[HN Gopher] For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for ...
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For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price
(1982) [pdf]
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-05-10 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (s3data.computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (s3data.computerhistory.org)
| hobbitstan wrote:
| 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 the gaps.
|
| Tech these days has long lost it's magic. The 'AI' boom tried to
| recreate the buzz with nonsensical claims that it has failed to
| deliver. It's all smoke and mirrors these days.
|
| I think the last time I was truly wowed was when Shazam appeared.
| That was 23 years ago.
| shever73 wrote:
| 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 Turbo
| Pascal.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| I still remember my first Internet search-- Phineas Gage-- and
| bewilderment at where this information came from. The recursive
| beauty is the story itself has been transformed by the
| Internet, and has been filled in very differently than was
| reported back in the mid 90s.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
| macintux wrote:
| I remember chatting online (MUD) with a friend in Sweden in
| 1990. I sent her an email, and she confirmed it arrived moments
| later, and my mind was blown. For some reason I felt "mail"
| surely couldn't arrive that fast, even though we were chatting
| interactively in real time.
| pryelluw wrote:
| That is some hard hitting copy. I wonder how it performed ...
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)
| antihipocrat wrote:
| 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.
| thedailymail wrote:
| 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.)
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| We were a commodore family growing up. I got started on a Vic-20
| and went through a good chuck of their offerings until doom
| changed the world.
| classichasclass wrote:
| After the Tomy Tutor, we started with a C64 and then later a
| C128. Both were in regular use pretty much through high school.
| bluemoola wrote:
| Interesting that the M4 Mac Mini is the same price
| djaychela wrote:
| And that's without taking interest rates into account -I think
| that's about $2500 in today's money.
| frutiger wrote:
| > without taking interest rates into account
|
| I'm sure you know -- but you mean inflation.
| shpx wrote:
| Comparing prices across time without even thinking about
| inflation is basically just numerology
| haunter wrote:
| The iMac is $1299 since its launch in 1999
| https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iMac-price-history
| colinbartlett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They bought MOS Technology in 1976, which was critical to their
| success.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/commodore-64
| gitroom wrote:
| Perfect throwback. I really miss that old tech magic - nothing
| feels the same anymore, tbh.
| neilv wrote:
| 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?
| brudgers wrote:
| _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.
| neilv wrote:
| That just means they didn't have a Woz. :)
| arthurcolle wrote:
| In 2035 every process with have a 0.1B LLM running at 60x
| human capacity, with half the overhead and twice the work! ;)
| juancn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cgh wrote:
| 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.
| syntex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does it say 1982 anywhere except the pricing table and the
| submission title here? Is it possible that the brochure is
| actually newer?
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(page generated 2025-05-10 23:00 UTC)