Born in 1970, Commodore was my life as a computer and my first foray into programming. A great company and I have so many wonderful memories of typing BASIC code lines or just typing on the keyboards.
@ 6:25 mentioned the non-standard DIN plugs. Bil Hurd, who designed these computers, said that the reason why these were used for the C16, Plus4 and the C116 was their boards were too busy/dense to use the standard Atari-type serial ports. Once Jack Tramiel left Commodore to go to Atari, he and his sons focused on developing the Atari ST, while Commodore acquired the company that eventually put out the Amiga. Jack himself was not into computers or chips, but he could hire and inspire (and fire). Commodore was never the same without him. Amazing how an Auschwitz survivor could have such an influence on the personal computer industry.
"Someone stabbed the box" ... let me imagine the year and take a wild guess here that it was someone throwing ninja star at it, which would not penetrate wood.
8:44 - "Marketing people" and "design decisions" -- I hope this is a cliff hanger since I'm now interested in what the marketing people did and what these design decisions were.
In a nutshell: this series of machines was not intended to replace the C64, but to augment Commodore’s lineup of computers. When Jack left, marketing decided to position the Plus/4 and C16 as successors. According to Bil Herd and David Pleasance, this was due to the C64 practically selling itself and marketing frightened of actually having to figure out how to promote the new machines. “Hey, make them C64 like and they’ll take care of themselves!” Incidentally, check out some of Bil’s, David’s, and Dave Haynie’s videos here for insight. Also, Brian Bagnall’s series of books are very informative.
ALL of Commodore's problems were due to their people in marketing!!! I still recall talking to one at a World of Commodore show in Toronto back in the early '90s. I asked one "why aren't you advertising more?!" and his lame reply was that "advertising costs money"... I was floored... ummm... it MAKES MONEY... as they soon found out in 1994, their lack of marketing didn't help them one bit.
WOW! tuve la Timex Sinclair 1000, TK85 y MSX Gradiente. Estudié con TK90, Timex Sinclair 2068, Commodore 64 y Commodore 128. Gracias por esto. Saludos.
Those machines were all designed by Bill Herd, who was (and still is) a master of doing a heck of a lot with not a lot. The Plus/4 was my favourite Commodore machine. They finally got a decent BASIC interpreter with the release of the C16 and the Plus/4.
Yes. It would have to be later. The c64 was designed in 81 and released in the last half of 82. Wikipedia says this was released in 1984. Don't know what he was thinking of.
It's likely that the Timex from the filing cabinet was a Timex-Sinclair 2068 and not a TS1000 as shown in the video. The 2068 was the american version of the Spectrum released in 1983 and so had colours. Even Commodore wouldn't have seen 1981's TS1000 as competition. :)
I remember pouring a whole Fanta over my commodore - yet it surprised me by working nonetheless the day after that tantrum... ...never thought of stabbing the box though.
I really like the concept of the C116 - for $49 it's a really smart little starter machine. The later models in the series didn't make sense, though - why not just get a C64 if you're spending that sort of money?
The 16K games for the C16 & 116 tended to be 11-15K in size. I don't think games used the graphics modes at all but rather redefined character sets. The plus/4 and C16 were pretty good for getting your feet wet with BASIC 3.5. Lotsa graphics command, some structured programming, simple debugging aids, non-cryptic disk access. Not sure what the C116 was good for with that intolerable keyboard; there were a *few* decent 16K games that could hold a 12-year-old's attention, but when your pals had C64s... though I must admit it's kinda cute.
To save memory, most BASIC interpreters would convert the characters you typed into a compact tokenised form, as each line was entered. This also improves the speed when the programme is run, as it doesn't have to parse text.
The C116 or the C64 weren't the Raspberry Pi of it's day. The actual inspiration for the R Pi was Acorn's BBC Micro, aimed specifically at education and to complement the BBC's series of computer literacy programmes. It also had enough ports, interfaces and ROM sockets to sink a battleship and a very powerful OS, complete with a superb version of BASIC. Eben Upton, David Braben of Elite fame (which he created on the BBC Micro) and several others took this as inspiration. And of course, Acorn created the original ARM chip. 🙂
Lu Tello The 116 wasn’t intended for business. Its bigger brothers, the 264 and 364 with full travel keyboards, were. This cutie was supposed to go after Sinclair.
