Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever. "There was something magical about the C64," says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden."
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Member since:2006-03-13
Actually, Europe was their biggest market. What killed them was their continued attempts to break the Amiga into the US market as a "serious" computer, rather than focusing on it's successful market (high end gaming in Europe) An unwillingness to to give up on the lost cause of the Amiga in the US plus too much money spent on PC clones are what killed Commodore.
Member since:2005-07-06
What I find funny is how unwilling American customers are to embrace products from outside the US; whether its music, movies, television programmers or in this case, computers. Its almost like an underlying xenophobia dictating buying habits within the US.
Member since:2007-02-22
It's also in part due to their hardware choices. When they made the shift to 16-bit, Commodore had two choices: A processor compatible with the 6502 (the 65816, as seen in the IIgs and the SNES) or the sexier 68000.
Although theirs was a legitimate choice, what with the custom chips and all... imagine what Commodore's fortunes would have been like if their new 16-bit machine had stayed compatible with the C64 *and* was easy to port from the SNES just like the 6502-based C64 was (comparatively) easy to port to from the 6502-based NES? Not to mention having a proven OS (GEOS) to port forwards?
But, hindsight is 20/20.
Member since:2007-10-26
Commodore did not make the 68K choice, I believe it was Amiga Inc which did.
However thinking about what if they did use the 65816 or a similar model. I don't think it would have been a really portable solution since most C64 games relied on the system being the way it was, running at 1Mhz with the SID and VIC-II chips. Games did not have loops written for running on different speed CPU's because they assumed too much about the system. Porting would be problematic because you would have to change all the timing plus all the I/O code for talking to the VIC-II, SID, keyboard and joystick. Most of the code would be in assembly as well.
You could create a virtual C64 inside such a system easier. Because you don't need to translate instructions. Just run the CPU at ~1MHz and map the chips/(functional equivalents) to the right location.
The real problem with the 65816 is that is just a hyped up 6502. The 68K gives you 8 Address registers and 8 Data registers which makes it much more powerful.
Member since:2005-07-06
No, true, the PC Architecture wasn't an open "standard", but it was open nonetheless. It was documented and unencumbered. The primary effort was in reverse engineering the BIOS. Once that was done, the open hardware design and Microsoft's willingness to license MS-DOS to any and all comers created de facto standards.
With all of the other home computers, they're weren't open at all. The Apple could take board slots and accept peripherals, but only Apple could actually "make" Apples since they controlled the software as well. With the Atari, Atari controlled both software and hardware (with the special graphics chips no one was willing to replicate). And with the Commodore, you had the same issues.
But there was nothing really special about the PC. It was off the shelf components all around, and since it used a BIOS via interrupts as a high level interface, the BIOS could be more readily reverse engineered. All of the other systems relied on software being at addresses in ROM rather than indirectly addressed through the 8086 interrupt mechanism.
If IBM had tighter control over the OS or the hardware, then cloning the machine would have been much more difficult. But, they didn't, and suddenly you had a popular, "commodity" computing platform. By the late-80s, Computer Shopper was 2 inches thick, computer shows were everywhere, and everyone and their brother was stamping out PC parts to build your own kit. Doing their best to survive on the minimal profit margin commodity computing provides.
Member since:2007-07-20
True enough on the closed nature of the Atari and Commodore platforms, but there were a couple of Apple II clones that sold very well and survived legal opposition from Apple: the Franklin Ace and VTech Laser 128. The Laser 128 was particularly nice -- basically, a better Apple IIc at a fraction of the price.
The Radio Shack Color Computer was a fairly open system, given that the whole computer is basically an implementation of Motorola's reference system for the 6809, but it never achieved the popularity or software support of the Atari or Commodore 8-bit, mostly because it wasn't yet another 6502 system and it didn't have hardware sprites (making for marginal games).
Member since:
2005-07-06
Just building on the 'open standards' lie which the original author said; the PC has NO openstandards. The processor competition is only as a result of reverse engineer and later FTC/DOJ intervention, and the BIOS only reversed because of Compaq. Before the only way one could purchase a PC outside of IBM was purchasing off shady back room vendors.
The only remotely open standards based machines today is SPARC, OpenFirmware, OpenSPARC etc. etc. So lets not try and perpetuate this urban myth that just because parts are cheap and can be picked up from newegg, doesn't mean that it is automatically commodity or open standards. Heck, there are motherboard vendors who can't even adhere to the SATA specification!
From what I understand is that they sucked the money out of their Amiga side of the business and regurgitated back into their failing PC side of the business. It never made any sense to have the mutated camel that is Commodore. Add that to their suck marketing, and there lack of focus on the biggest market (the US) - they killed themselves rather than the competition killing them. Its like Apple, Apples decline before Steve Jobs had to do more with bad management than bad products or lack of talent.