[0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=595&year1=1982...

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?

Payback, as they say, is a b*tch.

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.

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.

It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world—was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direct 1977 competitors, there were abundant human and engineering resources to come up with a fast, inexpensive, and reliable floppy drive and controller; Chuck Peddle at Commodore was certainly no average engineer. And yet, Commodore was still unable to do this in 1984.

Whether one believes in the reality of the existence of the "10X developer", it's hard not to see what Woz did between 1976 and 1978—Integer BASIC, Apple II color graphics, and Disk II—as proof that such a being can exist, even if (as I have written elsewhere) that brilliance straddled the line between optimized and overoptimized. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685888>

If that were true then carts like Fastload wouldn't work using the same hardware and same cabling, to load programs many times faster than the stock C64 code.

The C64 ROM code worked, but slowly. This was also true for the built-in serial routines. When I got a 2400bps modem for my C64, the computer couldn't keep up, there was garbage coming through,I couldn't upload or download, and it was caused by the slow ROM serial code. I hacked my favorite terminal program with my own assembly language bit-banged serial driver, and then the 2400bps modem worked flawlessly. The same is true for the slow disk drive serial code. To my knowledge, that wasn't caused by any flaw in the hardware, it was just slow driver code.

Everyone I knew had a Fastload cartridge, but I was in "the scene", so maybe not the average user back then.

https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58317

Bob Russell once observed the 1541 was the best computer Commodore ever made.

Commodore tried to solve this twice. The first time was for the Plus/4 series with TCBM drives which connected through the expansion port. The only drive of this type was the 1551, which was very fast, but only worked with the Plus/4 family. Commodore was going to design a TCBM interface for the 64 as well, but it wasn't really necessary as pretty much everyone had a fastloader by then. The 128 has a fixed serial bus and burst mode when combined with the 1571 disk drive, which is also very fast and doesn't require using the expansion port, but by then it was 1985 and the 8-bits were on their way out.

The 1571 is way better than the 1541, IME. It's faster with the 128, it's 100% compatible, it's more reliable and less prone to alignment problems, and it can also read MFM formats. But Bob worked on the 1541, so he loves it. :)

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)

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.

That lead me to this:

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...

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!

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?

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.

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_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.

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.

Is there a port to the 6502, or did they run a computer in a cartridge to do that?

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.

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.

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. :-)

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.

https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...

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?

Googling that returns below which also says (maybe infers?) the brochure is from 1982.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264626...

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.

Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.

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

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.

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.

What decade do you think this computer is from?

"Serious co processors" in 1982 wasn't a thing.

It’s a shame that poor management, product fragmentation, and failure to respond to IBM/Microsoft killed the company.

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.

I’m sure you know — but you mean inflation.

This was the first I’ve heard that Commodore made their own hardware.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/commodore-64

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.

Your comment has prompted my response because it reminded me that I thought Shazam was great too, and it made me think of what more recent incredible technological experiences I've had. I don't know if you've tried on a VR (or more accurately AR) headset recently but the engineering is really something.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

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.