New Competing Computers (c16, Plus4, C116)

So, looking at Commodore’s 3 computers so far, the PET, which had been a success in education and business, and the VIC-20 which had been a great success as a low-cost, entry level home computer and gaming platform, and then the C64 which was a high end home computer and gaming platform, there was sort of a problem, though. The PET had already been discontinued by this point.

And the VIC-20 was being phased out as all development on that platform had ceased in favor of the 64. So that left Commodore with basically just one product to sell. The company’s founder and CEO Jack Tramiel had been the business genius behind these products so far. But, Jack decided there were areas of the computer market that Commodore wasn’t competing in. For example, The Sinclair ZX80, which was sold as the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the USA, was originally sold for $99 but by this point was selling for $49. So, even though the computer wasn’t that good, and it wasn’t even that popular, Jack still felt they could compete with this product even at the $50 level. But, more than that, they could compete with the ZX Spectrum which sold even for more money. Now, the spectrum wasn’t sold in the United States, but we did have the Sinclair 2068 which was basically the same computer here in the US. And so development began on a new chip called the TED, which stands for Text Editor. This chip was going to be similar to the chip powering the VIC-20, in that the TED would include both Graphics generation and Sound generation. But more than that, it was also going to handle DRAM refresh, interval timers, and even keyboard input. So in essence, this might be one of the first system-on-a-chip designs for a home computer. By the way, this was the Raspberry Pi of the day. It’s as close to a single chip computer as we could get it. The integration of all of those things into a single chip was the key to reducing the cost of the computer. The chip would also support up to 121 colors on screen, giving it slightly better bit-mapped graphics than the Commodore 64, but it would lack any sort of hardware sprites making it more difficult to program games, and sound generation would be very basic with a 2-voice square wave generator. But, while the TED project was going forward, Jack came to another conclusion. Commodore had not managed much success in the business market since the PET. And he realized that the Commodore 64, at the time, was almost as capable as an IBM PC or Apple II when it came to running business software. And by business software, we’re talking about word processing, spreadsheets, and database applications. But Jack reasoned that a business computer probably doesn’t really need sprites or a fancy sound synthesizer like the C64, so how much cheaper could such a machine be if those items were removed from the C64? So, what was TED? TED meant text-display. And you have to understand Commodore had already done the Commodore 64, which we considered to be the Apple killer, ultimate gaming machine, sprites, sound, everything else. Jack Tramiel wanted something else. He was going after Clive Sinclair’s Spectrum color computer and he wanted a business machine. And so we ended up with what we called the TED series. Text Display. It was not a game machine. It was for doing business. And they hoped to ship it with software for doing business. So, the plan was to use the TED chip in two different computers, the Commodore 116, and the 264. The 116 was the low cost competitor to the Sinclair ZX81. And to be honest, it was a far superior machine to the Sinclair. So, on one hand you had a Z80 CPU and the Commodore had a 6502 variant. The RAM was no contest with the Commodore coming with 16K built in. And while the Sinclair really had no true graphics mode, the Commodore had a 320x200 graphics mode with 121 colors. Also the Sinclair unit had no disk drive support, but the Commodore machine was compatible with the same disk drives used in previous models. And don’t forget the importance of the keyboard. Now, the C116 has a reputation for having a bad keyboard. And admittedly, you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time using a word processor or typing in really long BASIC programs. However, if you compare it to its main competitor, the ZX Spectrum, you’ll find the keyboard isn’t really much better there, and if you compare to the ZX81, then it’s no contest at all And if you consider that both of these machines would be selling for $49, there seemed to be little question that Jack’s vision of a Sinclair competitor would absolutely dominate. On the business side, the plans included the 264, and also a larger model called the 364 which would have a numeric keypad and a built-in speech synthesizer. Commodore hired the same guys that worked on the Speak and Spell to work on the 364’s speech capabilities. But then something rather unexpected happened. Shortly after Jack Tramiel showed off the prototypes of the Ted project, he left the company due to a dispute with Irving Gould and instead went to work for Atari. Commodore management didn’t seem to know what to do with the TED project. Jack Tramiel left! Alright? If you’ve seen the picture of him holding several TED units at a CES show, I know those units. My fingerprints are all over them. We literally, I don’t want to say we put them in his hands, but we got them to where he could pick them up. He left within a day or two of that picture being taken. Literally left from CES. Ok. And, it was a month later they said he’s gone. With Jack gone, the strategy was gone, the whole concept of this family was gone, and the 264, A.K.A. TED, died on the vine. Originally the 264 was designed with 2 ROM slots open on the board and customers would be able to order the computer with various different business software