For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
40 comments
·May 10, 2025neilv
cgh
Paperclip (word processor) had an 80 column preview mode, which showed your text in hi-res 80 columns. It seemed like magic at the time and made ten year old me feel like I was performing serious business.
brudgers
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.
juancn
The disk drive uses a serial protocol and it actually has 8k of RAM and a 6502 CPU.
There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers.
Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.
fmajid
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.
neilv
That just means they didn't have a Woz. :)
arthurcolle
In 2035 every process with have a 0.1B LLM running at 60x human capacity, with half the overhead and twice the work! ;)
colinbartlett
Interesting to me that the Apple II+ was the only one in the comparison matrix that supported only upper case letters.
That lead me to this:
https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/2833/why...
classichasclass
It's a fair cop against the II+ but there are other things in the comparison which are mildly hinky. I find their characterization of POKEY a little unfair, even though I think SID is superior, and the CP/M option on the C64 was nearly useless because the 1541 didn't read MFM formats. (Much more useful on the C128, but you needed a 1571 disk drive, and by 1985 CP/M was on its way out.) The keyboard criteria are also somewhat of an Apples-to-Commodores comparison, so to speak. Still, it's hard-hitting ad copy and it was Tramiel's Commodore -- he was determined to win, by golly.
_wire_
But there was the Apple 80 column card option with full ascii. Add USCD Pascal and suddenly it morphed from plaything to a programming-for-computer-science trainer.
Lerc
It's interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, combined with the features that they chose to highlight.
The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show information.
High end workstations of the era gave you decent resolution bitmapped displays long before they focused on colour.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a household that had at various times TRS-80, a PET, CBM8032, VIC-20 and a C64 (plus others, the Casio fx9000P, was nice but I never had the tools to go beyond BASIC) . If you wanted a computer that could do a bit of everything the C64 was a good choice, If you wanted games, it was an excellent choice, but If you wanted to work, characters on screen was what you wanted.
Nate75Sanders
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?
echoangle
Does it say 1982 anywhere except the pricing table and the submission title here? Is it possible that the brochure is actually newer?
syntex
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 programming in BASIC, always dreaming about creating the perfect text based game ;p
ChrisMarshallNY
My 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.
gitroom
Perfect throwback. I really miss that old tech magic - nothing feels the same anymore, tbh.
pryelluw
That is some hard hitting copy. I wonder how it performed …
usefulcat
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 word processor.
But yeah, mostly I played games on it. It was a great gaming machine for its time.
pryelluw
I had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)
antihipocrat
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.
unsnap_biceps
It was life changing at the time. They sold something like 15 million units. Everyone was running a commodore in my neck of the woods.
nickjj
It's interesting because when I read "For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price" all my brain does is parse that sentence as they are charging double what they should because there's no competition.
It's not until I scroll down to the pricing table to see what they really mean is their machine is half the price while having more features than the rest.
neuroelectron
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.
wmf
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.
neuroelectron
Yes but think of the Commodore of the trusted, known and completely grokable system that orchestrates the co-processors. Then you can run LLMs or whatever data-intensive task you like. Still, all that data has to go through the CPU bus.
guidedlight
Commodore was such a juggernaut at the time. It was the first truly successful home computer.
It’s a shame that poor management, product fragmentation, and failure to respond to IBM/Microsoft killed the company.
LPisGood
The copy and the features remind me a lot of modern Apple.
This was the first I’ve heard that Commodore made their own hardware.
jdietrich
They bought MOS Technology in 1976, which was critical to their success.
bluemoola
Interesting that the M4 Mac Mini is the same price
haunter
The iMac is $1299 since its launch in 1999 https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iMac-price-history
djaychela
And that's without taking interest rates into account -I think that's about $2500 in today's money.
frutiger
> without taking interest rates into account
I’m sure you know — but you mean inflation.
shpx
Comparing prices across time without even thinking about inflation is basically just numerology
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 business computer). Buyers who knew the real set of alternatives, at and below the C64's price point, might question why they need 64KB RAM, when the popular lower-priced competitors not shown in the table also did fine games and Basic programming (the main uses of home computers) while costing less money.
Then there's structuring "TV Output" as a feature of the C64, which they say the TRS-80 Model III doesn't have. But that's because the TRS-80 has an integrated display monitor, while the C64 includes no display in that price comparison.
I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. But that IBM PC defined industry standard peripheral interfaces for years.
The competitors also had obvious strengths not shown. Want your word processor to be in crisp 80-column text? A real spreadsheet program? Math coprocessor? Better graphics? Option to upgrade to a hard disk drive?