There there! Its all part of your therapy. Take a nice slow deep calming cleansing breath; hold it for a moment; and slowly let it all out as you smile. ;-)
It’s fascinating just how uncertain computer design was in the pre-PC era. I had the Timex Sinclair 1000 and it’s hard to see it as any kind of competitor to the Commodores which were much more robust. The TS 1000 was, at best, an intro or beginner machine to learn the very basics of BASIC. I quickly outgrew it ( I was in about 5th or 6th grade at the time). I also had the C64 which was actually a proper computer with good graphics capability and software offerings. In the end it was the Apple IIe and the PC that swept them all away.
Yeah, but the reasons for that are not necessarily technical in nature. The key to the PC's success was Microsoft's underhanded behaviour, a growing desire for a 'standard' that was backwards compatible so you didn't constantly need new software, and the fact that IBM built the thing almost entirely out of off the shelf components and didn't manage to protect the design in any meaningful way, creating an influx of cheap clones. The PC gained ground gradually, but it didn't truly dominate until the era of the 486... The apple II range benefited from backwards compatibility, but was deliberately killed by apple to push the macintosh. The last in the series, the IIGS even had a slower CPU than was available (standard 65816's at the time were 4 mhz parts, the one in the IIGS only ran at 2.68 mhz - specficically to avoid making the macintosh look bad, since the IIGS otherwise had a similar OS, Much better graphics and sound capabilities, and extensive backwards compatibility.) Seems what matters most in the long term may have been backwards compatibility and inter-operability, since the longest lived platforms maintained the capacity to run the same software over many, many generations. I mean, modern 2019 PC's can technically still run programs written for the original IBM 5150... more than 3 decades of unbroken compatibility... The Amiga could have held on, I think, if Commodore had managed things better and had been more adept at upgrading the platform to keep it relevant. Probably would still have lost out to the PC, but it may have held on as a niche architecture the same way that the macintosh did...
@@KuraIthys I don't think the PC's advantage was much more than a mistake. Commodore would have been FAR more dominant had they used marketing/advertising to any meaningful extent. Now you're right about compatibility and I think Commodore dropped the ball in a big way on that with the 128...which probably sounds odd since it was basically commodore 64 compatible. But, hear me out. I think they could have vaulted past everyone if they'd tried to do the same thing with the C64 that Apple did as they tried to switch to the AppleII gs. Only Commodore would have been far more successful. Switching to a 65816 for a much higher speed but with backward compatibility...and adding another video mode (even if it basically just switched off the bulk of the VIC) for 640x200 so it could handle business applications well. Of course, the increased memory use by the video/CPU would have required that they have two memory buses and make the new video chip buffer the CPU's requests, mostly with something like a delayed write. But if they'd pulled it off, they would have had the whole library of the commodore 64 in a machine that was roughly on par with the PCs it was going up against. With theoretically up to 16 meg of memory without complex memory banking, 16bit registers, 14mhz operation, etc. Sorry for the ramble. I've been giving this a lot of thought over the past few weeks for some reason.
The TI99/4 cost over $1000 in 1979, but that included a color monitor. This left many people with the impression to this day that it was a high end machine, which was also helped by bragging about its 16 bit microprocessor. The TI99/4A with a much better keyboard was a lot cheaper as it was sold on its own. When I bought mine in 1982 it was under $400. TI got into a price war with Commodore's VIC 20 and by 1983 both machines were under $90. The problem was that the TI99/4A cost $120 to make while Commodore was making a profit. The C64 was still in the $500 range at this point. TI hoped to make up for its losses in peripherals and software but that didn't work out. TI announced the very cheap black and white TI99/2 which was probably what worried Jack Tramiel, as well as the higher end TI99/8 but left the market without actually releasing them.
@@jecelassumpcaojr890 Meanwhile Atari was caught in the crossfire with it's 8 bit microcomputers, suffering the damage of a price war it wasn't technically even part of.
الجمهورية اليمنية 325 المعهد العام لللغات الرقمية 392 حركة كمبيوتر 180 طاقة كهربائية 180 الحركة الكمبيوتر 228 الطاقه الكهربائيه 228 المؤسسة العامة للاتصالات السلكية واللاسلكية مكتب المدير العام فني شبكات ابراهيم محمد صالح غثيم 273
this isn't a criticism, Adrian seemed very anxious in front of the camera; assure him that we appreciate him sharing his knowledge and I know exactly how it feels!
