9 ms·

For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

250 points by indigodaddy 1y ago

pryelluw 1y ago
That is some hard hitting copy. I wonder how it performed …
- unsnap_biceps 1y ago
  It was life changing at the time. They sold something like 15 million units. Everyone was running a commodore in my neck of the woods.
  - nickjj 1y ago
    It's interesting because when I read "For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price" all my brain does is parse that sentence as they are charging double what they should because there's no competition. It's not until I scroll down to the pricing table to see what they really mean is their machine is half the price while having more features than the rest.
- usefulcat 1y ago
  It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school. Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive word processor. But yeah, mostly I played games on it. It was a great gaming machine for its time.
  - pryelluw 1y ago
    I had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)
    - antihipocrat 1y ago
      I interpreted the copy initially as justifying the product being twice the price of the competition. My eyes are used to much more concise copy nowadays though so maybe it landed properly back then? Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.
      - thedailymail 1y ago
        I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)
        antihipocrat 1y ago
        Yeah I realised once I read the comparison chart in the ad. It's also possible that the ambiguity was intentional.. Ad copy is an art and it did compel me to read all of it to unpack the meaning. Though thinking this through I would assume that everyone interested in computers at the time would know what the prices of other products were so the $595 would immediately be understood as very cheap in comparison
  - heironimus 1y ago
    You could touch type on that horrible keyboard? I learned to type on typewriters at school, but never could very well on my C64 with its elevated, mushy keyboard.
    - usefulcat 1y ago
      I too learned on a typewriter (IBM Selectric, if memory serves). Yes, the C64 keyboard was pretty crap, but still better than not being able to rearrange text.
  - d332 1y ago
    How would you print back then? Did you also own a printer?
    - ako 1y ago
      Epson fx-80
    - usefulcat 1y ago
      Yes, a dot matrix printer.
hobbitstan 1y ago
I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling. This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in the gaps. Tech these days has long lost it's magic. The 'AI' boom tried to recreate the buzz with nonsensical claims that it has failed to deliver. It's all smoke and mirrors these days. I think the last time I was truly wowed was when Shazam appeared. That was 23 years ago.
- shever73 1y ago
  I was wowed when I first got home Internet in 1995 because it was so much more than the BBSs I’d been using up to that point, but nothing has recreated the sense of wonder I had on 8-bit machines in the 80s. Even when I bought a secondhand PC in the late 80s, going through the hand-labelled disks was like a treasure hunt. That’s how I first discovered Hack/Nethack, played Leygref’s Castle and started learning Borland Turbo Pascal.
  - b112 1y ago
    If you get ice crean for dessert nightly, it's not exciting or even a joy. It needs to be rare, or new, to be a treat. I think now, there's always a computer near me. How can it still be special? Even the change in sound and graphics was astonishing, now it's minor tweaks.
- unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
  I still remember my first Internet search-- Phineas Gage-- and bewilderment at where this information came from. The recursive beauty is the story itself has been transformed by the Internet, and has been filled in very differently than was reported back in the mid 90s.[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
- macintux 1y ago
  I remember chatting online (MUD) with a friend in Sweden in 1990. I sent her an email, and she confirmed it arrived moments later, and my mind was blown. For some reason I felt “mail” surely couldn’t arrive that fast, even though we were chatting interactively in real time.
unsnap_biceps 1y ago
We were a commodore family growing up. I got started on a Vic-20 and went through a good chuck of their offerings until doom changed the world.
- classichasclass 1y ago
  After the Tomy Tutor, we started with a C64 and then later a C128. Both were in regular use pretty much through high school.
- smilespray 1y ago
  I went from a VIC 20 to an Amiga 500. Quite the leap.
bluemoola 1y ago
Interesting that the M4 Mac Mini is the same price
- djaychela 1y ago
  And that's without taking interest rates into account -I think that's about $2500 in today's money.
  - frutiger 1y ago
    > without taking interest rates into account I’m sure you know — but you mean inflation.
- shpx 1y ago
  Comparing prices across time without even thinking about inflation is basically just numerology
- haunter 1y ago
  The iMac is $1299 since its launch in 1999 https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iMac-price-history https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iMac-price-history
- layer8 1y ago
  It doesn’t have a keyboard, though.
colinbartlett 1y ago
Interesting to me that the Apple II+ was the only one in the comparison matrix that supported only upper case letters. That lead me to this: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple-ii-didnt-support-lowercase-letters https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...
- classichasclass 1y ago
  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.
  - vardump 1y ago
    Wasn’t POKEY out of tune due to limited frequency register? Making it hard to produce music that sounds good.
- _wire_ 1y ago
  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.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  The Apple is almost five years older than the C64, an eternity in that era.
neuroelectron 1y ago
I always wondered what it would be like if Commodore had serious co processors, but the base Commodore is really too slow for anything like that. Could you imagine a Voodoo 2? I think the SNES was only about 10mhz as well and used the FX math co-processor for 3d.
- wmf 1y ago
  IMO in those days money would have been better spend on a faster CPU than coprocessors. That's assuming you're using the computer as a computer not as a game console.
  - neuroelectron 1y ago