pre-installed. However, that never happened. Instead, they ended up licensing Tri-Micro’s 3-Plus-1 business software, which features a word processor, spreadsheet, database, and graphing feature. Then they renamed the machine the “Commodore Plus/4” and marketed it as a business machine or home productivity computer. Taking a look at the box, you can see they heavily marked this for productivity. “The Productivity Computer With Software Built-in.” So, where’d the Plus/4 come from? Well, ok our marketing department hadn’t had to market anything in a long time. In fact, Jack didn’t believe in marketing I’m told. He believed in sales. And he also didn’t like to charge a lot of money for the hardware. He liked to make an OK profit, but not an absurd profit. You know, remember, the other guy’s computer cost $1,500 and a Commodore 64 cost $299 and then later $199. So, when he left, our marketing department is like “can’t we make it into another 64? I mean that sold well.” And so, we don’t hear anything, we don’t heart anything, and then we hear about its name called Plus/4 because I’d left these ROM sockets in there where you could put ROM in, and they put some ROM in, ROM meaning read-only-memory with somebody’s program on it. And they charged like $399, $299, some huge price competing with the Commodore 64 price, way above what it was designed to cost. I used to say “Ah, it’s horrible software,” but the reality is I never even tried it so, I’m not going to slam the poor guy who’s software they used, but somebody in marketing picked it out, it wasn’t us. Well, let’s open it up. It’s packaged fairly similar to previous Commodore machines. And it comes with a spiral bound manual, just like previous machines. It’s a pretty nice manual and it does contain a lot of programming information and examples, but it isn’t quite as good as previous ones in that regard. OK, let’s see what else is in the box. Underneath the computer there is another spiral bound manual. This one is the integrated software manual. This entire manual covers the 3-Plus-1 productivity software that is built into ROM. Which, admittedly is a good thing it is included because the software isn’t very intuitive. There’s also a brochure in here, and again, seems to heavily link this computer to the productivity software that is included. Word Processor, Graphics, Spread Sheet, and file management. Woo Hoo. And in this little cubby, you’ll find the same things as previous machines. You get an RF cable, and one of these little antenna switch boxes for connecting to televisions. And here’s the power brick. The brick is very similar to the C64, but one thing you might notice is the connector is square instead of round. And while it’s the same voltages and amperages as the C64, it is incompatible due to the different connector. OK, let’s remove the foam and have a look at the computer. It’s actually a bit smaller than, say, the C64, as you can see. Now, these cursor keys are something else. Commodore finally decided to give us 4 keys instead of the weird 2 key setup of previous machines. But the keys are so small and so close together that it is actually just as difficult to use them if not more so. It would be really difficult to play a game with these. You’d come closer to being able to use it as a thumb pad like this. But few, if any games supported the cursor keys, and there’s no mystery as to why. The function keys have been moved to the top. And the naming convention is weird because there is no F8 anymore because it is a HELP key, and F7 must be accessed with the shift key, which is odd compared to previous machines. Over here on the side, you get the typical power switch, but thank goodness they finally included a proper hardware reset button. And it’s a good thing too, as you may notice there is no RESTORE key like previous machines. There’s an extra CONTROL key where the RESTORE would usually go. So, let’s turn it around and have a look at the ports on the rear. So, you get a power port, disk drive, cassette, user-port, cartridge, two joystick ports, and the audio/video port. Now let’s talk about these for a moment. First of all, I’m glad they moved the power port to the rear. I always found it annoying on the VIC-20 and C64 how the power cord had to stick out the side. The disk drive port is the same one as on the previous machines and it will work with the 1541 disk drive as well as all of the later model disk drives that Commodore produced, however, in order to keep it compatible it also suffers from the same bug that causes the disk access to be so slow on previous machines. However, Commodore also had a solution for that. This was a business computer, so it needed faster disk access. So they created the 1551 disk drive, which matches the color of the Plus/4 and it plugs directly into the cartridge port, making it super fast. The cassette port, however, is different from previous machines. Electrically it is exactly the same, but the shape was changed for a couple of reasons. One thing was for tighter FCC regulations on RF emissions. But also there wasn’t a lot of space on the back of this thing. They did produce a custom cassette drive for the Plus 4, as you can see. This unit matches the color and has the correct connector. Interestingly enough, an adapter was also included that would allow you to run this cassette drive on older Commodore machines as well. The user-port, which was often used for modems on Commodore machines, actually included lines for a real RS-232 uart that could run at high speed for terminal programs. Again, considered necessary for business. Of course, it will still work with regular Commodore modems as well. The cartridge port looks very similar to the C64 but it is slightly different shape so they are not compatible. And the joystick ports were also changed to these little space-saving mini-dins