Remembering The Home Computer Christmas Wars of 1983 (paleotronic.com) 165
"1983 had seen an explosion of home computer models of varying capabilities and at various price-points," remembers the vintage computing site Paleotronic, looking back at the historic tech battle between Commodore, Texas Instruments, and eventually Coleco.
Slashdot reader beaverdownunder shares the site's fond remembrance of the days when "The question on everyone's minds was not who was going to win, but who would survive." Commodore's Jack Tramiel saw an emerging market for low-cost home computers, releasing the VIC-20 in 1980. At a US$299 price point sales were initially modest, but rival Texas Instruments, making a play for the bottom of the market, would heavily discount its TI99/4A, and start a price war with Commodore that culminated with both computers selling as low as $US99. Only one company was going to walk away... [W]hile TI spokesperson Bill Cosby joked about how easy it was to sell a computer when you gave people US$100 to buy one, Jack Tramiel wasn't going to take this lying down, and he dropped the price of the VIC-20 to US$200 in order to match TI. However, unlike TI, who was selling the 4A at a loss in order to gain market share, Commodore wasn't losing any money at all, since it owned MOS Technology, the maker of many of the chips inside of the VIC-20, and as a result got all of those components at cost. Meanwhile TI was paying full price and haemorrhaging cash on every model sold.
You would think TI might have realised they were playing a fool's game and back off but instead after Tramiel dropped the wholesale price of the VIC-20 to US$130 they went all-in, dropping the 4A's retail price to $150. Commodore went to $100, and TI matched it, with many retailers selling both machines for $99. Inside TI, Cosby's joke stopped being funny, and many wondered whether management had dug them into a hole they could never climb out of...
After all the dust had settled, the only real winner was Commodore. It fended off all of its competitors and cemented the Commodore 64 as the low-budget 8-bit computer everyone wanted their parents to buy.
Slashdot reader beaverdownunder shares the site's fond remembrance of the days when "The question on everyone's minds was not who was going to win, but who would survive." Commodore's Jack Tramiel saw an emerging market for low-cost home computers, releasing the VIC-20 in 1980. At a US$299 price point sales were initially modest, but rival Texas Instruments, making a play for the bottom of the market, would heavily discount its TI99/4A, and start a price war with Commodore that culminated with both computers selling as low as $US99. Only one company was going to walk away... [W]hile TI spokesperson Bill Cosby joked about how easy it was to sell a computer when you gave people US$100 to buy one, Jack Tramiel wasn't going to take this lying down, and he dropped the price of the VIC-20 to US$200 in order to match TI. However, unlike TI, who was selling the 4A at a loss in order to gain market share, Commodore wasn't losing any money at all, since it owned MOS Technology, the maker of many of the chips inside of the VIC-20, and as a result got all of those components at cost. Meanwhile TI was paying full price and haemorrhaging cash on every model sold.
You would think TI might have realised they were playing a fool's game and back off but instead after Tramiel dropped the wholesale price of the VIC-20 to US$130 they went all-in, dropping the 4A's retail price to $150. Commodore went to $100, and TI matched it, with many retailers selling both machines for $99. Inside TI, Cosby's joke stopped being funny, and many wondered whether management had dug them into a hole they could never climb out of...
After all the dust had settled, the only real winner was Commodore. It fended off all of its competitors and cemented the Commodore 64 as the low-budget 8-bit computer everyone wanted their parents to buy.
Let me see... [scratches chin] (Score:2)
Sorry, I don't remember it -- and I was 20 in December, 1983.
Dumber every time. (Score:4, Insightful)
Funn, how this meme becomes dumber every time one of you passive-thinkers parrots it.
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OK Boomer.
Funny, how this meme becomes dumber every time one of you passive-thinkers parrots it.
I just reply, "Kk zoomer" ... and enjoy the thought that they'll someday be older too, probably sooner than they imagined, and, yet, somehow wiser (or maybe not).
