Commodore was born out of fraud purported by both the founder Tramiel and main financer and fraudster Irving Gould. Atlantic Acceptance Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Accept … ration#Downfall "June 1965 in one of the biggest financial scandals in Canada at that time, with an estimated $65 million loss to investors" https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/. After getting rid of Tramiel Gould installed another crook Mehdi Ali https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/me … d-of-commodore/. Commodore management was only interested in cutting costs and extracting value.
My standard comments every time someone brings up Commodore:
'Commodore reported 7-year record revenue with good profit 4 years before going bankrupt. https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-financial- … tory-1978-1994/'
'C128 only sold on its name, scamming potential buyers into thinking it was a 2x better C64. Maybe 1% of owners ever ran it in C128 mode.'
'c128 was a case of idle engineers with no plan/strategy gluing unsold garbage components (graphic chip left over from earlier failed project and Z80) to c64 and scamming public with misleading name. 2 CPUs, 2 graphic chips, 2 monitor outputs, all in one package.'
'128 was a scam. It was a way for Commodore to get rid of unused sunk cost R&D (MOS 8563). Buyers were promised C64, but twice the number so must be 2x better, received C64 with another almost separate computer glued to its ass. Second graphic chip requiring expensive monitor, second CPU. As a bonus manufacturing C128D was more expensive than Amiga 500!'
'C128 slapped together without any plan or adult supervision. You paid for 2 cpus and two graphic chips, one cpu only ran a reset routine?, and the second "graphic chip" had no graphic enhancements and required expensive monitor. Zero practical upgrades when running C64 software, no incentives to develop c128 native software. Price with floppy drive on par with Atari ST and 20% away from Amiga. As a bonus C128D was more expensive to manufacture than Amiga.'
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/ … w_much_you_get/ 'terrible ads. There was no real business software for C64 (VisiCalc/dbase/lotus123/WordStar), yet executives at Commodore pushed ad after ad with spreadsheet bar charts instead of capitalizing on games by promoting graphics and sound 😒 Even the one game ad didnt show actual screenshots, just box art with another fake spreadsheet graph.
Our computer supports high resolution 16 color graphics - just look at those 8 color text mode bars!'
'In 1983 C64 was $300, 1541 was $300, 180K Tandon TM100-1 PC floppy drive was $189. Why sell cheap floppy drive when you can sell one for the full price of your computer and double the profit? Commodore was manufacturing all mayor chips inside it after all ;-/
It got even worse when Commodore shat C128D out its engineering hole. 3 CPUs for the low low price of 3 CPUs, two doing nothing 99.999% of the time, all in all 85% of Amiga 500 price, 100% of Atari 520ST price, at 10% the power.'
'Commodore was so mismanaged its not even funny 🙁
Commodore 65 design started in 1989? Another pointless pet project like C128 (I had one, what a piece of shit, there was pretty much no c128 soft so you ran it in c64 mode all the time, at twice the price). They were already selling Amiga 500 in 89, and you could go out and buy 386DX 40MHz or first 486s. What were they smoking to come up with 3MHz 8bit computer when market moved on to 16/32 bit? Commodore didnt know what they had when they took over Amiga 🙁 and kept wasting money and R&D on pos like this.'
'Just to reiterate, post Jack Tramiel Commodore hired new CEO with industrial construction background (Marshall Smith) who knew F-all about computers or business. This new CEO canned completed and almost ready for production Commodore laptop project because Tandy CEO told him there is no money to be made in laptops (while selling HUGELY popular TRS-80 Model 100) http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lcd.html ... This is like GM calling Musk, and convincing him to cancel Model 3 because there is no money to be made in ~30K electric cars, while selling Volt and planning Bolt.'
'C64 kept them afloat far longer than they should of lasted. They actually still sold ~150K C64 in 1994! Commodore went bankrupt because they kept selling 1981 released c64 and 1985 released Amigas all the way to 1994 with almost no upgrades. They did plenty of updates, like new C64 cases, or Amiga 600. A600 had same cpu, same mhz, same Dual Density floppy as 1985 A1000.'
'Tramiel had a thing for not keeping verbal agreements (suppliers being huge example). Whole C64 team was promised bonuses after release, instead they got "be glad you have a job" pep talk and the smart ones left.'
'Tramiel had a habit of firing good engineers 3 months after product release. Either directly, or by screwing them by moving to useless positions or taking bonuses away until people 'got the message'. Those who didnt get what was going on or didnt care about money/dignity were the ones who stayed as long term employees. Jack had an eye for suckers and people putting passion before common sense and self respect.
Whole C64 design team was effed out of promised bonuses and fired/left. People like Bruce Crockett (manufacturing), Al Charpentier (VIC) and Robert Yannes (SID) went to start Ensoniq (later sold to Creative), Chuck Peddle went to Apple, Bill Mensch hung around for two years of abuse. Same with Amiga team (Jay,RJ,Needle).
Those two videos touch on the Commodore culture of curb stomping until only the weak and dumb survive:
Oral History of Chuck Peddle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enHF9lMseP8
Oral History of William David "Bill" Mensch Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne1ApyqSvm0'
'Commodore made sure to fire designers promptly after every new product launch. C-64 custom chip designers founded Ensoniq in 1982, the year C-64 launched. Amiga team was "let go" before Amiga 1000 to 500 cost optimization redesign. This meant Amiga never got HD floppy controller - there was no one capable of upgrading PLL inside Paula.'
'CD32 was a repackaged Amiga 1200. It was the worst fifth generation game system. It featured such gems as Wing Commander running at 1 frame per second.'
'Commodore never made HD floppy controller, and the only HD capable Amiga (4000, 1992) had modified drive spinning at _half_ speed.'
'Amiga was dead man walking due to culture of clueless management at Commodore. Tramiel took pride in not knowing a first thing about computers, he would be as happy selling cars or meat. His replacement was even worse, not to mention rest of the management.'
'Commodore had a ton of reliability problems. Amigas came from factory with electrolytic capacitors soldered backwards! (and afaik they were also backwards on the factory diagram).'
'Commodore Amiga floppies used 32bit XOR checksum = 3% of undetected two bit errors!!
http://www.techtravels.org/amiga/amigablog/?p=280'
Can you tell Im a fan of Commodore? especially C128? 😜