Question about the Commodore 16

[VERAULT]

Thats a pretty interesting point. And 85 col... Thanks for that.


Speaking of C16s. Does anyone know if there is any new software or games at all? After Pets reacue and petscii robots... I have heard nothing. Back to being a dead platform....

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Shaving one character off, taking it down to 64, leaves a number that is much easier for computers (especially early computers) to work with than 65, and it would still look almost exactly like a normal business typed page to an ordinary reader since the difference between a 64-character row and a 65-character row is almost imperceptible on printout, with, instead of a 65-character row's one-inch margins on both sides, a 64-character row having either one inch on one side and one & one-tenth inches on the other, or, if you were determined to be exactly the same on both sides, one & one TWENTIETH of an inch margin (half a character extra) on both sides.

I'm happy to make this case myself, IE, 64 characters per row being *much* better than 40 and, in practice, hardly a downgrade from 80, whenever anyone gives me a chance. As you note, it isn't much of a handicap compared to 80 columns for presenting "WYSIWYG" views of a printed page when the standard for such was 10 point Courier type, and just more broadly, well, since it's 80% as wide as 80 column it's not really that much worse for other applications like spreadsheets. (For a typical numeric spreadsheet the difference is going to be maybe one less column fits horizontally on the screen, verses only *half* as many.) And, yes, from a technical standpoint it has all sort of other winning attributes; 64 columns x 16 row are nice round binary numbers for the counters you need in the video hardware, 64x16 = 1024, IE, exactly one binary K, so it makes the most optimal possible use of 1K of video memory (40x25 wastes 24 bytes), etc...

(All of these are great reasons why 64 column display systems were actually very common in the middle 1970's; many early terminals and most of the first generation of S-100 video cards used this format, and the TRS-80's video system is essentially just a cheap implementation of a PolyMorphic Systems VTI card built directly into the computer. It just so happened, though, that for various reasons, including obscure factors like the column format of IBM punch cards, by 1980 most business machines had moved to 80 columns. By this time the price/simplicity advantages were mattering less because memory was getting cheaper and programmable CRTC chips were replacing discrete logic, so the TRS-80 Model III was kind of a fossil when it came out in 1980. It was still a totally usable display format, which the TRS-80 was kind of stuck with for backwards compatibility, but in the broader univers it wasn't the standard anymore.)

Anyway, Here's the problem: most televisions can't display 64 columns clearly enough to make it a practical format for "TV computers". Even in black and white it's going to be unacceptably muddy through an RF modulator, and even if you use composite (which most TVs didn't offer in the early/mid-80's) you're going to have issues if you support color. (There were companies like Apple that sold color composite monitors intended to be used with the 80-column capable Apple IIe, but on the computer side the IIe had a "color killer" circuit that turned off colorburst in text mode, and some of those Apple monitors also included a "green" switch that explicitly prevented them from mistaking dot patterns for color information. A IIe's 80 column mode is... pretty bad, on a normal non-tweaked color composite TV set, and you'll get similar non-optimal results if you hook a TRS-80 Model I up to one despite the fact the Model I *can't* generate a color burst. This is why most "serious" 80 column computers that supported color used RGB.) This "you need a monitor" issue puts a price floor on how much you can charge for a 64 column machine, and that floor's a lot higher than the Sinclair ZX-81 that Commodore supposedly built the TED to compete with...

But again, here we are again wondering to how *anyone* inside or outside Commodore could then come back around and decide that, yeah, that video chip they built *specifically* to compete with a sub-$100 computer and display on domestic TV sets suddenly made sense as the core of a "business machine". I mean... it's like if you were working at Schwinn bicycles designing tricycles for toddlers and suddenly your boss taps you on the shoulder and says "Hey, great work there, I love it. Now I want you to take that thing and get it set up so we can enter it in the Tour de France.". Sorry, no matter how great of a todders' trike you've engineered it's just not fit for that application. If you need a cheap bike for the Tour de France you're going to need bigger wheels and a chain, just stretching out the frame of a kid's trike so a grown man can sit on it isn't going to cut it. And, well, ultimately this is why the market for "home computers" that hooked up to your TV imploded not long after the 1983 video game crash; the expectations for what people wanted to do with computers, as a whole, ended up converging with the "business computer" spec such that you just couldn't cut that corner anymore.

 

[krebizfan]

The 80 column display allowed for display of what the printed draft would look like. It also gave enough room to add a large number of characters before the line need to be reformatted and words moved to the next line which was often time consuming.