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ditto to Kenai_Alpenglow. Awesome.
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Stop believing all the nonsense you hear on the news. You've been grossly misinformed about the world around you.
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But let's be honest. These Boomers are why we have Trump, climate denial, massive racism, and a host of other absurdities in our political ecosystem.
WTH? Boomers were the hippies, for Pete's sake. They went on the long march through the institutions and changed them to the race-obsessed things they are today. They are the ones who first started forgetting how to tell girls from boys. They are literally everything you want, and have given you everything you wanted.
Next week (more or less), it will be you who isn't woke enough. Good luck with that.
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Cosby and Jack (Score:3)
And now Cosby is in jail and Jack Tramiel is dead.
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And now Cosby is in jail and Jack Tramiel is dead.
I smell a new conspiracy theory percolating...
Full Price (Score:5, Informative)
The TI99/4 used a TMS9900 CPU, a TMS9919 sound generator, and a TMS9918 video controller, all produced by TI. I don't think buying chips at cost was the issue.
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Yeah, that didn't make sense to me either, If you're a chip company or own a chip company and are venturing into a new market, why wouldn't you use your chips almost exclusively?
For example, Doritos tried out a new product using Lay's chips, but it didn't work out.
Re:Full Price (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, came to say the same thing. Whoever wrote the summary has no idea what they're talking about. Commodore owned MOS? Great. Texas Instruments was mainly a chip manufacturer at the time, and I can say with confidence that the insides of the TI-99/4a were all TI chips. 9900 CPU, 9901 I/O controller, 9918a VDP, plus assorted other memory chips and such.
Re:Full Price (Score:5, Interesting)
The architecture simply didn't scale down. The 9900 had a ton more gates than the 6502 because it was a 16-bit CPU (on an 8-bit bus), which lead to lower yields. The TI architecture also required static RAM, which was always much more expensive.
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The 9900 had a ton more gates ... which lead to lower yields.
"Led" is the past tense of the verb "to lead". "Lead" (pronounced like "led") is a metallic element.
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You may be right, but I read it "lead" to rhyme with "deed", as in "that choice will lead to disaster":
More gates lead to lower yields - eternal truisms do not require the past tense.
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well it would still lead to lower yields in the present.
the real problem I guess was that TI would have been making more money selling the fab time to make 6502's, z80's or just about anything else than what they were using their fabs for at the time! wasting the fab time on chips for your own product that doesn't sell well is still wasting your fab time - which is super expensive. if your yields are bad then it's just more expensive, it doesn't really matter if you own the fab it still takes money to run i
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That was because everything was doubly- or triply-interpreted, and (in the base model without the enormous and expensive PEB box) there was only 1K or 2K of SRAM on the main CPU bus. Program code was all stored in the video RAM, and it had to pull its data through the VDP.
I never actually used one, but I did have an experience that left me very unimpressed. I walked up to a TI-99/4a that was set up at a store, and it was at the "ready" prompt. I pressed the enter key. It took a whole second or so for it to
Missed opportunity (Score:2, Insightful)
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If comodore had open sourced their OS
What OS? It didn't have one.
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Re:Missed opportunity (Score:4, Informative)
If comodore had open sourced their OS they could have been the worlds Microsoft and controlled the home computer market for decades.
If Commodore had licensed their proprietary OS to IBM who had built it into a proprietary* PC which their smartly suited and booted sales force could sell to their vast base of corporate customers (who had, so far, stayed away from the turtle-necked hippies selling microcomputers)... but craftily made the license non-exclusive so that when some bright spark figured a legal way to clone the IBM PC and sell it to the mass market, they could buy the OS directly from Commodore ... then they could have been the worlds Microsoft and controlled the home computer market for decades.
Fixed that bit of revisionist history for you.