for similar reasons as the cassette port. However, they are electrically compatible with the ports on a C64, VIC-20 or other Atari machines. So you could buy or build an adapter. And here’s the video port, which is identical to the C64 and so it also includes composite video as well as separated chrome/luma for the sharper picture. All right, well since Commodore thought the built-in software was such an important part of this computer, let’s go ahead and take a look at it. You’ll notice on the startup screen it says that 3-plus-1 on key F1. So just press the F1 key and it will print this command, and you can follow that up with return, and bam you’re in the software. OK, so I’m going to type a little bit here. Now let me tell you about this software. A lot of people will gripe and complain about this software saying it was terrible. It wasn’t mouse operated, instead you had to learn a bunch of special key commands to accomplish much. Fortunately, all of this is explained in the manual. However, this was fairly standard for productivity software of the time. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for home users, the software wasn’t bad at all. I could see the word processor being useful, and you could also switch to a spreadsheet and do household type stuff, or perhaps even small business type things. One downside to home users though is that the software cannot load and save documents from cassette. So that means users would have to also buy a disk drive if they planned to use this software. I do think it was far too limited for serious business use, though. For one thing the screen is only 40-columns. So, much like the Osborne programs did, it will scroll to the side as you type because this wasn’t just a text editor. It expected you were going to print this out on paper as that’s what most word processors were used for back then, and that needed to be 80 columns. Another problem was that the documents and spreadsheets were somewhat limited in size. Probably not a problem for home users, but would definitely be a problem for true business users. Apparently Commodore had originally planned to offer several different ROM options for this computer, including a new and improved version of Commodore’s Magic Desk software. I’m using the original C64 version here, which is a very basic home productivity suite, but from what I’ve read they were going to really beef it up some. Anyway, at least if you get tired of the black and white colors, you can change the color schemes around to make it easier on the eyes. According to David Johnson, who wrote the 3-Plus-1 software, they had originally told him he could have 64K of ROM space. But, when the software was near completion, they told him he could only have 32K and so the software had to be cut down to fit. I would imagine many of the issues it has are a result of that. Still, the software wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t good enough to be a major selling point for such a computer, especially at the price Commodore was asking for the machine. They tried to sell the computer at $299, which was the same price they were already selling the Commodore 64 at that point. Speaking of ROMs, however, the TED machines all offered a few things the C64 and VIC-20 had both been sorely missing. The BASIC was much improved. Commodore had finally caught up with the rest of the 8-Bit world and included graphics and sound commands into BASIC so that you no longer had to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to code graphics with POKE commands. Now there were simple commands for plotting lines, shapes, and colors on to the screen. There were also other big improvements like being able to list a directory on a disk with a simple command and it also wouldn’t overwrite your BASIC program you were working on. They also included other things to simplify loading and saving with commands like DLOAD or DSAVE. And, to top it off, you could type in MONITOR and get a machine language monitor and actually look directly at RAM, or even type in small assembly language programs right there in the monitor. Apple had already had this feature since day one in their machines. So these were all welcome changes that made programming on the Plus/4 much more pleasant than the previous machines. So Jack Tramiel’s original plan had been to sell the Commodore 116 for around in the United States for around $50. And then, they would sell this machine for around $75 to $100. But, that never happened. After Jack left the company, Commodore management instead pretty much cancelled this machine before it ever hardly have a chance to get started. And then they ended up bringing out the Commodore 16, which is basically the same machine as this, only it has the same case style as the Commodore 64 and VIC-20. But these machines are essentially identical other than just the keyboard is a little bit better here and cosmetic differences. And they wanted to sell the Commodore 16 for around $100 instead of the $50 that Jack had originally envisioned. Neither one of them has a user port, so they cannot connect to a modem. Now, this machine is also identical to these two machines except for the fact that it has a full 64K of RAM, and it has a user port and all of that built in software that we talked about. But otherwise all three of these machines are compatible with each other. I think Commodore also totally misunderstood another issue. You see, all 3 of Commodore’s computer’s to this point were totally incompatible with each other. This hadn’t been a huge problem up to this point because in the early days people were content to write their own programs in BASIC, or buy the select few software titles that might be on the store shelf next to the computer they bought. But by 1984, the computer market had changed. There were well-established platforms