    Yes but think of the Commodore of the trusted, known and completely grokable system that orchestrates the co-processors. Then you can run LLMs or whatever data-intensive task you like. Still, all that data has to go through the CPU bus.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    Even then, the Commodore Plus/4 could do some pretty sophisticated gaming, even without the dedicated sprites of the VIC-II -- simply because the CPU was about twice as fast as the C64's. An example: https://psytronik.itch.io/pets-rescue https://psytronik.itch.io/pets-rescue Anyway, that's blasphemy to a Commodore fan, especially an Amiga fan, to whom good system design consists of having amazing custom silicon for which the CPU is a mere mediator. After all, if a faster CPU were really all you needed, the PC wouldn't suck as much as it does! This school of thought won out in the end, as most of the compute in today's high-performance applications (like AI) is done on the GPU, the CPU's role being to transfer programs and data to the GPU, basically a front-end processor to the actual computer which is made by NVIDIA.
- robotresearcher 1y ago
  We found out a bit later, with Amiga.
- leptons 1y ago
  >had serious co processors What decade do you think this computer is from? "Serious co processors" in 1982 wasn't a thing.
guidedlight 1y ago
Commodore was such a juggernaut at the time. It was the first truly successful home computer. It’s a shame that poor management, product fragmentation, and failure to respond to IBM/Microsoft killed the company.
LPisGood 1y ago
The copy and the features remind me a lot of modern Apple. This was the first I’ve heard that Commodore made their own hardware.
- jdietrich 1y ago
  They bought MOS Technology in 1976, which was critical to their success. https://spectrum.ieee.org/commodore-64 https://spectrum.ieee.org/commodore-64
gitroom 1y ago
Perfect throwback. I really miss that old tech magic - nothing feels the same anymore, tbh.
neilv 1y ago
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?
- brudgers 1y ago
  I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. 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.
  - neilv 1y ago
    That just means they didn't have a Woz. :)
  - arthurcolle 1y ago
    In 2035 every process with have a 0.1B LLM running at 60x human capacity, with half the overhead and twice the work! ;)
  - juancn 1y ago
    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.
syntex 1y ago
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
- heironimus 1y ago
  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.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Luxury! I had a Vic-20, cassette drive, and a black and white TV. Also learned to program.
  - mrandish 1y ago
    > 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!
- TMWNN 1y ago
  >(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?
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
My first computer was a VIC-20 (1982 or so). 3KB of RAM. So little room, I needed to write most of my apps in Machine Code. That was OK. At school, I had an STD Bus-Based 6800, with 256B. Was a very good learning experience.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Same here, but never heard of assembly until college. How did you learn it? I don't think anything but a Basic manual came in the box.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Oh wait, not entirely true… I made a few DOS .com files with debug but did not understand much.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    There was a third-party Machine Code Monitor cartridge. Don't remember who made it. You could write code, as well as view it, or debug it. I used the 6502 manual. I was taking Machine Code in school at the time (tech school -not "proper" school), and had learned how to trawl the tech literature for guidance.
  - gopherloafers 1y ago
    Not OP, but In 1983 I was 13 and I won a scholarship to a summer camp that rented space in a rich kid prep school for computer camp. I learned pascal over two weeks and the following summer I went back and learned assembly. Three years later I built a 286 and fortunately lived near the Yale bookstore and it had a book on 286 assembly. Basically being a middle class kid adjacent to rich people is how I learned assembly at a young age. If it wasn’t for that camp I wouldn’t have learned computer architecture, logic, and assembly until college. Zip code matters.
  - mrandish 1y ago
    I had a Radio Shack Color Computer and Radio Shack actually sold a ROM cartridge (right alongside all the game cartridges) that was an editor/assembler. That's how I got started in assembler. The manual that came with it covered using the assembler itself but only had a minimal overview of 6809 CPU assembly language. Pretty strange that you could pick up an assembly language IDE at your local Radio Shack store (with over 7000 locations, virtually every town in the U.S. had at least one Radio Shack). My teenaged self actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called their offices asking for information on how to program their CPU. Some nice salesperson there took pity on me and sent me their 6809 reference manual along with a quick reference card for free. The manual was quite a sizable book that I wasn't fully ready to understand yet but that reference card was my constant companion. I still have it today. :-)
Lerc 1y ago
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.
- criddell 1y ago
  I had no idea about the CP/M option. I’ve never heard of anybody actually running CP/M on a C64.
  - themadturk 1y ago
    I tried. Didn't work very well.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Same. I played with the CP/M boot disk that came with my C128 later. That was fun for a few hours. Then I went back to not knowing it existed.
Nate75Sanders 1y ago
It's a 1982 brochure, but they show Ace of Aces in the games section. The Accolade Ace of Aces (WW2 combat flight sim) wasn't released until 1986. It seems that this may have been a different Ace of Aces -- perhaps a version of the Nova tabletop game that never got released. Anybody know anything about this?
- echoangle 1y ago
  Does it say 1982 anywhere except the pricing table and the submission title here? Is it possible that the brochure is actually newer?
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    At the very bottom right there is a reference to 0782100M Googling that returns below which also says (maybe infers?) the brochure is from 1982. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646264 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264626...
  - Nate75Sanders 1y ago
    I had considered that, but noticed the price and as classichasclass points out in a reply to me (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949843), $595 was the intro price. They're also comparing against the Atari 800 instead of the 800XL, so that's another piece of evidence. The 800XL was released in 1983.
- classichasclass 1y ago
  I don't know anything about the Ace of Aces pictured, but it's definitely not the Artech/Accolade one. $595 was the 1982 introductory price for the C64, so this pamphlet almost certainly dates from then.
- Nate75Sanders 1y ago