* In 1983, "open" didn't mean what it means now. The IBM PC was "open" in the sense that third parties were graciously permitted to sell hardware and software for it - which was a massive u-turn c.f. the restrictive practices in IBM's mainframe business, but pretty much business as usual for the emerging microcomputer market. You sure as hell weren't allowed to make an IBM compatible machine (which would need IBM's BIOS software) until someone came up with the "clean room" technique for cloning software without violating copyright (although Oracle seem to be trying to fix that now in their action against Google).
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>Building a pcs clone wasn't difficult.
Assembling the hardware wasn't difficult, but it wasn't a clone unless it could run the same software - and for that you needed a drop-in-replacement for the IBM BIOS, since IBM wasn't about to let you use theirs. That's the clean-room endeavor they're referring to - the development of Phoenix BIOS, with which you could turn your PC-equivalent hardware into a PC-compatible computer capable of running software designed for the IBM-PC
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If comodore had open sourced their OS they could have been the worlds Microsoft and controlled the home computer market for decades.
Did we just jump ahead a decade to the Amiga?
Re: Missed opportunity (Score:5, Informative)
The 1541 disk drive was a stand-alone computer almost as complex as the 64 itself. Far from being "simple commands built into hardware" (WTF does that even mean?), it was running DOS internally to the drive. Two drives could be connected to each other via the Commodore serial post and copy disks stand-alone without a C64 connected.
So much for "simple".
The operating system was called the KERNAL. It booted the machine into BASIC.
"Plus there was no such thing as Open Source in the 80s."
Except for every computer magazine and reference book with type-in programs.
Anything else you care to be wrong about today?
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Except for every computer magazine and reference book with type-in programs.
Those were, mostly, not open source. They were still copyrighted by the magazines, or by the authors of the articles. There *was* open source at the time, but very little was consumer-facing.
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You appear to be confusing "open source" with "public domain." All software currently covered by an "open source" license is copyrighted by someone, else the license would be unenforceable.
Re: Missed opportunity. Far from being "simple com (Score:2)
Far from being "simple commands built into hardware" (WTF does that even mean?)
If I had to guess, I'd say that means this:
it was running DOS internally to the drive
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"built into hardware" means hard-wired logic gates. That's not at all the same as running software on a CPU.
Or can mean firmware, burned into ROM so it's part of the hardware.
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>Far from being "simple commands built into hardware" (WTF does that even mean?
Seemed pretty clear to me as meaning simple *software* commands, whose implementation was handled by the hardware. You wanted disk access, you just poke'd the right section of memory to say what you wanted, and the hardware handled the details.
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>Plus there was no such thing as Open Source in the 80s.
Sure there was, they just hadn't formalized it yet. In Ye Olde Days of computing you generally shared your program by sharing your code, and expected other people to build off it - open source in all but name. In the 70s that changed, and proprietary commercial software became a force to be reckoned with. Stallman started he GNU Project in '83, which lead to Free Software, The GPL, and eventually Open Source, in defiance of the proprietary trend
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The Apple disk drive was a really simple thing that was controlled by the computer, even using the CPU for timing, with a disk operating system called DOS 3.3. The next generation, called ProDos was also released in Jan of 1983 and by October was dominant, and controlled even more of the computer and had its roots in SOS, the Sophisticated Operating System for the Apple III released in 1980 and was pretty close to what we call an operating system, single user of course.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
TI couldn't win a price war (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:TI couldn't win a price war (Score:5, Insightful)
The computer itself was $99. However, the expansion box was insanely expensive, and it was needed if you wanted a floppy disk drive. That box ran you $1000, so after all is said and done, if you wanted a computer with a modem, floppy drive, and some other stuff, you were looking at around $1900. Overall, the C64 with a drive was a better value, if one wanted more than just a the computer.
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To be more realistic, the TI-99 was a testament to how much you could get out of a fairly powerful (for the generation) chip, despite a completely pants-on-head architecture. The "video chip with its own video RAM" isn't really as true as "almost all the RAM was controlled by the VDP". No really http://www.unige.ch/medecine/n... [unige.ch] - the base unit TI-99 had 256 BYTES of what anyone on any other platform would call RAM. 256 BYTES. The 32k expansion (expensive static RAM in the expensive peripheral expansion
1983 (Score:2)
I think I bought a C=64 that year
and of course continued to expand my Apple ][+
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In 1983 I think my computer was the DEC PDP 11/70 at my college.
