatives, at and below the C64's price point, might question why they need 64KB RAM, when the popular lower-priced competitors not shown in the table also did fine games and Basic programming (the main uses of home computers) while costing less money.
Then there's structuring "TV Output" as a feature of the C64, which they say the TRS-80 Model III doesn't have. But that's because the TRS-80 has an integrated display monitor, while the C64 includes no display in that price comparison.
I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. But that IBM PC defined industry standard peripheral interfaces for years.
The competitors also had obvious strengths not shown. Want your word processor to be in crisp 80-column text? A real spreadsheet program? Math coprocessor? Better graphics? Option to upgrade to a hard disk drive?
Payback, as they say, is a b*tch.
They are computers…for example the C64’s floppy drive had its own CPU. This was also typical for printers…in fact it still is.
There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers.
Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.
Bob Russell once observed the 1541 was the best computer Commodore ever made.
The Atari sure had some nice games, though!
The full IBM PC wasn't really a competitor; it was 3x the price and very few families were willing to shell out that kind of money at that point.
That lead me to this:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...
Odd; the Commodore Datasette is about as reliable as a microcomputer tape storage system can be, far more so than the tin cans-on-a-string designs of Sinclair and TRS-80. Did you attempt to use a regular cassette recorder with a third-party adapter?
My parents even sent it in for repair but it came back as "it's not broken".
Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).
> My friends who had one just played games.
Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!
The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show information.
High end workstations of the era gave you decent resolution bitmapped displays long before they focused on colour.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a household that had at various times TRS-80, a PET, CBM8032, VIC-20 and a C64 (plus others, the Casio fx9000P, was nice but I never had the tools to go beyond BASIC) . If you wanted a computer that could do a bit of everything the C64 was a good choice, If you wanted games, it was an excellent choice, but If you wanted to work, characters on screen was what you wanted.
I had a similar experience when I got to college and my roommate and I compared our computers- I had a PC and he had an Amiga, and when he explained what it could do it was clearly superior, but it just didn't "feel right" to me.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)
I just had a Tandon 286 PC with a 287 coprocessor (yes, probably twice the price compared to an Amiga). But it did run Matlab pretty well, as well as WordPerfect - all I needed for my study.
Buy it for twice the price.
So it should have cost $298 then?
Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you) (for twice the price)
But it should be read:
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you for twice the price)
Rephrased:
No one else makes a machine that can do what ours does, even if they charge twice as much!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068
[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-12/page/n281
A non American operation breaking into the American market is far harder than the other way round, and relays on a lot of experience with how to market to Americans.
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[0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=1982...
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