  OK, here's something: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/ace-of-aces/ https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/ace-of-aces/ Jim Rothwell (see the gallery image and enlarge it) was supposed to release something called Ace of Aces for the Ultimax, it seems, IIUC. I didn't know about the Ultimax until 5 minutes ago. EDIT: Here's the image link: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/wp-content/uploads/gtw64/a/auto-draft/vic_development_group_status_report_0006.jpg https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/wp-content/uploads/gtw64/a/a...
mrandish 1y ago
As I searched for a first computer I hoped to talk my parents into buying for my late-teen self, I read a lot of early computer magazines and visited local stores. I looked first at the Atari 400 and loved the games but, wanting to learn programming too, I just couldn't imagine that membrane keyboard being livable. Then I saw the C64, fell in love and went home from the store clutching the same color brochure linked above. How could I not love the promised 320 x 200 resolution, the sprites, all those colors - but I knew that $600 was too expensive. Ultimately, I had to settle on a Radio Shack Color Computer at around $400. I loved the 6809-based Coco but, at the time, I felt it was inferior to the C64 and Atari 400/800 because it had no sprites, far fewer colors, lower resolution, lower clock speed, etc. Because I didn't yet understand computer architecture and simply believed the specs in the brochure, it was only much later, during my computer-industry career, that I grew to understand that the Coco, which I'd felt so insecure about, was really pretty ideal for my young self to learn on. The built-in Microsoft Extended Color BASIC was far superior to the ROM BASIC the C64 shipped with. Perhaps more importantly, the comprehensive, illustrated BASIC manuals Radio Shack commissioned are still legendary for being excellent for beginners to self-teach. And, unlike many of its peers, that ROM BASIC had extensive native commands for graphics, sound and music from day 1. Once I'd written a bunch of graphic games entirely in BASIC, I advanced to learn assembly language because it was the only way to draw more and bigger objects faster. Fortunately, Radio Shack offered a ROM cartridge-based 6809 editor/assembler that was unreasonably good for a cheap home computer. And the Motorola 6809 CPU, being the little brother of the legendary 68000 was really an 8/16-bit CPU with an elegantly orthogonal instruction set which supported advanced addressing modes and many features neither the 6502 nor Z80 had. Things like re-entrant, relocatable, program counter relative code, separate user and system stacks, a multiply instruction and multiple levels of interrupts. Today it's considered the most powerful 8-bit CPU of that era (in fact, Apple originally intended the Macintosh to use the 6809). Radio Shack even offered a multi-tasking, multi-user, Unix-like operating system for their 8-bit, 64K 'toy' home computer. Of course, back then I didn't know how good I had it since my only experience was with the computer I owned and I still believed the impression I formed from that beautiful C64 brochure. It wasn't until the mid and late 90s when there were piles of C64s and Ataris at thrift stores for $5 and $10 that I really understood that the C64's 320x200 resolution and 256 colors weren't all available at the same time, at least for regular users (short of advanced programmer tricks and esoteric demo scene hacks far beyond a beginning coder). Once the computers I'd lusted after were nearly free (or actually free when people just gave them to me vs throwing them out), I managed to acquire ALL of the widely available 8-bit and 16-bit computers I'd never been able to afford in the 80s and actually play with them. Only then did I understand a 0.89 Mhz 6809 was two to three times faster than a 1 Mhz 6502 and that I'd 'grown up' in programming understanding interrupt driven multi-tasking, managing multiple stacks and using index register indirection, which made pointers feel natural when I later learned C on 68000-based computers. Even the lack of hardware sprites in my 'poor Coco' forced me to figure out software sprites using bit masks and XOR in assembler - and I had a blazingly fast CPU to do it with. Even the higher resolution and colors of the C64 and Atari didn't turn out to actually be that much higher than my Coco. Setting aside the amazing tricks demo scene coders eventually figured out on all these machines, in practice, as a beginning assembly language game coder back then I would probably have only used 3-color sprites on a background with an effective 160 x 192 resolution background. My Coco had four colors (although from a more limited palette) at an effective resolution of 128 x 192 and, being entirely software-based, I could do anything with those pixels that I could figure out how to CPU blit in one frame. With no hardware graphics to rely on, work around or trick, it was always just my code and the unforgiving pace of the CRT beam. This kept me focused from day 1 on cycle-counting performance and intense code optimization, which made my practical experience with real-time graphics more Apple II-like - except with 2 to 3 times more CPU power to throw at it. Sure, I didn't have the hardware GFX I'd lusted after in that brochure but those capabilities weren't quite as accessible to novices as I'd assumed - and what I got instead had some pretty sizable advantages I didn't appreciate at the time in shaping and preparing the programmer I would later become. To be clear, I'm not being critical of the C64, today I revere and respect all of these classic machines. They're each great in their own unique way, and each one represents a different vision of what personal computing could be. That's a big part of what I miss about 80s home computing and the reason I've collected over a hundred different models of non-Intel 8-bit and 16-bit home computers over the years (all the commonly available Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, Amiga machines a few dozen more rare 8-bits from around the world). It's just ironic how my teen self misunderstood the specs in that brochure and how it led to an undeserved inferiority complex which existed only in my head.
suzzer99 1y ago
Trying to teach myself BASIC on the C64 in high school frustrated me so much it kept me from becoming a programmer until I was 29.
- bartread 1y ago
  Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful. No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on. Just dreadful. I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways that mattered, and even taking into account the weird key combinations required to write code, and the fact that it wasn't particularly well regarded either, but I think Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum range was actually better. You had drawing commands, you had sound commands (although the PLAY command on the 128K honestly didn't give you that much access to the power of the Yamaha FM soundchip so it still wasn't great, and on 48K you were limited to BEEP). You didn't have sprites but you had UDGs and they were easy to use. And I think it might have run faster - it certainly felt faster. It did still have some annoying oversights: e.g., want to read the joystick? Well, I can't remember the damned address but in the end I figured out enough to realise I was going to have to PEEK the right location in memory, which I duly did after a quick study of the memory map and trying out a bunch of different addresses. Anyway, point is I remember being so frustrated when I upgraded/crossgraded from a ZX Spectrum 128K +2A to a C64 with how difficult it was to get anything done in BASIC.