Born in 1970, Commodore was my life as a computer and my first foray into programming. A great company and I have so many wonderful memories of typing BASIC code lines or just typing on the keyboards.
@ 6:25 mentioned the non-standard DIN plugs. Bil Hurd, who designed these computers, said that the reason why these were used for the C16, Plus4 and the C116 was their boards were too busy/dense to use the standard Atari-type serial ports.
Once Jack Tramiel left Commodore to go to Atari, he and his sons focused on developing the Atari ST, while Commodore acquired the company that eventually put out the Amiga.
Jack himself was not into computers or chips, but he could hire and inspire (and fire). Commodore was never the same without him. Amazing how an Auschwitz survivor could have such an influence on the personal computer industry.
"Someone stabbed the box" ... let me imagine the year and take a wild guess here that it was someone throwing ninja star at it, which would not penetrate wood.
8:44 - "Marketing people" and "design decisions" -- I hope this is a cliff hanger since I'm now interested in what the marketing people did and what these design decisions were.
In a nutshell: this series of machines was not intended to replace the C64, but to augment Commodore’s lineup of computers. When Jack left, marketing decided to position the Plus/4 and C16 as successors. According to Bil Herd and David Pleasance, this was due to the C64 practically selling itself and marketing frightened of actually having to figure out how to promote the new machines. “Hey, make them C64 like and they’ll take care of themselves!” Incidentally, check out some of Bil’s, David’s, and Dave Haynie’s videos here for insight. Also, Brian Bagnall’s series of books are very informative.
I love this computer history video. Need moooaaarrr!
i'd love to see this guy again, he fluffed a date slightly but his quality of knowledge and his deeper feel for the field is obvious
ALL of Commodore's problems were due to their people in marketing!!! I still recall talking to one at a World of Commodore show in Toronto back in the early '90s. I asked one "why aren't you advertising more?!" and his lame reply was that "advertising costs money"... I was floored... ummm... it MAKES MONEY... as they soon found out in 1994, their lack of marketing didn't help them one bit.
So cool! I grew up with the C64 & C128 however I never heard of the 116 / 232 / 264 / v364. Cheers!
Why does this guy know so much about commodore! I mean it seems that he could go on for hours, or even days. Kinda cool.
Never mind that, I want a closer look at Adrian's calculator watch!
WOW! tuve la Timex Sinclair 1000, TK85 y MSX Gradiente. Estudié con TK90, Timex Sinclair 2068, Commodore 64 y Commodore 128. Gracias por esto. Saludos.
I got my hands on one 116 back in the day from a friend. Yes he got it in Germany, had very little software and I trouble with the power cable.
Those machines were all designed by Bill Herd, who was (and still is) a master of doing a heck of a lot with not a lot. The Plus/4 was my favourite Commodore machine. They finally got a decent BASIC interpreter with the release of the C16 and the Plus/4.
Wow, 4k gaming back in 1984!
Hehe, yeah. Four kilobytes of memory. Not 4K screen resolution.
@@CarFreeSegnitz /r/whoosh
Ain't nobody getting whooshed here
The PDP-1 had a display with 1024x1024 resolution, and a display with 4096x4096 resolution. So probably there was some 4k gaming in the 1960s.
OH, so _that's_ what TED means. But why would so many people give talks on Text Editing Chipsets?
Its a different TED. The TED in TED conferences stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design.
@@KenHarding123 whoosh
@@KenHarding123 No, it stands for Text Editing Chipsets. Did you even watch the video?? LOL xD
"Designed in Japan" - that makes a lot of sense, it looks like an MSX computer...
Yutaka Takenouchi Most Commodores had Japanese industrial design.
Many years ago I saw one of these, computer only, with one key missing on a car boot stall. Man, I wish I'd bought it.
3:43 To anyone who claims that gamer rage is a modern phenomenon, I present to you Exhibit A.
'81-'82? Surely not - more mid eighties I would have thought.
