> Unfortunately the 64, like all those 8-bit machines, was a technical dead end I suspect that most of them were dead-ends for business reasons rather than tec

> Unfortunately the 64, like all those 8-bit machines, was a technical dead end I suspect that most of them were dead-ends for business reasons rather than technical reasons. More often than not, they were in a race to the bottom to try to sell to home users. Compatibility between generations, when it did exist, was often an afterthought. Commodore owning MOS probably didn't help either. A 16-bit successor to the 6502 was eventually introduced, in the same year as the 386, and the 65816 didn't even come from Commodore/MOS. I'm not sure what the story behind the other popular 8-bit processor is, i.e. the Z80. It has a 16-bit successor in 1979, but I've rarely heard of it's use.