  - leptons 1y ago
    I thought C64 BASIC was just as good as any other BASIC at the time. BASIC is, well... "basic", and even with POKEs and everything else, we still did quite a bit with C64 BASIC. I started on Atari BASIC and that BASIC was pretty bad, too, but even so I made use of it and did all kinds of graphics stuff, and wrote games, etc. I did all kinds of stuff in BASIC on the C64 between 1986 and into the 90's. But, after a few months of learning all about BASIC, I went right into Assembly language. The C64 manual taught BASIC, but it also had the memory map and documentation about all the 6510 opcodes, registers, custom chips, and even a schematic of the computer in the back. It was incredible compared to all other computers at the time, because it was made for DIY, you could go as deeply as you wanted with it. https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Reference_Guide_1983_Commodore/page/n425/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen... I created so many cool things with the C64, got into the Demoscene, and made crack intros, etc. I even wrote some code to do 3D vector rotations in C64 BASIC and displayed the data with an assembly language line drawing routine. I don't know you, but if you couldn't do amazing things with the C64, that says more (to me) about you than it does the C64. And like all machines, the system is what it is, you either make use of it or you don't.
K0balt 1y ago
Wow. I got a c64 as soon as I could get one, a huge upgrade from my Ohio scientific C28P. But I had no idea it could run CP/M? I totally would have been all over that. Is there a port to the 6502, or did they run a computer in a cartridge to do that?
- classichasclass 1y ago
  It's a Z80 in a cartridge and was capable of booting CP/M 2.2. But don't get too excited: the 1541 was still the 1541, so it could only run software that had been copied to a GCR disk (no directly reading MFM floppies). CP/M Plus on the 128 was much more useful because the 1571 could read MFM disks, though it was hobbled by its architecture and ran slower than it should have.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    Thanks for the info!
  - TMWNN 1y ago
    >It's a Z80 in a cartridge and was capable of booting CP/M 2.2. But don't get too excited: the 1541 was still the 1541, so it could only run software that had been copied to a GCR disk (no directly reading MFM floppies). This by itself is no great obstacle; even aside from the nonstandardization of CP/M 5.25" disk formats, CP/M on Apple II has the same GCR/MFM issue but the SoftCard and its many clones were among the most popular accessories, and consequently no shortage of software available on the Apple II disk format. No, the issue with the C64 CP/M cartridge is that it sucked, like almost everything else Commodore designed. Even assuming that someone in 1985 or 1986 wanted to run Turbo Pascal or WordStar on the 128 as opposed to buying an inexpensive PC clone or a used Kaypro or Osborne, the 128 implementation is so slow that it is more or less unusable for regular use.
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  The C64 CP/M implementation required the Z-80 cartridge which contained an actual Zilog Z80 processor that took over when CP/M was running - the 6502 would essentially go idle while the Z80 accessed the C64's memory and peripherals.
dekhn 1y ago
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. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)
- j-a-a-p 1y ago
  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.
leonidasv 1y ago
Fun fact: adjusted for inflation, that's equivalent to $2,017.82 in today's money [0] [0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=198201&year2=202503 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=1982...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nxobject 1y ago
  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.
  - sbierwagen 1y ago
    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.
jasoneckert 1y ago
> Commodore is one of the few companies that manufacture their own chips. This is one of the best takeaways from this ad. Because they owned MOS, Commodore had an advantage over their competitors that is commonly replicated today.
a1371 1y ago
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"?
- loeg 1y ago
  No; they're saying it outcompetes products at or below $1,200.
- spinarrets 1y ago
  You are reading it like: 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!
- timknauf 1y ago
  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.
utopcell 1y ago
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.
- UncleSlacky 1y ago
  It was a US-only ad (hence the dollar pricing), the Spectrum was (AFAIK) never sold in the US, only the sort-of-compatible Timex-Sinclair 2068: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068
  - utopcell 1y ago
    The 2068 was also a sub-$200 machine, though it was only released in '83 [1]. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-12/page/n281 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-12/page/n281
- chgs 1y ago
  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.
- TacticalCoder 1y ago
  [dead]
prvc 1y ago
How big a selling point would CP/M have been, really?
corentin88 1y ago
Looks like a (web) Landing Page to me. Funny that the marketing UI is still the same.
chadnorvell 1y ago
"Commodore's programmers examined the whole jungle of software available today—literally hundreds of programs" How quaint!
micw 1y ago
That's about $2000 today. Still fair if the competitors costs twice that much.
Nihilartikel 1y ago
Man, I had a hand-me-down Atari 800 with 48k. It was great, but I coveted the c64 with its crunchy cool sid sounds. Then I had a 486 vga pc that could barely scroll a game at 60fps (except for ones like jazz jackrabbit with its hardware scrolling wizardry) and I coveted the Amiga with its smooth scaling and rotation and 4 channel samples.
heisenbit 1y ago
Ahh, the times when a computer could send analysts back to typewriters. This really defines the transition where ad copywriters could for computers still did not get what computers meant.
kstrauser 1y ago
> Cartridge Slot: Will accept games and other applications designed for Commodore 64 or Max Machine™ on plug-in cartridges. Wait, the what now? Now I’m off to learn what a Max Machine is.
- itomato 1y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240522205952/http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cmax.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240522205952/http://www.zimmer...