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It's not price alone (Score:3)
Also, I don't know how it went in other countries, states or provinces, but here in Québec (Canada) there was another player: the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2, which was a lot more popular than the TI99/4A.
In any case, compare the graphics and audio capabilities of all three machines, you'll understand why the C64 was the clear winner.
Depends on country - ZX Spectrum/BBC B in the UK (Score:2)
That stopped in the 16 bit era. Atari ST vs Amiga like everywhere else in the world. No room in the wider market for the QL or the Archimedes...all went the same way as the rest of the world. The 8 bit era though - that was a much more fun time for competing machine
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The Atari ST and Amiga 500 were mostly used as games machines in the UK. Many cash-strapped teenagers bought one in the knowledge that they could get pirate copies of all the latest game titles for free.
In contrast, the NES, SNES and Genesis were hugely popular gaming machines over in the US. PC clones weren't really a factor in gaming until Doom, Quake and the mid-90s. The ST/Amiga were way better for gaming than the PC for at least 5 years, probably more.
At least, that's how I remember things!
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I know the C64 dominated the US gaming market in the mid-80s, and it was a great machine. If you're from the US, you might be surprised that in the UK, the C64 shared its market 50/50 with the home-grown ZX Spectrum. It had inferior graphics and sound to the C64, but it was much cheaper - £100 compared to £200-£300 for the C64.
From what I've read about it, the Tandy 1000 was a fine machine. It wasn't really a match for the ST/Amiga in terms of graphics, but it did allow you to use more "se
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"and it was a great machine."
Except for storage. That floppy drive had a speed that was marginally faster than an atari 8-bit tape drive.
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Virtual +1 informative. If all PCs had 16 colours graphics as well as the PC Jr/Tandy 1000 soundchip, the soundcard wars would have been much different.
Re: Depends on country - ZX Spectrum/BBC B in the (Score:2)
One big factor behind the c64's rise in the US... video games GREW in popularity after the Crash, but RETAILERS (esp. Sears & K-mart) wouldn't touch videogame consoles with a rusty, tetanus-infected pole. If you were a middle/upper-class American teenager who wanted a videogame console for Christmas post-Crash that was better than the Colecovision you got the previous year, you had one real choice: a C64. Period. Everything else was a step down or compromise. Coleco turned all its attention to the Adam
Even the U.S.had the Spectrum (Score:2)
In the UK, the playground war was ZX Spectrum vs BBC B.
I had the Timex Sinclair computer around this time (well really the ZX-81 which I had ordered as a kit), so they were around in the U.S. also - not to the same extent as the C-64 / TI units, but they were mentioned and had code in various computer magazines of the time so it seems like a significant number...
That stopped in the 16 bit era. Atari ST vs Amiga like everywhere else in the world.
Again I'm really fuzzy on the timeline, but in the U.S. special
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If you had one, you'll recognise immediately why I was banned. The keyboard. I simply couldn't get a character to appear on screen with that keyboard, and eventually just starting stabbing at it really hard. A teacher saw me and...well. Ban.
Had an ST too - it's where I started getting into MIDI and using a computer to write/help write
Re:Depends on country - ZX Spectrum/BBC B in the U (Score:4, Informative)
Really? I don't recall the ZX Spectrum vs BBC battle in the private consumer space in the UK - no one I knew had a BBC (the schools did, certainly, but common amongst private individuals?), and it was C64 vs ZX Spectrum until the Amiga/Atari wars later on. And being a military brat, I moved schools a lot in that time so I had a lot of exposure to different playgrounds....
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One thing that surprises me about that chart was the VIC 20. I only knew one person with a VIC 20 - surprised to see it so long near the top.
