It seems like every time I read something about the history of Commodore I learn about some oddball prototype that never went to market but existed in a functio

It seems like every time I read something about the history of Commodore I learn about some oddball prototype that never went to market but existed in a functional form within Commodore. I'm a lifelong Commodore fan (got a 64 when I was about 8, and was a C= user until after the bitter end; I finally gave up on my Amiga a year after the company folded...I currently own a functional C64), and still had no idea about this one. This time it's the VIC-40. I've never even heard of it, but apparently, it was a 40 column version of the VIC-20 with 16k of RAM. The C64 killed it, even though it was announced as coming soon by Commodore. Given how small Commodore was, relatively speaking (the same handful of engineers seemed to build everything), it's surprising that there were so many dead end projects. At least the VIC-40 was canned before it went to market; that would have been a colossal waste of resources. In hindsight, it seems like the curse of Commodore was just trying to do too many things with the limited resources they had and heading down too many dead end alleys. Often it took the form of trying to capitalize on the success of their low-end lines toward the end of their useful life, rather than putting all their resources into the next generation. e.g. the C64 turned into the C64GS after better gaming systems already existed and the Amiga was five years old, the Amiga 500 effectively got a re-release as the Amiga 600 at a time when the 500 was ridiculously under-powered. Likewise CDTV crammed an Amiga 500 into a VCR box and removed all of its computer-y bits, making it a shitty computer, a mediocre game machine, and a novel but ultimately pointless pre-cursor to DVRs (it could play shitty video from CDROM, but couldn't record or otherwise do much that any ordinary desktop computer could do better at the time). OK, rant over. When I was a kid, I used to think that "kernal" was an accidental misspelling that stuck; that seems so unlikely to me, today. It seems like it's more of an intentional in-joke. It's interesting to think that the best-selling computer in history was made by a team small enough, and a company casual enough, to let something like that slip through to production.