250 points by indigodaddy 1y ago

pryelluw 1y ago

That is some hard hitting copy. I wonder how it performed …

unsnap_biceps 1y ago
It was life changing at the time. They sold something like 15 million units. Everyone was running a commodore in my neck of the woods.
- nickjj 1y ago
  It's interesting because when I read "For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price" all my brain does is parse that sentence as they are charging double what they should because there's no competition. It's not until I scroll down to the pricing table to see what they really mean is their machine is half the price while having more features than the rest.
usefulcat 1y ago
It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school. Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive word processor. But yeah, mostly I played games on it. It was a great gaming machine for its time.
- pryelluw 1y ago
  I had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)
  - antihipocrat 1y ago
    I interpreted the copy initially as justifying the product being twice the price of the competition. My eyes are used to much more concise copy nowadays though so maybe it landed properly back then? Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.
    - thedailymail 1y ago
      I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)
      - antihipocrat 1y ago
        Yeah I realised once I read the comparison chart in the ad. It's also possible that the ambiguity was intentional.. Ad copy is an art and it did compel me to read all of it to unpack the meaning. Though thinking this through I would assume that everyone interested in computers at the time would know what the prices of other products were so the $595 would immediately be understood as very cheap in comparison
- heironimus 1y ago
  You could touch type on that horrible keyboard? I learned to type on typewriters at school, but never could very well on my C64 with its elevated, mushy keyboard.
  - usefulcat 1y ago
    I too learned on a typewriter (IBM Selectric, if memory serves). Yes, the C64 keyboard was pretty crap, but still better than not being able to rearrange text.
- d332 1y ago
  How would you print back then? Did you also own a printer?
  - ako 1y ago
    Epson fx-80
  - usefulcat 1y ago
    Yes, a dot matrix printer.

hobbitstan 1y ago

I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling. This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in the gaps. Tech these days has long lost it's magic. The 'AI' boom tried to recreate the buzz with nonsensical claims that it has failed to deliver. It's all smoke and mirrors these days. I think the last time I was truly wowed was when Shazam appeared. That was 23 years ago.

shever73 1y ago
I was wowed when I first got home Internet in 1995 because it was so much more than the BBSs I’d been using up to that point, but nothing has recreated the sense of wonder I had on 8-bit machines in the 80s. Even when I bought a secondhand PC in the late 80s, going through the hand-labelled disks was like a treasure hunt. That’s how I first discovered Hack/Nethack, played Leygref’s Castle and started learning Borland Turbo Pascal.
- b112 1y ago
  If you get ice crean for dessert nightly, it's not exciting or even a joy. It needs to be rare, or new, to be a treat. I think now, there's always a computer near me. How can it still be special? Even the change in sound and graphics was astonishing, now it's minor tweaks.
unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
I still remember my first Internet search-- Phineas Gage-- and bewilderment at where this information came from. The recursive beauty is the story itself has been transformed by the Internet, and has been filled in very differently than was reported back in the mid 90s.[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
macintux 1y ago
I remember chatting online (MUD) with a friend in Sweden in 1990. I sent her an email, and she confirmed it arrived moments later, and my mind was blown. For some reason I felt “mail” surely couldn’t arrive that fast, even though we were chatting interactively in real time.

unsnap_biceps 1y ago

We were a commodore family growing up. I got started on a Vic-20 and went through a good chuck of their offerings until doom changed the world.

classichasclass 1y ago
After the Tomy Tutor, we started with a C64 and then later a C128. Both were in regular use pretty much through high school.
smilespray 1y ago
I went from a VIC 20 to an Amiga 500. Quite the leap.

bluemoola 1y ago

Interesting that the M4 Mac Mini is the same price

djaychela 1y ago
And that's without taking interest rates into account -I think that's about $2500 in today's money.
- frutiger 1y ago
  > without taking interest rates into account I’m sure you know — but you mean inflation.
shpx 1y ago
Comparing prices across time without even thinking about inflation is basically just numerology
haunter 1y ago
The iMac is $1299 since its launch in 1999 https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iMac-price-history https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iMac-price-history
layer8 1y ago
It doesn’t have a keyboard, though.

colinbartlett 1y ago

Interesting to me that the Apple II+ was the only one in the comparison matrix that supported only upper case letters. That lead me to this: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why-the-apple-ii-didnt-support-lowercase-letters https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...

classichasclass 1y ago
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.
- vardump 1y ago
  Wasn’t POKEY out of tune due to limited frequency register? Making it hard to produce music that sounds good.
_wire_ 1y ago
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.
mixmastamyk 1y ago
The Apple is almost five years older than the C64, an eternity in that era.

neuroelectron 1y ago

I always wondered what it would be like if Commodore had serious co processors, but the base Commodore is really too slow for anything like that. Could you imagine a Voodoo 2? I think the SNES was only about 10mhz as well and used the FX math co-processor for 3d.

