The Commodore plus/4 - Tear Down, Explore, Review
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- Опубліковано 5 сер 2022
- What exactly is this thing? Tune in and lets find out together!
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My first computer!
Nice example you've found.
She's a beaut!
It seems there was quite a story about why the Commodore TED series flopped after Jack Tramiel left the company. The built-in business software was cut down from 64k to 32, for some reason, and last minute before release. And, the rest of the series of computers was cancelled. The C16 replacing the C116 because it then looked a bit like a C64 / Vic-20. The only advantage… a better keyboard. It's frustrating as the plus/4 had great promise, never realised. It would have been the "264" in the range. Instead, it stands alone.
Yeah, there was a lot of un-tapped potential for the Commodores (with the benefits of 20/20 hindsight). I think the best thing that the IBM PC had going for it was that you didn't have to reboot between programs. The Commodores weren't slower because of it, just more cumbersome.
@@TemporarilyOfflineRetroTech Yep, "un-tapped potential" is a great phrase for this machine.
There was plenty to like about that machine and none of that was in the built-in applications. It's best thought of as a C16 with 64K. I had one of these in the mid 1980s. It was sold off cheap here in the UK after it flopped. I think mine cost £80 new. I think of it as kind of equivalent to the C64, some things better, some things worse. The sound was nowhere near as good as the C64 (2-channel square wave, 1 channel could be used as noise instead). It had no sprites. On the up side, it had 121 colours: 8 shades of 16 colours, except all 8 blacks were the same. And the programmability was far better than the 64: a full BASIC with support for the graphics and sound, including software sprites. And a machine code monitor with rudimentary assembler, so young programmers had an easy introduction to machine code. As a young programmer, I'm glad I got this instead of a C64 back in the day.
On that missing operation/programming manual: if your C16 has its manual, it should be all you need to delve deeper into the Plus/4 too, as they're 100% compatible.
I totally agree with 100% of what you said - they didn't make this the evolution it could/should have been.
Here, in the UK, there was a tape-based patche to allow you to save "3 + 1" files onto cassette tape.
Nice! I love these old computers, they did so much with so little... things we take for granted today.
Well I was an Apple ][ guy and I am sure glad I was. CP/M card for Z80 processor and Wordstar FTW. Thanks.
This was a very odd duck!
While it might have been impractical without a tape deck/disk drive, I don't think anyone bought one without at least a tape deck- that's what software ran on (apart from the built in stuff). I imagine that anyone buying it in a shop would be invited by the sales assistant to buy a tape deck or disk drive. We had one (I believe; it was either this or the Commodore 16) but I was very young, probably between five and eight years old when I played a few games on it (I remember Treasure Island and Icicle Works, both good games). It was inferior compared to an Apple but then it will have been a fraction of the price. I think the idea of it was that it was a low-end serious user's computer on a tight budget; if you had a small business (or just a wish to do home accounts/send letters to utility suppliers, the bank etc.) and needed a word processor to do letters to clients/suppliers and a spreadsheet to keep records, perhaps this would have sufficed. Maybe with a disk drive and a printer it would have been useable for those purposes, if not enviable compared to Apple or IBMs. A lot of people wouldn't have been able to afford those, especially outside of America. That said, I think it's widely reckoned in retrospect to be a prime example of one of Commodore's failings; too many models that didn't complement one another as they were supposed to. Another drawback was that it couldn't run C64 software either, which seems an odd design decision, and as you found the built-in software was rather poor, which negates the advantage of having it as part of the package in the first place.
Your analysis is spot on. I think commodore had trouble evolving after the c64... it's a shame too because the c64 system was really pushed to its limits over time and did some amazing things that probably shouldn't have been possible. I do try to envision where the c64 style of architecture would have landed if they kept evolving the machine in a similar fashion to the IBM PC & clones.