and huge amounts of software for platforms like the Atari, Apple, IBM, and The Commodore 64. You knew if you bought one of those machines that you would have hundreds, if not thousands of software titles to choose from. So introducing yet another incompatible machine at this point in history was also more or less doomed to fail. Now if this platform had some amazing new capabilities like 16-bit graphics and sound or something like that, that might have been able to incentivize game developers to want to develop for it, then it might have had a chance, but considering this machine was only slightly better than the Commodore 64 in some ways, and then worse than the Commodore 64 in others, but it sold for the same price. Let’s talk a bit about gaming on these machines. Now, obviously these two computers were in fact marketed as low-end home gaming computers. But, the Plus/4 was marketed as a business machine. Nevertheless, I guarantee you these spent way more times playing games then they ever did running business software. The Plus/4, however was very crippled as a gaming platform. What were some of the problems it faced? Well, for one it lacked hardware sprites. Now that doesn’t mean you couldn’t create sprites in software, it just meant it was more challenging for the programmers, making development time longer and in some cases things that were done on the C64 just simply couldn’t be done on a TED machine. The second problem was, of course, the sound system. With only 2 voices, these games would never sound as good as the Commodore 64, or even the VIC-20 for that matter. But the real, and in my opinion biggest problem, was the Commodore 16. The sheer existence of this machine ended up crippling the Plus/4 as a gaming platform. Now why is that? Let’s look at this from a software company’s standpoint. You have two machines that are essentially identical and run the same software, but one machine is 16K and the other is 64K. Now, if you write software for the 64K machine, it will only work on the 64K machine, and will not be compatible with the low end machine. But, if you write your game to be compatible with the 16K machine, then both machines can run the same software and you only have to develop the game one time. So, unfortunately, most of the games were designed to work with 16K, greatly limiting the complexity. In fact, if you think about it, the Commodore VIC-20, it’s game cartridges could actually hold 16K. Which means that the games for the Commodore 16 wouldn’t really end up being any more complex than games for the good ole’ VIC-20. So, let’s start off by taking a look at some of the 16K games that would work on any of these machines. Now, unfortunately there weren’t that many mainstream titles for these machines, as a lot of the mainstream software development companies pretty much ignored these machines. But there were actually hundreds of games released by smaller software companies. This is Commando. It’s insanely difficult as you die almost the moment your character comes to life. It doesn’t scroll like the C64 version and it has no background music. And lack of background music is fairly common on these games due to lack of RAM and also needing the two voices for sound effects. Here’s Ghosts and Goblins. This is done entirely with character graphics, they didn’t even attempt to do any sort of software sprites. Still, it isn’t the end of the world. Here’s a neat little game called Kikstart. It’s far less complex than the C64 and Atari versions of this game, but it’s still playable. And here’s the C16 version of Monty on the Run. It’s actually not a bad rendition of the game, the graphics look remarkable similar to the C64 version. But it lacks the fantastic music that the C64 version had. Plus, your character doesn’t have the same animation when he jumps. Probably due to less RAM. Also the levels are similar, but not exactly the same. Again, probably due to RAM limitations. And here’s Spy vs. Spy. I actually had some difficulty figuring out how to play this as the controls are somewhat different to the C64 version. Obviously it’s missing that wonderful music soundtrack from the C64 version. And the screen layout is different. I think most of the differences boil down to the less RAM. This is trailblazer. I understand this game was actually developed on the Commodore 16 first before it was later ported to a variety of other systems. In this game you can steer the ball to try to avoid the holes. Certain colors of tiles will cause the ball to bounce, so you can hopefully time it correctly to bounce over these holes, but I don’t seem to be any good at this game. So let’s move on. Winter Events is probably one of the most well-made games for the 16K machines. The way they are able to get away with this is that each event is like a mini game and so they can be loaded into RAM one at a time. And surprisingly it even has background music. This game is called Tutti Fruity and it’s the last 16K game I’m going to show you today. It’s sort of a boulderdash style game, or you might even compare it with Dig Dug or Mr. Do. OK, so now I’m going to show you a 32K game. These are pretty rare. That’s because the Commodore 232 never really came to be. So either this game was designed for that, or maybe they were targeting the Commodore 16 with a RAM expander cartridge. Anyway ,this one is called Mr. Puniverse. It’s a little platform game. It’s actually more difficult than it looks. And here are some 64K games, this one is called Mercenary. It’s a wire-frame 3D type game. And this is where the Plus/4 can sort of shine next to the C64 because the processor runs at 1.76 megahertz. So it’s 75% faster than the C64. But honestly, most of the good 64K games were written well after the Plus/4 had long been discontinued. For example, during the 1990s, all three of the Spy vs. Spy games were