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Here's the chart for the UK in 1983. It was Spectrum at the top, with the BBC ahead of the C64 for most of the year, tailing off at the end.
Impressed with the ZX81 position in that year still :-)
In the Netherlands it was ZX Spectrum vs. Commodore 64.
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I have always wondered why a computer with the same "be as cheap as possible while still being usable" goals as the Sinclair machines never really happened in the US.
Timex did sell the Sinclair stuff in the US but it never took off. Surely there would have been a market for a computer similar to the Spectrum with a similarly low price (which would have been below what computers like the Atari, Apple and Commodore were being sold for at the time)
I remember well (Score:3)
Revisionist history (Score:2)
If it couldn't run Lotus 1-2-3 and Dos it didn't exist or were real business machines. If I am spending that kind of money it better generate me income or be related with my job. Since IBM ran the world it would have to be a PC clone
Re:Revisionist history (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, Lotus 1-2-3 was definitely the killer app for 12 to 16 year olds! And parents who weren't sure if the home computer was just a fad that their child would soon relegate to the closet definitely wanted to spend an extra $1000 just in case. And what could be more kid friendly than a green monochrome screen and the ability to go "BEEP".
So, nothing revisionist about that history. You just weren't in that demographic and evidently forgot that there were demographics other than yours.
Many of those in the other demographic did graduate into a PC clone at or near their graduation from high school. Then, Sound Blaster and EGA (later VGA and SVGA) allowed the PC to match the more kid friendly C64. Atari, Amiga, etc And run DOS and Lotus 1-2-3, all for less than the cost of the original IBM PC.
One frequently forgotten factor in the PC's rise was people figuring out how to crack copy protection (we didn't call it DRM yet) on that platform. (That includes clone makers figuring out how to defeat code that prevented software from running on anything but an actual IBM PC).
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Cute you had rich parents.
I had some too so my Dad got them from work. The argument was to learn IBM BasicA as that would enable me to get a job and to spend it on a PC non IBM was idiotic as an Atari had the games if that is all you cared about. Pcs back then were very expensive and to use them to get a job or run a business required the right software. AppleII did have some success early on.
If you were between 12 and 16 you had no money and Dad would typically aim to what he had at work was my point. $1,0
Re: Revisionist history (Score:2)
Visicalc was the original spreadsheet and was only replaced years later with Lotus. For the first year it was on the market, Visicalc only ran on the Apple 2. In fact, Visicalc was the main reason for Apple's early success. Business people would go into one of the new Personal Compter stores and ask for a Visicalc machine. The fact that it ran on Apple hardware was a footnote.
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If it couldn't run Lotus 1-2-3 and Dos it didn't exist or were real business machines. If I am spending that kind of money it better generate me income or be related with my job. Since IBM ran the world it would have to be a PC clone
What kind of money? It's not an $1800 TRS-80 Model 4 (which *was* a business computer), it was a $200 computer for fun. That's $500 in today's dollars -- many people spend more that on their phones these days.
TRS-80 etc (Score:5, Insightful)
And then there were all the other machines Apple, Sinclair, Atari, Acorn/BBC, Spectravideo, Ohio Scientific/UK101 etc etc etc.
And if you wanted business there were all the CPM based ones Osbourne, Kaypro, Bondwell, Tandy, Panasonic etc etc
It was an incredibly rich time for computing back then, competing hardware, CPUs, OS's, Peripherals.
There we all sorts of variations on Basic (love it or hate it), The Jupiter Ace used Forth.
Various sizes of hard drives, 8", 5 1/4, 3 1/2, 3, 2 point something, stringy floppy, the Sinclair tape system, software cartridges
There were probably hundreds of different computer magazines
It was probably the richest time there has been for computer ideas.
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I had a part-time job in college running a TRS-80 that the owner of a local music store chain had purchased. Actually wrote simple payroll and inventory applications for them, using BASIC.