wmf 1y ago
IMO in those days money would have been better spend on a faster CPU than coprocessors. That's assuming you're using the computer as a computer not as a game console.
- neuroelectron 1y ago
  Yes but think of the Commodore of the trusted, known and completely grokable system that orchestrates the co-processors. Then you can run LLMs or whatever data-intensive task you like. Still, all that data has to go through the CPU bus.
- bitwize 1y ago
  Even then, the Commodore Plus/4 could do some pretty sophisticated gaming, even without the dedicated sprites of the VIC-II -- simply because the CPU was about twice as fast as the C64's. An example: https://psytronik.itch.io/pets-rescue https://psytronik.itch.io/pets-rescue Anyway, that's blasphemy to a Commodore fan, especially an Amiga fan, to whom good system design consists of having amazing custom silicon for which the CPU is a mere mediator. After all, if a faster CPU were really all you needed, the PC wouldn't suck as much as it does! This school of thought won out in the end, as most of the compute in today's high-performance applications (like AI) is done on the GPU, the CPU's role being to transfer programs and data to the GPU, basically a front-end processor to the actual computer which is made by NVIDIA.
robotresearcher 1y ago
We found out a bit later, with Amiga.
leptons 1y ago
>had serious co processors What decade do you think this computer is from? "Serious co processors" in 1982 wasn't a thing.

guidedlight 1y ago

Commodore was such a juggernaut at the time. It was the first truly successful home computer. It’s a shame that poor management, product fragmentation, and failure to respond to IBM/Microsoft killed the company.

LPisGood 1y ago

The copy and the features remind me a lot of modern Apple. This was the first I’ve heard that Commodore made their own hardware.

jdietrich 1y ago
They bought MOS Technology in 1976, which was critical to their success. https://spectrum.ieee.org/commodore-64 https://spectrum.ieee.org/commodore-64

gitroom 1y ago

Perfect throwback. I really miss that old tech magic - nothing feels the same anymore, tbh.

neilv 1y ago

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?

brudgers 1y ago
I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. 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.
- neilv 1y ago
  That just means they didn't have a Woz. :)
- arthurcolle 1y ago
  In 2035 every process with have a 0.1B LLM running at 60x human capacity, with half the overhead and twice the work! ;)
- juancn 1y ago
  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.

syntex 1y ago

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

heironimus 1y ago
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.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Luxury! I had a Vic-20, cassette drive, and a black and white TV. Also learned to program.
- mrandish 1y ago
  > 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!
TMWNN 1y ago
>(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?

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

My first computer was a VIC-20 (1982 or so). 3KB of RAM. So little room, I needed to write most of my apps in Machine Code. That was OK. At school, I had an STD Bus-Based 6800, with 256B. Was a very good learning experience.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Same here, but never heard of assembly until college. How did you learn it? I don't think anything but a Basic manual came in the box.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Oh wait, not entirely true… I made a few DOS .com files with debug but did not understand much.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  There was a third-party Machine Code Monitor cartridge. Don't remember who made it. You could write code, as well as view it, or debug it. I used the 6502 manual. I was taking Machine Code in school at the time (tech school -not "proper" school), and had learned how to trawl the tech literature for guidance.
- gopherloafers 1y ago
  Not OP, but In 1983 I was 13 and I won a scholarship to a summer camp that rented space in a rich kid prep school for computer camp. I learned pascal over two weeks and the following summer I went back and learned assembly. Three years later I built a 286 and fortunately lived near the Yale bookstore and it had a book on 286 assembly. Basically being a middle class kid adjacent to rich people is how I learned assembly at a young age. If it wasn’t for that camp I wouldn’t have learned computer architecture, logic, and assembly until college. Zip code matters.
- mrandish 1y ago
  I had a Radio Shack Color Computer and Radio Shack actually sold a ROM cartridge (right alongside all the game cartridges) that was an editor/assembler. That's how I got started in assembler. The manual that came with it covered using the assembler itself but only had a minimal overview of 6809 CPU assembly language. Pretty strange that you could pick up an assembly language IDE at your local Radio Shack store (with over 7000 locations, virtually every town in the U.S. had at least one Radio Shack). My teenaged self actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called their offices asking for information on how to program their CPU. Some nice salesperson there took pity on me and sent me their 6809 reference manual along with a quick reference card for free. The manual was quite a sizable book that I wasn't fully ready to understand yet but that reference card was my constant companion. I still have it today. :-)

Lerc 1y ago

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.

criddell 1y ago
I had no idea about the CP/M option. I’ve never heard of anybody actually running CP/M on a C64.
- themadturk 1y ago
  I tried. Didn't work very well.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Same. I played with the CP/M boot disk that came with my C128 later. That was fun for a few hours. Then I went back to not knowing it existed.

Nate75Sanders 1y ago

It's a 1982 brochure, but they show Ace of Aces in the games section. The Accolade Ace of Aces (WW2 combat flight sim) wasn't released until 1986. It seems that this may have been a different Ace of Aces -- perhaps a version of the Nova tabletop game that never got released. Anybody know anything about this?

echoangle 1y ago
Does it say 1982 anywhere except the pricing table and the submission title here? Is it possible that the brochure is actually newer?
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  At the very bottom right there is a reference to 0782100M Googling that returns below which also says (maybe infers?) the brochure is from 1982. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646264 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264626...
- Nate75Sanders 1y ago
  I had considered that, but noticed the price and as classichasclass points out in a reply to me (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949843), $595 was the intro price. They're also comparing against the Atari 800 instead of the 800XL, so that's another piece of evidence. The 800XL was released in 1983.
classichasclass 1y ago
I don't know anything about the Ace of Aces pictured, but it's definitely not the Artech/Accolade one. $595 was the 1982 introductory price for the C64, so this pamphlet almost certainly dates from then.
Nate75Sanders 1y ago
OK, here's something: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/ace-of-aces/ https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/ace-of-aces/ Jim Rothwell (see the gallery image and enlarge it) was supposed to release something called Ace of Aces for the Ultimax, it seems, IIUC. I didn't know about the Ultimax until 5 minutes ago. EDIT: Here's the image link: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/wp-content/uploads/gtw64/a/auto-draft/vic_development_group_status_report_0006.jpg https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/wp-content/uploads/gtw64/a/a...

