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> machine wise, the C64 was more powerful by virtue of flexibility. What do you mean? Are you referring to the demo scene being able to push the internal hardw

> machine wise, the C64 was more powerful by virtue of flexibility. What do you mean? Are you referring to the demo scene being able to push the internal hardware as far as they've been able to? > The Mac128 was priced way outside a home users budget, had an almost unusable Tiny amount of memory Probably better to consider a comparison with the Apple model I was alluding to in my earlier post. The Apple //c was much cheaper than a Mac, had 80 column text, 128K RAM, and could run Appleworks. It didn't do games nearly as well as a C64, but you'd have been hard pressed to find as good a machine from Commodore for small office tasks. (Maybe the C128... it was cheaper and had a numeric keypad, but I don't think the software was as strong there as it was for Apple.) > Apple failed and almost went bankrupt too. That 'almost' is rather important, don't you think?

cromwellian 8y ago
> What do you mean? Are you referring to the demo scene being able to push the internal hardware as far as they've been able to? Yes, the C64 VIC and SID were just flexible enough, to enable them to do a large number of graphical and sound effects which they were never intended to do, like arbitrary X/Y positioning of the screen, line-crunching/stretching and sprite-crunching/stretching. Because the hardware was so exploitable in this way, it encouraged a never ending competition of creativity and innovation in its use that hasn't even subsided until this day. I mean, just in 2018, 44Khz digital audio was demonstrated on the C64: https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-for.html https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-mus... Now, search for Apple II's demo scene, and it never materialized except on the IIgs for obvious reasons, and even there, it's paultry. >Probably better to consider a comparison with the Apple model I was alluding to in my earlier post. The Apple //c was much cheaper than a Mac, had 80 column text, 128K RAM, and could run Appleworks. It didn't do games nearly as well as a C64, but you'd have been hard pressed to find as good a machine from Commodore for small office tasks. (Maybe the C128... it was cheaper and had a numeric keypad, but I don't think the software was as strong there as it was for Apple.) Most offices used PCs. Home users didn't have much need for much office tasks, but those that did, had plenty of apps available for the C64. I used to write all of my school reports using GeoWrite on the C64, no problem. If you really needed 80 columns for the C64, there were hacks to get it, including software only ones, and plugin cartridges, and as you mentioned, the C128, which had 100% backwards compatibility with the C64, plus the hi-res VDC. It was notoriously hard to program for, but here's a slick demo for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8bEgX6n-QM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8bEgX6n-QM Here's GeoWrite 128 in hi-res 80-column mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNosi2C9Ic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNosi2C9Ic When you say cheaper, you neglect to say HOW MUCH cheaper. The Apple IIc was $1300.The C64 was priced at $600, and the C128 was actually priced at $300. It sold 5.7 million machines (C128), more than all Apple models combined. The Amiga 1000 sold for $1300 at launch, compared to the Mac which sold for $2500. The Commodore computers sold for less than half the price, had much better graphical and sound capabilities (in the Amiga's case, it's severely understating the difference, the Mac didn't catch up for years and at a huge cost differential because Commodore, like the new post iPhone Apple, developed highly efficient, integrated, chipsets). Apple got squeezed in the home market by Commodore, Atari, and Sinclair, and squeezed in the business market by IBM, their lifeline was finding a niche in education. The hagiography of fans rewrites Apple's history, because they were first and because of the reality distortion field, but really, their computers were pretty shitty. The original Mac128K was inferior to the Apple IIgs in many ways, and it was hellishly expensive. Seriously, go grab a Mac 128k, and grab an Amiga 1000, and tell me which computer you're more productive on. You could use an original Amiga 1000 today and still have a pleasant experience, whereas the original Mac is agonizing to use. On the business side, up until 1984, Commodore made more money than Apple. Apple revenues took off with the introduction of the Mac, but this follows the usual Apple script of charging a ton of money for a less capable computer. Up until Windows 95, when the trend was reversed.
- mschaef 8y ago
  (You should keep in mind that I'm writing this in a spirit of friendly disagreement/discussion more than anything else... it's fun to think about these machines from my childhood... and I had formative experiences with both Apples and Commodores. :-) ) I think at least part of our disagreement is a disagreement on personal priorities. Just to illustrate: > Seriously, go grab a Mac 128k, and grab an Amiga 1000, and tell me which computer you're more productive on. You could use an original Amiga 1000 today and still have a pleasant experience, whereas the original Mac is agonizing to use. Having used both machines, there's almost no chance I'd pick the Amiga, unless I wanted to play a game. The clearer display alone is a huge advantage. (In fact, I remember regretting the negative experience of a video producing high school friend of mine who I'd convinced to buy an Amiga 500. He had a much better experience a year or two later when he switched over to a PC.) > Because the hardware was so exploitable in this way, it encouraged a never ending competition of creativity and innovation in its use that hasn't even subsided until this day. I mean, just in 2018, 44Khz digital audio was demonstrated on the C64 Very impressive and a testament to the skill of the developers involved... but I'm not sure how useful it is to ask people to wait 35 years for their hardware's capabilities to be fully realized. Whatever my current machine will have been convinced to do in 35 years time is not likely to matter to me all that much, and certainly means nothing now. So, while the flexibility of the hardware is nice and all, the hidden capabilities are only useful to the extent developers are forced by resource constraints to find them. The Atari 2600 had the same sort of thing... people were making it do amazing things into the 80's because they had to do so to gain access to a market, not because they found it a desirable property of the hardware to be forced into it. (Note that recent demo coders that use these platforms as ways to challenge themselves are in a different category altogether.) > Most offices used PCs. Until the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 1983, it was very common for companies to buy Apple ][s for the express purpose of running VisiCalc. I'm not sure Commodore ever seriously played in that space with any of their machines, including the Pet. > When you say cheaper, you neglect to say HOW MUCH cheaper. The Apple IIc was $1300.The C64 was priced at $600, and the C128 was actually priced at $300. You need to add a some things to those machines to be feature complete with a //c... at the very least a floppy disk drive. (And then you need to accept a disk with 3-4% the transfer rate of the Apple product.... I spent a bunch of time in my youth waiting for C64 software to load off disk.) > more than all Apple models combined. The Amiga 1000 sold for $1300 at launch, compared to the Mac which sold for $2500. So that's the Amiga 1000, which would need a 256K memory expansion, an external monitor, and some work to connect it all up, to be comparable to the Mac. (Admittedly, the Amiga has color, but the Mac had 384 line display without interlacing and was more portable.) > The original Mac128K was inferior to the Apple IIgs in many ways, and it was hellishly expensive. The IIgs was introduced almost three years after the Mac 128K... why should it be surprising that it has some better capabilities than the earlier machine? (Probably more surprising is the fact that Apple kept the IIgs CPU as low as 2.8MHz.) > the usual Apple script of charging a ton of money for a less capable computer. This is a weird argument to make, because it essentially implies Apple has good enough marketing to convince people over 40 years to make non-economic choices. It seems more likely to me that Apple has, over the years, better been than most at assembling a set of capabilities that people find valuable enough to pay for.