Yes. It would have to be later. The c64 was designed in 81 and released in the last half of 82. Wikipedia says this was released in 1984. Don't know what he was thinking of.
yeh true, excellent vid tho, haven't seen this guy before i'd like to see more of him
This project started in late 1982, but was delayed and didn’t really take off until Bil Herd joined in ‘83. [See: Brian Bagnall’s books]
I've got two of these things too, one boxed as well. It has a low serial of 2774 :)
It's likely that the Timex from the filing cabinet was a Timex-Sinclair 2068 and not a TS1000 as shown in the video. The 2068 was the american version of the Spectrum released in 1983 and so had colours. Even Commodore wouldn't have seen 1981's TS1000 as competition. :)
I remember pouring a whole Fanta over my commodore - yet it surprised me by working nonetheless the day after that tantrum...
...never thought of stabbing the box though.
I really like the concept of the C116 - for $49 it's a really smart little starter machine.
The later models in the series didn't make sense, though - why not just get a C64 if you're spending that sort of money?
And that's what everyone did: the 116/16/Plus4 were discontinued pretty quickly, while C64 kept being produced until the very end of the company.
I still have my Plus4 in the box, I got for $10. Never really did anything with it do to non-standard ports.
The 16K games for the C16 & 116 tended to be 11-15K in size. I don't think games used the graphics modes at all but rather redefined character sets. The plus/4 and C16 were pretty good for getting your feet wet with BASIC 3.5. Lotsa graphics command, some structured programming, simple debugging aids, non-cryptic disk access. Not sure what the C116 was good for with that intolerable keyboard; there were a *few* decent 16K games that could hold a 12-year-old's attention, but when your pals had C64s... though I must admit it's kinda cute.
It amazes me that with such limited resources they wrote stuff in an interpreted language.
You can think of it as a compression scheme.
To save memory, most BASIC interpreters would convert the characters you typed into a compact tokenised form, as each line was entered. This also improves the speed when the programme is run, as it doesn't have to parse text.
I had a c116 as a kid. Unfortunately I threw it away in 2000 when I was 16. Thought it was a worthless piece of obsolete paperweight.... :(
It’s a fairly insignificant machine.
I’m still waiting for videos about the Amiga.
Oh. I'm waiting for videos about the Commodore 900.
Wasn't this an Ira Velinsky design?
The Raspberry Pi of it's day
OMG if I had a Pi in my youth! I maxed out my TS1000 & C64 in the mid-late 80s. I desperately needed more capacity for my imagination.
The C116 or the C64 weren't the Raspberry Pi of it's day. The actual inspiration for the R Pi was Acorn's BBC Micro, aimed specifically at education and to complement the BBC's series of computer literacy programmes. It also had enough ports, interfaces and ROM sockets to sink a battleship and a very powerful OS, complete with a superb version of BASIC. Eben Upton, David Braben of Elite fame (which he created on the BBC Micro) and several others took this as inspiration. And of course, Acorn created the original ARM chip. 🙂
I'm still subscribed to the Hackaday channel just because Bil Herd post there from time to time and I always learn something interesting from him.
Adrian's great
So where did the Vic20 fall into this timeline, was that after these?
Vic20 was before - these came a few years later
What business would put up with a chicklet keyboard?
Lu Tello The 116 wasn’t intended for business. Its bigger brothers, the 264 and 364 with full travel keyboards, were. This cutie was supposed to go after Sinclair.
Oh right sorry I misheard.
1:33 84-85
Shoutout to all my unashamed fam out there if u know u know 🏆
omg u have ruined everything when u connect it to lcd monitor :/ should have vbeen to any crt monitors :(
There there! Its all part of your therapy. Take a nice slow deep calming cleansing breath; hold it for a moment; and slowly let it all out as you smile. ;-)
It’s fascinating just how uncertain computer design was in the pre-PC era. I had the Timex Sinclair 1000 and it’s hard to see it as any kind of competitor to the Commodores which were much more robust. The TS 1000 was, at best, an intro or beginner machine to learn the very basics of BASIC. I quickly outgrew it ( I was in about 5th or 6th grade at the time). I also had the C64 which was actually a proper computer with good graphics capability and software offerings. In the end it was the Apple IIe and the PC that swept them all away.
Yeah, but the reasons for that are not necessarily technical in nature.