The Plus/4 had to be sold as a "business" machine because that was what its specifications indicated it would be and it would be an absolute failure for any other market. Given the cheap minimal computers that managed to sell for small businesses, the Plus/4 with a good software package should have sold some. That would have necessitated the least likely element in any alternate history: Commodore with a competent middle management.

 

[GreenLion]

Anyway, Here's the problem: most televisions can't display 64 columns clearly enough to make it a practical format for "TV computers". Even in black and white it's going to be unacceptably muddy through an RF modulator, and even if you use composite (which most TVs didn't offer in the early/mid-80's) you're going to have issues if you support color. (There were companies like Apple that sold color composite monitors intended to be used with the 80-column capable Apple IIe, but on the computer side the IIe had a "color killer" circuit that turned off colorburst in text mode, and some of those Apple monitors also included a "green" switch that explicitly prevented them from mistaking dot patterns for color information. A IIe's 80 column mode is... pretty bad, on a normal non-tweaked color composite TV set, and you'll get similar non-optimal results if you hook a TRS-80 Model I up to one despite the fact the Model I *can't* generate a color burst. This is why most "serious" 80 column computers that supported color used RGB.) This "you need a monitor" issue puts a price floor on how much you can charge for a 64 column machine, and that floor's a lot higher than the Sinclair ZX-81 that Commodore supposedly built the TED to compete with...

Which is why the Commodore 16 and family should never have supported color in the first place. Just have monochrome out and a composite port to attach a monochrome composite monitor. Tandy's VM-2 (introduced fall 84) was a green monochrome composite monitor costing $159.95. Naturally, that reflected Tandy's massive markup. By that point you could get a Sanyo or Amdek 12" green or amber monitor (capable of 80x25) for around $100.

So, again, for their business-oriented computer Commodore could have, again, had a full-size full-travel keyboard with numeric keypad. Cassette port. Monochrome output. Or heck even incorporate the monochrome monitor into an all-in-one unit for simplicity and user-friendliness like the Model III and 4, but without Tandy's conspicuously empty drive bays (with face-saving placeholder plates) waiting for upgrade to floppy disk. Oh, wait a second, we've just made the Pontiak Aztek Commodore PET. Unfortunately, with the PET line, Commodore went straight from 40x25 to 80x25.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Unfortunately, with the PET line, Commodore went straight from 40x25 to 80x25.

Maybe this point in my reply got a little lost, but the issue in play here is the need for a dedicated monitor, full stop, for better than 40 column. By 1983 the cost difference between a 64x16 vs. 80x25 display system was negligible, and you need a dedicated monitor for both, so if you *were* intending to build a low-end business machine in this timeframe there probably isn't a whole lot of justification for going with 64x16 unless you're specifically intending to make a TRS-80 Model III compatible.

Now at this point it's probably worth pointing out that if Commodore had *really intended* to use TED in "Business Machines" they could have just built an 80 column video mode into it. TED fetches 2 bytes of RAM for every character it displays, one byte for the actual character and one attribute byte; this means its overall memory bandwidth consumption is the same as an 80 column video display that doesn't have color/attribute support. (IE, the same capabilities as a Commodore PET or TRS-80.) This mode would have been completely unusable on a TV, but it would have worked fine on a monochrome composite monitor (or Commodore's 1701/1702 color monitors, which have separate luma/chroma inputs and therefore have adequate monochrome resolution to handle 80 column... mostly acceptably). So far as I'm concerned this is the smoking gun that Commodore's attempt to wedge the TED into higher-end machines was nothing but thrashing.

Now, in my opinion I don't think the Plus/4 would have been much, if any, more successful if it *had* offered an 80 column mode for its built-in software for a number of reasons. By the time it came out it was already getting too late to introduce a "brand new" 8-bit computer and expect it to attract much in the way of serious software support. And again, while maaaybe there were some markets out there where you could still pretend that a "business computer" with just cassette storage might have made some kind of sense that wasn't the case in the US. Once you added a dedicated monitor and a disk drive to this hypothetical 80 column Commodore Plus/4 you're up within spitting distance of the street price of an Apple IIe starter config or a number of inexpensive CP/M machines, and both of those offered huge libraries of software, making them *far* better deals even if they might have cost a few bucks more.

 

[Unknown_K]

The Plus/4 and C16 made no sense when they came after the C128 with built in 80 column support.

For Commodore to make a decent office computer they would have had to start making software for it available at launch and that's something they didn't care about doing. The built in Plus/4 software was cheesy at best.

