> Commodore is one of the few companies that manufacture their own chips.
This is one of the best takeaways from this ad. Because they owned MOS, Commodore had an advantage over their competitors that is commonly replicated today.
For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
81–90 of 152 posts
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#82I 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.
Yep, and in 1986 I had just interned at a NASA lab where they were investigating multiprocessors, which at the time was a wild and crazy idea. I had the epiphany that I could bit-bang a driver between a C64 and one or more 1541s and make my own little multiprocessor, so I did. I made it all the way to the International Science Fair and ended up getting a college scholarship. I've written a lot of code but I'm probably the proudest of that couple of hundred lines of 6502 assembly I wrote when I was 17.
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#83Can someone explain the English of this slogan? It makes no sense to me. The thing being advertised is "what nobody else can give you". If I consider that to be "it", then the slogan becomes:
Buy it for twice the price.
So it should have cost $298 then?
Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#84Can someone explain the English of this slogan? It makes no sense to me. The thing being advertised is "what nobody else can give you". If I consider that to be "it", then the slogan becomes: Buy it for twice the price. So it should have cost $298 then? Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
No; they're saying it outcompetes products at or below $1,200.
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep, and in 1986 I had just interned at a NASA lab where they were investigating multiprocessors, which at the time was a wild and crazy idea. I had the epiphany that I could bit-bang a driver between a C64 and one or more 1541s and make my own little multiprocessor, so I did. I made it all the way to the International Science Fair and ended up getting a college scholarship. I've written a lot of code but I'm probabl…
So what did it calculate?
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#86That 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…
How would you print back then? Did you also own a printer?
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#87Can someone explain the English of this slogan? It makes no sense to me. The thing being advertised is "what nobody else can give you". If I consider that to be "it", then the slogan becomes: Buy it for twice the price. So it should have cost $298 then? Wasn't it better to end the sentence with "at half the price"?
You are reading it like:
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you) (for twice the price)
But it should be read:
For $595, you get (what nobody else can give you for twice the price)
Rephrased:
No one else makes a machine that can do what ours does, even if they charge twice as much!
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#88My first computer was a VIC-20 (1982 or so). 3KB of RAM. So little room, I needed to write most of my apps in Machine Code. That was OK. At school, I had an STD Bus-Based 6800, with 256B. Was a very good learning experience.
Same here, but never heard of assembly until college. How did you learn it? I don't think anything but a Basic manual came in the box.
Oh wait, not entirely true… I made a few DOS .com files with debug but did not understand much.
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of Woz's major accomplishments with the Apple II was driving a floppy drive entirely in software from the host computer's CPU, which made the floppy drive and its controller much cheaper.
... and much faster. Like *30 times* faster. Even had the hardware bug juancn and classichasclass discuss not existed with the C64, the Disk II is still much faster. It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world —was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direc…
With just a little attention to sector interleave, in fact, the Apple Disk II was capable of streaming from the floppy into memory at the full rotation speed of the disk. It wasn't actually possible to be faster at all, without a hardware modification to the drive motor.
And it was all done with a "controller" card build out of like eight chips you could get at Radio Shack. The Disk II really is probably the cleverest single piece of hardware shipped in the microcomputer era.
Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful. No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on. Just dreadful. I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways…
I thought C64 BASIC was just as good as any other BASIC at the time. BASIC is, well... "basic", and even with POKEs and everything else, we still did quite a bit with C64 BASIC. I started on Atari BASIC and that BASIC was pretty bad, too, but even so I made use of it and did all kinds of graphics stuff, and wrote games, etc. I did all kinds of stuff in BASIC on the C64 between 1986 and into the 90's. But, after a few…
I had a C64 as a kid (~13 years old), and like you, after doing as much as I could do in BASIC, I knew I had to learn machine language. I saved up money and bought the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide, learned the opcodes, the memory map, how to work with peripherals, and so on, but had no way to actually input and assemble programs, so I was stuck. The book referred to the 64MON cartridge, but as a little kid I had no idea where/how to get it. I ended up writing writing a few programs on paper, hand converting them into numbers to POKE into memory and then SYS to them, but obviously that was the really hard way to do anything.
It wasn't until my dad sold the C64 and upgraded the family to a C128 (with a built in assembler/monitor) that I finally got to try my programs, but by that time, the 8 bit world was winding down and everyone was moving to PCs. To this day I wish C64 shipped with the 64MON cartridge.