The key to the PC's success was Microsoft's underhanded behaviour, a growing desire for a 'standard' that was backwards compatible so you didn't constantly need new software, and the fact that IBM built the thing almost entirely out of off the shelf components and didn't manage to protect the design in any meaningful way, creating an influx of cheap clones.
The PC gained ground gradually, but it didn't truly dominate until the era of the 486...
The apple II range benefited from backwards compatibility, but was deliberately killed by apple to push the macintosh.
The last in the series, the IIGS even had a slower CPU than was available (standard 65816's at the time were 4 mhz parts, the one in the IIGS only ran at 2.68 mhz - specficically to avoid making the macintosh look bad, since the IIGS otherwise had a similar OS, Much better graphics and sound capabilities, and extensive backwards compatibility.)
Seems what matters most in the long term may have been backwards compatibility and inter-operability, since the longest lived platforms maintained the capacity to run the same software over many, many generations.
I mean, modern 2019 PC's can technically still run programs written for the original IBM 5150...
more than 3 decades of unbroken compatibility...
The Amiga could have held on, I think, if Commodore had managed things better and had been more adept at upgrading the platform to keep it relevant.
Probably would still have lost out to the PC, but it may have held on as a niche architecture the same way that the macintosh did...
@@KuraIthys I don't think the PC's advantage was much more than a mistake. Commodore would have been FAR more dominant had they used marketing/advertising to any meaningful extent.
Now you're right about compatibility and I think Commodore dropped the ball in a big way on that with the 128...which probably sounds odd since it was basically commodore 64 compatible. But, hear me out. I think they could have vaulted past everyone if they'd tried to do the same thing with the C64 that Apple did as they tried to switch to the AppleII gs. Only Commodore would have been far more successful. Switching to a 65816 for a much higher speed but with backward compatibility...and adding another video mode (even if it basically just switched off the bulk of the VIC) for 640x200 so it could handle business applications well.
Of course, the increased memory use by the video/CPU would have required that they have two memory buses and make the new video chip buffer the CPU's requests, mostly with something like a delayed write. But if they'd pulled it off, they would have had the whole library of the commodore 64 in a machine that was roughly on par with the PCs it was going up against. With theoretically up to 16 meg of memory without complex memory banking, 16bit registers, 14mhz operation, etc.
Sorry for the ramble. I've been giving this a lot of thought over the past few weeks for some reason.
TI 99/4A cheap? Didn't it cost more than a C64?
The TI99/4 cost over $1000 in 1979, but that included a color monitor. This left many people with the impression to this day that it was a high end machine, which was also helped by bragging about its 16 bit microprocessor. The TI99/4A with a much better keyboard was a lot cheaper as it was sold on its own. When I bought mine in 1982 it was under $400. TI got into a price war with Commodore's VIC 20 and by 1983 both machines were under $90. The problem was that the TI99/4A cost $120 to make while Commodore was making a profit. The C64 was still in the $500 range at this point. TI hoped to make up for its losses in peripherals and software but that didn't work out. TI announced the very cheap black and white TI99/2 which was probably what worried Jack Tramiel, as well as the higher end TI99/8 but left the market without actually releasing them.
@@jecelassumpcaojr890 Meanwhile Atari was caught in the crossfire with it's 8 bit microcomputers, suffering the damage of a price war it wasn't technically even part of.
This looks like basic to me.
if c116 was compatible with vic20 or pet hmmmm
MY MACHINES! MYY MACHINES!! xD
Pensaba que Commodore era alemana.
84
الجمهورية اليمنية 325
المعهد العام لللغات الرقمية 392
حركة كمبيوتر 180
طاقة كهربائية 180
الحركة الكمبيوتر 228
الطاقه الكهربائيه 228
المؤسسة العامة للاتصالات السلكية واللاسلكية
مكتب المدير العام
فني شبكات
ابراهيم محمد صالح غثيم 273
heyo
this isn't a criticism, Adrian seemed very anxious in front of the camera; assure him that we appreciate him sharing his knowledge and I know exactly how it feels!
I think he did fine, and did not seem uncomfortable or anxious.
Early cool
jd
Are there any developers for virtual reality working on a rocket skateboard/hoverboard game?
I know that this has nothing to do with the video but what is the reason we don’t use 512, 1024, 2048 ect. bit encryption?
9th
FIRST!!