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Sinclair ZX Spectrum was dominating in parts of Europe. Their tape system was so much better than Commodore (up to 6x faster bitrates and using standard tape players for music too), that at one point I ported it to Commodore to load games faster. Fun times.
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The 2010s were the richest time for smart phones.
The 2000s were the richest time for the internet.
The 1980s were the richest time for computer ideas.
The 1920s were the richest time for flying ideas.
The 1890s were the richest time for cycling ideas.
The 1880s were the richest time for mowing ideas.
Eventually a few oligarchs win and innovation stagnates
Enjoy it while it lasts.
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It was the precambrian explosion of home computers.
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TRS-80s and Atari's did pretty well in K-12 academia until the IBM PC 2 model 30s finally made a cheap enough box for them to move out of 8 bit (at the cost of graphics color - VGA was horrible but SVGA was still too expensive).
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Have about 400 odd machines, mostly 8bit stuff but have a PDP11, Jacquard J100 (based on an Analog Devices Bit Slice Processor) , PC jr, TI99/4 , etc etc etc etc
Got boxes of new shrink wrapped 8" floppies.
Early Sinclair stuff ZX80, ZX81, QL, Spectrum, Amstrad stuff 464,664,6128,PCW8512.
Played with a compucolour that a friend owned way back when they were new.
Would lov
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I remembered that... (Score:2)
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My parents got me a Commodore VIC-20. After I mentioned that I got one for Christmas, I was laughed out of my 7th grade Apple ][ programming class. My parents made up for it the following Christmas with a Commodore 64.
Similar story. I got a VIC-20 for my birthday and by Christmas 9 months later I was getting a C64. I outgrew it quickly. It took another 6 months before I got a floppy drive and modem.
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I did play on a friend's C64 for years as well.
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To be fair, the Apple ][ was 10X more expensive.
But yeah, the C64 was a big improvement on the Vic-20.
Don't feel bad (Score:2)
I had a C= 16. Talk about laughable. I didn't even have a tape drive, either.
Later I got an Apple ][+, with two floppy drives no less. That was a serious game changer for me.
Tandy (Score:2)
>"1983 had seen an explosion of home computer models of varying capabilities "
I know, I lived through it. And the summary completely left out the most important one- the Tandy CoCo 2 (which yes, I bought, as an upgrade from the CoCo 1) :)
A few years later and the CoCo 3, running OS-9 (level 2) from Microware, which blew the doors off anything around at the time (Commodore couldn't come close to that functionality). Much of the power of Unix, but on a tiny home computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
T
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Anyone still have their Radio Shack battery of the month card? Or those free black
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>"Man, Tandy + Radio Shack completely blew it. Today they would have been the perfect showroom "
Indeed they did. I even worked for Radio Shack for a few years. I loved that place.... up to the point they turned into a cell phone store, which destroyed them. As if we needed more places to buy cell phones. Suddenly all the space for the unique and important stuff and parts and gadgets shrank and shrank and you had to wait 15 minutes to pay for something because every possible "cell" sale consumed all a
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> the most important one- the Tandy CoCo 2 (which yes, I bought, as an upgrade from the CoCo 1) :)
This kind of cultish behavior is why the coco cultists were regularly beat up by the other nerds . . . :)
hawk
I remember (Score:4, Funny)
But not for long, because then I was eaten by a grue.
TI made the chips as well (Score:2)
Most of the chips in the TI (such as the TMS9900 CPU and the TMS9918A graphics chip) were made by TI. So how is it an advantage that Commodore owned the chips when TI did as well?
Or was this one of those situations where the part of TI that made the chips and the part of TI that made the computers were kept at arms length? (with the TI computer guys having to buy the TI chips at retail)
Re:TI made the chips as well (Score:4, Informative)
Or was this one of those situations where the part of TI that made the chips and the part of TI that made the computers were kept at arms length? (with the TI computer guys having to buy the TI chips at retail)
The latter. The consumer products group (TI-99s, Speak and Spells, eventually calculators) was in Lubbock. Hundreds and hundreds of miles from Dallas HQ and Houston IC research, and very much a us-v-them, exiled-to-Siberia part of the company.
