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For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

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Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#41

Post by thedailymail »

antihipocrat wrote: post #31
pryelluw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)

I interpreted the copy initially as justifying the product being twice the price of the competition. My eyes are used to much more concise copy nowadays though so maybe it landed properly back then? Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.

I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#42

Post by indigodaddy »

echoangle wrote: post #40
Nate75Sanders wrote: post #37

It's a 1982 brochure, but they show Ace of Aces in the games section. The Accolade Ace of Aces (WW2 combat flight sim) wasn't released until 1986. It seems that this may have been a different Ace of Aces -- perhaps a version of the Nova tabletop game that never got released. Anybody know anything about this?

Does it say 1982 anywhere except the pricing table and the submission title here? Is it possible that the brochure is actually newer?

At the very bottom right there is a reference to 0782100M

Googling that returns below which also says (maybe infers?) the brochure is from 1982.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264626...

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#43

Post by heironimus »

syntex wrote: post #20

I bought my C64 very late - around 1991/1992. It was in Poland where I bought a used one from my friend. Back then, Eastern Europe was a decade behind the Western side of Europe. Two years later, I purchased a used disk drive. So, for two years, I could only run cartridges like Boulder Dash (I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games"). But from that boredom, I started program…

Similar to me, but years earlier in the US. The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive. My friends who had one just played games. I had to learn to program instead.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#45

Post by robotresearcher »

neuroelectron wrote: post #9

I always wondered what it would be like if Commodore had serious co processors, but the base Commodore is really too slow for anything like that. Could you imagine a Voodoo 2? I think the SNES was only about 10mhz as well and used the FX math co-processor for 3d.

We found out a bit later, with Amiga.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#46

Post by heironimus »

usefulcat wrote: post #17
pryelluw wrote: post #3

That is some hard hitting copy. I wonder how it performed …

It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school. Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive…

You could touch type on that horrible keyboard? I learned to type on typewriters at school, but never could very well on my C64 with its elevated, mushy keyboard.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#47

Post by classichasclass »

neilv wrote: post #19

I was just a little kid then, and the C64 was a neat micro, but today I can see some questionable things about their comparison matrix in the ad. Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III busin…

There was a specific reason with the TI: Tramiel was still smarting over how they screwed him with calculator chips. Meanwhile, their home computer unit was suffering millions of dollars in losses due to greedy mismanagement and the VIC-20 was driving the 99/4A into the ground as a practical loss leader. As far as Tramiel was concerned, even acknowledging the 99/4A's existence was too good for them.

Payback, as they say, is a b*tch.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#48

Post by classichasclass »

brudgers wrote: post #23
neilv wrote: post #19

I was just a little kid then, and the C64 was a neat micro, but today I can see some questionable things about their comparison matrix in the ad. Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III busin…

I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. They are computers…for example the C64’s floppy drive had its own CPU. This was also typical for printers…in fact it still is.

And Atari, though this is acknowledged in the matrix.

Bob Russell once observed the 1541 was the best computer Commodore ever made.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#49

Post by b112 »

shever73 wrote: post #11
hobbitstan wrote: post #2

I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling. This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in…

I was wowed when I first got home Internet in 1995 because it was so much more than the BBSs I’d been using up to that point, but nothing has recreated the sense of wonder I had on 8-bit machines in the 80s. Even when I bought a secondhand PC in the late 80s, going through the hand-labelled disks was like a treasure hunt. That’s how I first discovered Hack/Nethack, played Leygref’s Castle and started learning Borland…

If you get ice crean for dessert nightly, it's not exciting or even a joy.

It needs to be rare, or new, to be a treat.

I think now, there's always a computer near me. How can it still be special?

Even the change in sound and graphics was astonishing, now it's minor tweaks.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#50

Post by bitwize »

wmf wrote: post #26
neuroelectron wrote: post #9

I always wondered what it would be like if Commodore had serious co processors, but the base Commodore is really too slow for anything like that. Could you imagine a Voodoo 2? I think the SNES was only about 10mhz as well and used the FX math co-processor for 3d.

IMO in those days money would have been better spend on a faster CPU than coprocessors. That's assuming you're using the computer as a computer not as a game console.

Even then, the Commodore Plus/4 could do some pretty sophisticated gaming, even without the dedicated sprites of the VIC-II -- simply because the CPU was about twice as fast as the C64's. An example: https://psytronik.itch.io/pets-rescue

Anyway, that's blasphemy to a Commodore fan, especially an Amiga fan, to whom good system design consists of having amazing custom silicon for which the CPU is a mere mediator. After all, if a faster CPU were really all you needed, the PC wouldn't suck as much as it does!

This school of thought won out in the end, as most of the compute in today's high-performance applications (like AI) is done on the GPU, the CPU's role being to transfer programs and data to the GPU, basically a front-end processor to the actual computer which is made by NVIDIA.

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