cromwellian 8y ago

> What do you mean? Are you referring to the demo scene being able to push the internal hardware as far as they've been able to? Yes, the C64 VIC and SID were just flexible enough, to enable them to do a large number of graphical and sound effects which they were never intended to do, like arbitrary X/Y positioning of the screen, line-crunching/stretching and sprite-crunching/stretching. Because the hardware was so exploitable in this way, it encouraged a never ending competition of creativity and innovation in its use that hasn't even subsided until this day. I mean, just in 2018, 44Khz digital audio was demonstrated on the C64: https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-for.html https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-mus... Now, search for Apple II's demo scene, and it never materialized except on the IIgs for obvious reasons, and even there, it's paultry. >Probably better to consider a comparison with the Apple model I was alluding to in my earlier post. The Apple //c was much cheaper than a Mac, had 80 column text, 128K RAM, and could run Appleworks. It didn't do games nearly as well as a C64, but you'd have been hard pressed to find as good a machine from Commodore for small office tasks. (Maybe the C128... it was cheaper and had a numeric keypad, but I don't think the software was as strong there as it was for Apple.) Most offices used PCs. Home users didn't have much need for much office tasks, but those that did, had plenty of apps available for the C64. I used to write all of my school reports using GeoWrite on the C64, no problem. If you really needed 80 columns for the C64, there were hacks to get it, including software only ones, and plugin cartridges, and as you mentioned, the C128, which had 100% backwards compatibility with the C64, plus the hi-res VDC. It was notoriously hard to program for, but here's a slick demo for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8bEgX6n-QM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8bEgX6n-QM Here's GeoWrite 128 in hi-res 80-column mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNosi2C9Ic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNosi2C9Ic When you say cheaper, you neglect to say HOW MUCH cheaper. The Apple IIc was $1300.The C64 was priced at $600, and the C128 was actually priced at $300. It sold 5.7 million machines (C128), more than all Apple models combined. The Amiga 1000 sold for $1300 at launch, compared to the Mac which sold for $2500. The Commodore computers sold for less than half the price, had much better graphical and sound capabilities (in the Amiga's case, it's severely understating the difference, the Mac didn't catch up for years and at a huge cost differential because Commodore, like the new post iPhone Apple, developed highly efficient, integrated, chipsets). Apple got squeezed in the home market by Commodore, Atari, and Sinclair, and squeezed in the business market by IBM, their lifeline was finding a niche in education. The hagiography of fans rewrites Apple's history, because they were first and because of the reality distortion field, but really, their computers were pretty shitty. The original Mac128K was inferior to the Apple IIgs in many ways, and it was hellishly expensive. Seriously, go grab a Mac 128k, and grab an Amiga 1000, and tell me which computer you're more productive on. You could use an original Amiga 1000 today and still have a pleasant experience, whereas the original Mac is agonizing to use. On the business side, up until 1984, Commodore made more money than Apple. Apple revenues took off with the introduction of the Mac, but this follows the usual Apple script of charging a ton of money for a less capable computer. Up until Windows 95, when the trend was reversed.