And to be honest if you did want a business machine before the PC dominated the area you would be better off with an Amiga.

I have C16 in its box that I have never done anything except test it because the C64 is the one with the massive software library. I wish the C128 had come out earlier so people would have made more software for that machine.

 

[vwestlife]

The Plus/4 and C16 made no sense when they came after the C128 with built in 80 column support.

The Plus/4 and C16 didn't come after the C128, unless you're talking about Commodore dumping them in Mexico and Eastern Europe to get rid of unsold stock.

On their own, they were not bad computers. I had a hand-me-down C16 as a kid, and when I finally got a C64, it felt like a downgrade to not have real BASIC commands for disk access, graphics, and sound, and only having 16 colors instead of 121... plus that awful blue-on-blue color scheme, instead of the C16's much more readable black-on-white.

Without the C64 overshadowing it and Commodore losing its direction after Jack's departure, it's quite possible that the C16 and Plus/4 would've been a success, and people would look back on them fondly today, despite their shortcomings, just as the Brits love the ZX Spectrum despite its miserable graphics and sound.

 

[Unknown_K]

Brits love the spectrum because it is all they had that was affordable (all their games were on tape because floppy drives were too expensive).

I love the case and keyboard colors on the C16, it looks nice.

Sure, you had basic commands that made life easier (if you could make it fit in 12K of RAM) and the CPU was faster than the C64's, but you gave up hardware sprites and not sure if it had a SID sound chip or not.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

In their own, they were not bad computers. I had a hand-me-down C16 as a kid, and when I finally got a C64, it felt like a downgrade to not have real BASIC commands for disk access, graphics, and sound, and only having 16 colors instead of 121... plus that awful blue-on-blue color scheme, instead of the C16's much more readable black-on-white.

Sure, in a vacuum they're not bad machines as 8-bit TV computers go. From a hardware standpoint they're better than the ZX Spectrum by basically every measure. They're also mostly better than the TRS-80 Color Computer/CoCo II and the various clones thereof (the CoCo has a better CPU but loses pretty much everywhere else), and don't even mention the original Apple II/II+, although it's kind of dirty pool to compare a 1977 design to anything made in 1984.

(Granted the Apple II was *never* really fairly compared to these kind of machines; you could argue all you wanted that it was a piece of junk compared to home computer X and incredibly overpriced to boot, but because of its early start and high degree of expandability it got to be grandfathered in as being a more premium product.)

The big thing they're missing, of course, is any kind of sprite support. The 121 color palette is pretty much the same as the Atari 800 series, but those had a better sound chip, player/missle graphics (dollar store sprites), and the ANTIC chip, so the TED clearly loses that comparison. (It is a lot cheaper, though.) And likewise they mostly lose to the huge slew of MSX-like Z80 machines equipped with the slightly dated but still pretty capable 9918A graphics chip, which had sprites and tile graphics good enough to support decent ports of most early 80's arcade games. So in the grand scheme of things the Plus/4 really can't ever be rated better than "meh, it's okay". Which, hey, would have been okay if it'd been marketed and priced properly, which it most definitely wasn't.

If the Plus/4 had come from some other company and was truely judged on its own merits it is probably fair to guess that it would have been beaten up a little less in the press than it was coming after its older but more capable older brother the C64. Whether that would have helped it sell any better, though... still pretty debatable? In liquidation it did end up selling pretty well in Europe, so I dunno, maybe if they'd played their cards right and gotten it out a little earlier and a lot cheaper (IE, the way Tramiel wanted), and with better support maybe it could have seriously eaten more of the Spectrum's lunch. The US was probably already out of reach, though. Hard to imagine an alternate scenario unless you subtract the C64 from the scene.

 

[krebizfan]

The Amstrad CPC 464 was introduced in 1984 and included a port that could be used with a cheap disk drive the following year. That managed to sell millions of units.

Commodore's decision to pair the cheaper TED machines with a higher performing more expensive disk drive did seem contrary to its goals.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I had a Plus/4 in med school. I did my papers on the 128D in Pocket Writer, and the 128 was also how I dialed into campus (with Kermit), but the Plus/4 was good enough for a simple apartment budget and some messing around. It helped it was a cheap thrift store pickup, back when that was still possible.

 

[Unknown_K]

My C16 along with most of my C64 gear was from Freecyle. There was a time if you posted for old computer equipment there you were bombarded with C64 gear.
My C128 probably cost $20 on eBay.
Never seen any Amiga gear on freecycle, probably just not that popular in my area.