Bought my first PC clone about then (Score:2)
1982 or thereabouts, bought a Leading Edge. This was a PC clone, but I remember looking hard at the Amiga at the time. Problem was, everybody at work (not the company, my co-workers) were choosing PC-clones and I jumped off the cliff with the rest of the lemmings. Did a nice swan dive at t
Got a TI 99/4A back then... (Score:2)
... since my folks wanted me to learn how to use a computer. I was scared of it until I found out it could video games too like my Atari 2600. And then my love with computers grew since then! Hehe!
Re: Got a TI 99/4A back then... (Score:3)
One thing I vividly remember about the Atari 400/800 versions of popular games like Space Invaders & Missile Command... they were OUTRAGEOUSLY hard, the same way the 2600 versions were a generally too easy (I think 2600 had the most-playable Space Invaders, though). The Atarisoft C64 versions were the ones that really "got it right" difficulty-wise.
I Got My First Computer That Year (Score:4, Interesting)
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You're in much the same time-frame as me. We didn't have any home computer until TI had already bailed out of the market (Oct. 1983), and so the TIs were $50 abandoned stock at K-Mart for Christmas '83. We eventually got a second-hand peripheral box, and I went more down the path of Forth.
The power supply had been fixed by late 1982. Oddly enough, you couldn't have done ASM without either Extended Basic or the Mini Memory cartridge. The built-in BASIC didn't have a CALL POKE at all! Like a lot of other
Texas Instruments never earned dime one (Score:2)
Texas Instruments never earned dime one on the 99/4A system, peripherals, and software.
They tried to be a loss leader without having a reliable revenue stream in place (or any stream at all).
Sad comparison of Christmas 1983 vs 2018 (Score:2)
1983: open box, connect new computer to TV, be excitedly writing your first program within ~12 minutes of tearing off the wrapping paper.
2018: (after 5-7 minutes of wifi setup, online registration, and first login) "Please wait, installing updates". If you're LUCKY, it might finish within 20-80 minutes & allow you to DO something. Like... install a game, and wait ANOTHER 40 minutes for it to install the mandatory updates.
Today's hardware is light years beyond what we had in 1982, but we had the benefit
Most other Computer were cheap, peripherals wern't (Score:2)
So I bought my first Computer in the summer of 83. a VIC-20. Served me well for a few years till I earned enough to finally get a C64.
Then, for the couple hundred dollars I had I got a VIC, the datasette and the first issue of Compute's Gazzette for Commodore. For that same amount I could have got a 16k Atari 400, and nothing else (no tape recorder, it *might* have had BASIC with it, maybe not - BASIC was an optional cartridge on Atari 400/800.).
The TI wasn't on my radar, most magazine articles had told
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1541s, the printer ink of the 1980s.
TI was NOT paying full price o the chips (Score:2)
The TI-99/4A used a TI-built processor, and a TI-built video chip.
The reason the TI-99/4A was so much more expensive was because it had THREE TIMES the ram, and a way more complex 16-bit CPU. It also had a complex DRAM + SRAM memory map, instead of the SRAM the VIC-20 used.
Commodore had originally intended the VIC chip as a successor to the Atari VCS, so they added three-channel sound generators to the same chip. And it used the same old cheap 6502 main processor they used in everything, si that was cheap.
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I don't think he was illiterate, I think he glossed over a lot of things though.
The TI architecture was pretty complex and it wouldn't cost-reduce much. It required higher-cost components like static RAM, where Commodore used cheaper dynamic RAM. Another example of this was Atari trying to compete with the over-engineered Atari 400 and Atari 800... they would lose tons of money until the XL line was ready to sell.
The other problem was how idiotic the TI management was. The computer division would actuall
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I remember. In fact, I still have a working Pioneer PX7.