mrandish 1y ago

As I searched for a first computer I hoped to talk my parents into buying for my late-teen self, I read a lot of early computer magazines and visited local stores. I looked first at the Atari 400 and loved the games but, wanting to learn programming too, I just couldn't imagine that membrane keyboard being livable. Then I saw the C64, fell in love and went home from the store clutching the same color brochure linked above. How could I not love the promised 320 x 200 resolution, the sprites, all those colors - but I knew that $600 was too expensive. Ultimately, I had to settle on a Radio Shack Color Computer at around $400. I loved the 6809-based Coco but, at the time, I felt it was inferior to the C64 and Atari 400/800 because it had no sprites, far fewer colors, lower resolution, lower clock speed, etc. Because I didn't yet understand computer architecture and simply believed the specs in the brochure, it was only much later, during my computer-industry career, that I grew to understand that the Coco, which I'd felt so insecure about, was really pretty ideal for my young self to learn on. The built-in Microsoft Extended Color BASIC was far superior to the ROM BASIC the C64 shipped with. Perhaps more importantly, the comprehensive, illustrated BASIC manuals Radio Shack commissioned are still legendary for being excellent for beginners to self-teach. And, unlike many of its peers, that ROM BASIC had extensive native commands for graphics, sound and music from day 1. Once I'd written a bunch of graphic games entirely in BASIC, I advanced to learn assembly language because it was the only way to draw more and bigger objects faster. Fortunately, Radio Shack offered a ROM cartridge-based 6809 editor/assembler that was unreasonably good for a cheap home computer. And the Motorola 6809 CPU, being the little brother of the legendary 68000 was really an 8/16-bit CPU with an elegantly orthogonal instruction set which supported advanced addressing modes and many features neither the 6502 nor Z80 had. Things like re-entrant, relocatable, program counter relative code, separate user and system stacks, a multiply instruction and multiple levels of interrupts. Today it's considered the most powerful 8-bit CPU of that era (in fact, Apple originally intended the Macintosh to use the 6809). Radio Shack even offered a multi-tasking, multi-user, Unix-like operating system for their 8-bit, 64K 'toy' home computer. Of course, back then I didn't know how good I had it since my only experience was with the computer I owned and I still believed the impression I formed from that beautiful C64 brochure. It wasn't until the mid and late 90s when there were piles of C64s and Ataris at thrift stores for $5 and $10 that I really understood that the C64's 320x200 resolution and 256 colors weren't all available at the same time, at least for regular users (short of advanced programmer tricks and esoteric demo scene hacks far beyond a beginning coder). Once the computers I'd lusted after were nearly free (or actually free when people just gave them to me vs throwing them out), I managed to acquire ALL of the widely available 8-bit and 16-bit computers I'd never been able to afford in the 80s and actually play with them. Only then did I understand a 0.89 Mhz 6809 was two to three times faster than a 1 Mhz 6502 and that I'd 'grown up' in programming understanding interrupt driven multi-tasking, managing multiple stacks and using index register indirection, which made pointers feel natural when I later learned C on 68000-based computers. Even the lack of hardware sprites in my 'poor Coco' forced me to figure out software sprites using bit masks and XOR in assembler - and I had a blazingly fast CPU to do it with. Even the higher resolution and colors of the C64 and Atari didn't turn out to actually be that much higher than my Coco. Setting aside the amazing tricks demo scene coders eventually figured out on all these machines, in practice, as a beginning assembly language game coder back then I would probably have only used 3-color sprites on a background with an effective 160 x 192 resolution background. My Coco had four colors (although from a more limited palette) at an effective resolution of 128 x 192 and, being entirely software-based, I could do anything with those pixels that I could figure out how to CPU blit in one frame. With no hardware graphics to rely on, work around or trick, it was always just my code and the unforgiving pace of the CRT beam. This kept me focused from day 1 on cycle-counting performance and intense code optimization, which made my practical experience with real-time graphics more Apple II-like - except with 2 to 3 times more CPU power to throw at it. Sure, I didn't have the hardware GFX I'd lusted after in that brochure but those capabilities weren't quite as accessible to novices as I'd assumed - and what I got instead had some pretty sizable advantages I didn't appreciate at the time in shaping and preparing the programmer I would later become. To be clear, I'm not being critical of the C64, today I revere and respect all of these classic machines. They're each great in their own unique way, and each one represents a different vision of what personal computing could be. That's a big part of what I miss about 80s home computing and the reason I've collected over a hundred different models of non-Intel 8-bit and 16-bit home computers over the years (all the commonly available Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, Amiga machines a few dozen more rare 8-bits from around the world). It's just ironic how my teen self misunderstood the specs in that brochure and how it led to an undeserved inferiority complex which existed only in my head.

suzzer99 1y ago

Trying to teach myself BASIC on the C64 in high school frustrated me so much it kept me from becoming a programmer until I was 29.

