>What's quite interesting about it though is that two years in to the era of the general-purpose IBM PC, it was a machine that still booted in to BASIC - a lang

>What's quite interesting about it though is that two years in to the era of the general-purpose IBM PC, it was a machine that still booted in to BASIC - a language still suitable for beginners, but which was looking a bit odd for a business machine. Commodore was hardly alone, of course, in not realizing how the world had changed in August 1981. Even Jerry Pournelle in BYTE kept discussing "Zeke" and other CP/M machines until about 1984. Those that realized the paradigm shift early—Compaq, Lotus, PC Magazine and PC World, and of course Microsoft—won big. Those that didn't—pretty much every single CP/M vendor, for example—either got run over or, worse, pivoted too late and got run over. Note how the first three pages in the January 1982 BYTE <https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-01/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-01/mode/2up?v...> (containing the magazine's first full review of the IBM PC) are an ad for Cromemco. ("Who?" you ask. Exactly.) Apple survived because Apple fanatics were a thing 40 years ago as much as they are today. Tandy barely survived by stumbling backwards into the single best-selling PC compatible of the decade. Commodore survived by continuing its move downmarket that the VIC-20 had begun.