converted from the C64 versions by enthusiasts. These were never commercially released. But they are practically indistinguishable from the Commodore 64 versions, other than the music. If anything I’d say this is proof that hardware sprites are not a requirement to make good games, it just makes it easier. This one is called PacPac, which came out in 2014. It obviously has a resemblance to PacMan, but there are some notable differences in game play. Plus it has a catchy background tune. Here’s a nifty little platform game called Adventures in time. Interestingly enough, this is one of the few games I found that actually does require the cursor keys to play. Here’s another one called Slipstream. I think this one is also available on the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, I’ve never quite figured out how to play it, but the graphics look cool. And I’ve saved the best till last. This game just came out this year and it’s called Pets Rescue. The same guys that made this have also used this engine to make several other platform games. But this one is most impressive. Obviously it’s very similar to Super Mario Brothers. This game easily has the spit and polish of a commercial game that you might have seen on the Nintendo or even some 16 bit platforms of the time. I think it’s safe to say that had this game existed at the time of the Plus/4s release onto the market, it might have taken significant market share from the Commodore 64. Of course, there’s no technical reason why this game couldn’t also be made for the C64 too. But, nevertheless, I think it easily shows what the Plus/4 was really capable of. Speaking of that, the Plus/4 has also made its mark on the demo scene. These programmers attempt to showcase not only what they can do, but what the Plus/4 is capable of doing as well. These are fairly impressive in what they can do with just 2 voices on the music. But I think where the Plus/4 absolutely shines is in its graphics. The irony is this machine was designed to do text based business stuff. But it has all of the same bit-mapped modes as the Commodore 64, plus it has 121 colors instead of 16. So, while it lacks hardware sprites, it can really do some amazing graphics, especially using FLI images. This concept was originally developed on the C64 using the CPU to help overcome some of the limitations of the color cells, thus allowing more colors per cell. These modes are highly CPU and RAM intensive, so you’re never likely to see these used for any sort of game, but it is still impressive none the less. Of course, none of these demos existed in 1984 when the Plus/4 hit the market, but admittedly there weren’t really any other home computers that had the hardware to produce graphics like this in 1984. So, in that regard the Plus/4 was very much ahead of its time. Another interesting piece of software is GEOS 3.5 which was developed by Berkley Softworks. This version only exists in German and for PAL machines, and was never released officially or commercially. However, it’s interesting seeing it work on the machine. The rumor is that Berkely approached Commodore as early as 1982 offering to develop the graphical operating system for Commodore’s 8-bit machines, but Commodore turned them down at the time. Just imagine for a moment if the Commodore 64 or even the Plus/4 had shipped with GEOS at its time of launch. They would have beaten the Macintosh to the market with an affordable graphical operating system. This would have certainly been more impressive than the 3-Plus-1 software that the Plus/4 got instead. So what happened to the TED series? Well, none of these machines ever sold at the price they were originally intended to be sold by Jack Tramiel. The C116 was pulled from the market almost as soon as it was released and these are very rare and collectors items today. They’re pretty hard to find. Most of them that do exist are in Europe, specifically in countries like Hungary. The C16 was sold in most countries, but even at its $100 price point, it was never a commercial success in the United States. However, it did achieve some success in some of the European countries. The Plus/4 sold somewhere around 600,000 copies. And most of those were in Europe. In the United States, Commodore simply could not move this product at the price they were asking. And it was discontinued about a year after it was released onto the market. Most of the inventory ended up being shipped off at reduced prices to discount outlets and places like TV shopping channels like this one, for example. Color designs, balance checkbooks, business statement, income tax, file management for mailing lists, inventories, recipes. Retailers originally sold the Commodore Plus/4 for $299.95, now it’s yours for only $99.95 complete. We’ll include $150 in discount coupons for its special options. Another common story you’ll hear amongst Plus/4 owners is that they got their machine as some kind of door prize while visiting like a time-share property or something of that nature. The main reasons for the failure of these machines is a combination of issues. Such as Commodore management deviating from Jack’s original plan and thus selling these machines at all a much higher price than they were originally intended to be. Also, the built-in software on the Plus/4, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t also good enough to be a selling point for this machine. And the Plus/4 would have probably done OK as a gaming machine if it weren’t for competition from the Commodore 64 and the fact that most of the games were designed to run on the Commodore 16. Personally, I like all of the TED machines when I look at them in context of what they were supposed to be. And I particularly like programming on the Plus/4. It offers a much better environment for programming whether it be in BASIC or in machine language.