bartread 1y ago
Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful. No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on. Just dreadful. I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways that mattered, and even taking into account the weird key combinations required to write code, and the fact that it wasn't particularly well regarded either, but I think Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum range was actually better. You had drawing commands, you had sound commands (although the PLAY command on the 128K honestly didn't give you that much access to the power of the Yamaha FM soundchip so it still wasn't great, and on 48K you were limited to BEEP). You didn't have sprites but you had UDGs and they were easy to use. And I think it might have run faster - it certainly felt faster. It did still have some annoying oversights: e.g., want to read the joystick? Well, I can't remember the damned address but in the end I figured out enough to realise I was going to have to PEEK the right location in memory, which I duly did after a quick study of the memory map and trying out a bunch of different addresses. Anyway, point is I remember being so frustrated when I upgraded/crossgraded from a ZX Spectrum 128K +2A to a C64 with how difficult it was to get anything done in BASIC.
- leptons 1y ago
  I thought C64 BASIC was just as good as any other BASIC at the time. BASIC is, well... "basic", and even with POKEs and everything else, we still did quite a bit with C64 BASIC. I started on Atari BASIC and that BASIC was pretty bad, too, but even so I made use of it and did all kinds of graphics stuff, and wrote games, etc. I did all kinds of stuff in BASIC on the C64 between 1986 and into the 90's. But, after a few months of learning all about BASIC, I went right into Assembly language. The C64 manual taught BASIC, but it also had the memory map and documentation about all the 6510 opcodes, registers, custom chips, and even a schematic of the computer in the back. It was incredible compared to all other computers at the time, because it was made for DIY, you could go as deeply as you wanted with it. https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Reference_Guide_1983_Commodore/page/n425/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen... I created so many cool things with the C64, got into the Demoscene, and made crack intros, etc. I even wrote some code to do 3D vector rotations in C64 BASIC and displayed the data with an assembly language line drawing routine. I don't know you, but if you couldn't do amazing things with the C64, that says more (to me) about you than it does the C64. And like all machines, the system is what it is, you either make use of it or you don't.

K0balt 1y ago

Wow. I got a c64 as soon as I could get one, a huge upgrade from my Ohio scientific C28P. But I had no idea it could run CP/M? I totally would have been all over that. Is there a port to the 6502, or did they run a computer in a cartridge to do that?

classichasclass 1y ago
It's a Z80 in a cartridge and was capable of booting CP/M 2.2. But don't get too excited: the 1541 was still the 1541, so it could only run software that had been copied to a GCR disk (no directly reading MFM floppies). CP/M Plus on the 128 was much more useful because the 1571 could read MFM disks, though it was hobbled by its architecture and ran slower than it should have.
- K0balt 1y ago
  Thanks for the info!
- TMWNN 1y ago
  >It's a Z80 in a cartridge and was capable of booting CP/M 2.2. But don't get too excited: the 1541 was still the 1541, so it could only run software that had been copied to a GCR disk (no directly reading MFM floppies). This by itself is no great obstacle; even aside from the nonstandardization of CP/M 5.25" disk formats, CP/M on Apple II has the same GCR/MFM issue but the SoftCard and its many clones were among the most popular accessories, and consequently no shortage of software available on the Apple II disk format. No, the issue with the C64 CP/M cartridge is that it sucked, like almost everything else Commodore designed. Even assuming that someone in 1985 or 1986 wanted to run Turbo Pascal or WordStar on the 128 as opposed to buying an inexpensive PC clone or a used Kaypro or Osborne, the 128 implementation is so slow that it is more or less unusable for regular use.
ethan_smith 1y ago
The C64 CP/M implementation required the Z-80 cartridge which contained an actual Zilog Z80 processor that took over when CP/M was running - the 6502 would essentially go idle while the Z80 accessed the C64's memory and peripherals.

dekhn 1y ago

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. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

j-a-a-p 1y ago
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.

leonidasv 1y ago

Fun fact: adjusted for inflation, that's equivalent to $2,017.82 in today's money [0] [0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=198201&year2=202503 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=1982...

deleted 1y ago
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nxobject 1y ago
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.
- sbierwagen 1y ago
  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.

jasoneckert 1y ago

> Commodore is one of the few companies that manufacture their own chips. This is one of the best takeaways from this ad. Because they owned MOS, Commodore had an advantage over their competitors that is commonly replicated today.

a1371 1y ago

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"?

loeg 1y ago
No; they're saying it outcompetes products at or below $1,200.
spinarrets 1y ago
You are reading it like: 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!
timknauf 1y ago
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.

utopcell 1y ago

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.

UncleSlacky 1y ago
It was a US-only ad (hence the dollar pricing), the Spectrum was (AFAIK) never sold in the US, only the sort-of-compatible Timex-Sinclair 2068: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068
- utopcell 1y ago
  The 2068 was also a sub-$200 machine, though it was only released in '83 [1]. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-12/page/n281 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-12/page/n281
chgs 1y ago
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.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
[dead]

prvc 1y ago

How big a selling point would CP/M have been, really?

corentin88 1y ago

Looks like a (web) Landing Page to me. Funny that the marketing UI is still the same.

chadnorvell 1y ago

"Commodore's programmers examined the whole jungle of software available today—literally hundreds of programs" How quaint!

micw 1y ago

That's about $2000 today. Still fair if the competitors costs twice that much.

Nihilartikel 1y ago

Man, I had a hand-me-down Atari 800 with 48k. It was great, but I coveted the c64 with its crunchy cool sid sounds. Then I had a 486 vga pc that could barely scroll a game at 60fps (except for ones like jazz jackrabbit with its hardware scrolling wizardry) and I coveted the Amiga with its smooth scaling and rotation and 4 channel samples.

heisenbit 1y ago

Ahh, the times when a computer could send analysts back to typewriters. This really defines the transition where ad copywriters could for computers still did not get what computers meant.

kstrauser 1y ago

> Cartridge Slot: Will accept games and other applications designed for Commodore 64 or Max Machine™ on plug-in cartridges. Wait, the what now? Now I’m off to learn what a Max Machine is.

itomato 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240522205952/http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cmax.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240522205952/http://www.zimmer...