mschaef 8y ago
(You should keep in mind that I'm writing this in a spirit of friendly disagreement/discussion more than anything else... it's fun to think about these machines from my childhood... and I had formative experiences with both Apples and Commodores. :-) ) I think at least part of our disagreement is a disagreement on personal priorities. Just to illustrate: > Seriously, go grab a Mac 128k, and grab an Amiga 1000, and tell me which computer you're more productive on. You could use an original Amiga 1000 today and still have a pleasant experience, whereas the original Mac is agonizing to use. Having used both machines, there's almost no chance I'd pick the Amiga, unless I wanted to play a game. The clearer display alone is a huge advantage. (In fact, I remember regretting the negative experience of a video producing high school friend of mine who I'd convinced to buy an Amiga 500. He had a much better experience a year or two later when he switched over to a PC.) > Because the hardware was so exploitable in this way, it encouraged a never ending competition of creativity and innovation in its use that hasn't even subsided until this day. I mean, just in 2018, 44Khz digital audio was demonstrated on the C64 Very impressive and a testament to the skill of the developers involved... but I'm not sure how useful it is to ask people to wait 35 years for their hardware's capabilities to be fully realized. Whatever my current machine will have been convinced to do in 35 years time is not likely to matter to me all that much, and certainly means nothing now. So, while the flexibility of the hardware is nice and all, the hidden capabilities are only useful to the extent developers are forced by resource constraints to find them. The Atari 2600 had the same sort of thing... people were making it do amazing things into the 80's because they had to do so to gain access to a market, not because they found it a desirable property of the hardware to be forced into it. (Note that recent demo coders that use these platforms as ways to challenge themselves are in a different category altogether.) > Most offices used PCs. Until the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 1983, it was very common for companies to buy Apple ][s for the express purpose of running VisiCalc. I'm not sure Commodore ever seriously played in that space with any of their machines, including the Pet. > When you say cheaper, you neglect to say HOW MUCH cheaper. The Apple IIc was $1300.The C64 was priced at $600, and the C128 was actually priced at $300. You need to add a some things to those machines to be feature complete with a //c... at the very least a floppy disk drive. (And then you need to accept a disk with 3-4% the transfer rate of the Apple product.... I spent a bunch of time in my youth waiting for C64 software to load off disk.) > more than all Apple models combined. The Amiga 1000 sold for $1300 at launch, compared to the Mac which sold for $2500. So that's the Amiga 1000, which would need a 256K memory expansion, an external monitor, and some work to connect it all up, to be comparable to the Mac. (Admittedly, the Amiga has color, but the Mac had 384 line display without interlacing and was more portable.) > The original Mac128K was inferior to the Apple IIgs in many ways, and it was hellishly expensive. The IIgs was introduced almost three years after the Mac 128K... why should it be surprising that it has some better capabilities than the earlier machine? (Probably more surprising is the fact that Apple kept the IIgs CPU as low as 2.8MHz.) > the usual Apple script of charging a ton of money for a less capable computer. This is a weird argument to make, because it essentially implies Apple has good enough marketing to convince people over 40 years to make non-economic choices. It seems more likely to me that Apple has, over the years, better been than most at assembling a set of capabilities that people find valuable enough to pay for.