What would you do if you were the CEO of Commodore Computers?

[Kalvan]

12 minutes ago, Scott Robison said:

I'm not @rje and I haven't talked to him about it. I didn't *laugh* at your specs, but they seem overly optimistic to me for the technology that was available in the day for "consumer hardware" or effectively a game console.



Don't get me wrong, I loved my C=64 & C=128DCR back in the day. Wish I still had them. That's what appeals to me about the CX16. But I don't see any 8-bit being a realistic path forward for much past the C=128. I think they could have created upgraded C=128s that had more RAM and perhaps had a few more sales (I mean, 5.7 million C=128s were sold, that's not bad, it's only bad in comparison to how many C=64s were sold over the years in combination with the profit margin of the more expensive hardware). But the world was moving away from all in one computers other than for game consoles. By all in one I don't mean the modern definition, I mean "you get this one video chip and this one sound chip". The world was demanding expandable / upgradable hardware. That's why I think they had to focus more on 16 bit / 32 bit platforms. They just didn't know how to market anything that wasn't a toy, more or less.

The 256 would have two cartridge slots a-la the MSX architecture, plus the user port and the RS-232 port, not to mention the standard datasette port and the daisy-chainable floppy port.  The 640 in either horizontal upright or monitor tower versions will have at leas four and possibly as many as eight expansion slots, each with at least four times the bandwidth of ISA as implemented at the time.  Either having MOS Technology develop an FPU solution for an expansion card or cartridge, or commissioning a third party to do so would have hardly been beyond Commodore's means.  And there is a logical CPU upgrade path in the form of the upcoming 65832 core architecture.

And as for computers with good chipsets already baked into the system being on their way out, consider that the Sharp X68000 sold over 16 million over a lifetime of seven years (1987-1994) and three major chipset revisions.  If Sharp had marketed a version in the West without the expense of the Kanji font ROM and the Video RAM to support it, it could have sold at least half as many more, allowing it to beat out the Commodore 64 and NEC PC93/98 for best selling computer series before the Windows 95 era.

The 640 would have all the ease of use of the Macintosh, but in living color, with better sound than the beeper, an actual language baked in ROM, and be just as upgradable, for less than half the price, with at least double the RAM, and with all the PET, CBM 400-800, VIC-20, Max Machine, and 64 software stack available right away (with caveats involving PET's 8' floppies and {for the 640} VIC-20 cartridges, but still).  The then new Mac, on the other hand, would have had the Microsoft Office suite and that's about it, and to program it, they would have hade to write a compiler or interpreter for it from scratch (Smalltalk and Hypercard only came out in '86 and '87, respectively) with a data analyzer.

Apple would have been (even more) screwed, and even the PC cloners would have gotten a run for their money.  The 16/32 bit era can wait for 1987 to fully blossom, by which time, I would have had the next machine in the series ready...

[StephenHorn]

5 hours ago, rje said:

I'm veering off topic, but it seems like many companies just decide to die at some point, and the stakeholders take their profit and are done.

I think a lot of this is because a successful business tends to interpret their success to mean that what they're doing is, in fact, strategically correct instead of just a consequence of some stroke of dumb luck or a temporary gap in the market. I wouldn't be surprised if Scott Robison has it correct and that C= leadership simply didn't know how to market anything that wasn't ultimately a "toy" - a non-upgradeable piece of purchase intended to be deprecated by a future model. Though I might look at it more similarly to the case of THQ Chapter 11, that even if they recognized that the "toy computer" market was drying up then they failed to understand how desperately they needed to reorganize under a new market strategy, perhaps telling themselves that it was a temporary market contraction and hoping that the toy computer market would pick up again. Perhaps they even convinced themselves that they saw signs of this turnaround on the horizon, fooling themselves into the belief that they didn't even need to change.

("THQ Chapter 11", otherwise known simply as THQ and originally known as Toy HeadQuarters, was a toy company turned videogame publisher, which made a killing in the 90s and early 00s on the back of mediocre licensed game franchises, particularly those made with Nickelodeon IPs. As an employee working for one of the studios they owned, my opinion is that they died as a result of multiple top-level failings: First, they continued to sign new, unprofitable licensed games deals, even years after having recognized that they were no longer able to negotiate competitive licenses with which they could break even, let alone make money. Second, they never really learned how to market their own IPs, having built their business on licensed IPs that needed little or no marketing whatsoever, and failed to more broadly adopt the successes and capabilities of their much more savvy European marketing teams. And third, they never learned how a well-run studio creating original IPs should operate, which wound up costing the company huge quantities of money as they went on an enormous buying spree to try and purchase their way into a more robust library of IPs, only for most of those studios to be shuttered within a year or two. These days, I refer to the company as "THQ Chapter 11", as they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012 and the THQ trademark was subsequently bought at auction by Nordic Games, who subsequently rebranded themselves "THQ Nordic" in 2016.)

((Huh. Well, that was a heck of an aside.))

[codewar65]

I would have pushed the 65c832 to production, and developed a new 80 column C64/128 style machine with a CBM PETSCII Unix style OS while trying to keep it usable for the masses with a BASIC built in, etc. 

Many of us back then liked the platform as it was CLI and basically a gaming console with the ability to develop your own stuff.

[Scott Robison]

Commodore had no interest in the 816 much less the never produced 832. Prior to buying the Amiga IP, they were very much a "Only Invented Here" shop (for the most part) in that they wouldn't make things with other people's IP. Once Jack was gone, they seemed to go the opposite direction betting on Motorola which would have ultimately been a dead end for them had they not died first.

[codewar65]

14 minutes ago, Scott Robison said:

Commodore had no interest in the 816 much less the never produced 832. Prior to buying the Amiga IP, they were very much a "Only Invented Here" shop (for the most part) in that they wouldn't make things with other people's IP. Once Jack was gone, they seemed to go the opposite direction betting on Motorola which would have ultimately been a dead end for them had they not died first.

Never the less, I would have loved to have seen a 832 and a real CBM using it. I left the Commodore scene when the Amigas started to pop up and went full IBM. I never cared for the GUI OSs until OS/2 Warp and then Win XP.

 

[Scott Robison]

12 minutes ago, codewar65 said:

Never the less, I would have loved to have seen a 832 and a real CBM using it. I left the Commodore scene when the Amigas started to pop up and went full IBM. I never cared for the GUI OSs until OS/2 Warp and then Win XP.

After reading about the 832 proposal, I agree with WDC never finishing it. Sure, it would be nice to have something that could internally deal with 32 bit numbers, but the 8 bit bus was just too limiting at the point it was being considered.

I'm with you about GUIs. I like *using* a *good* GUI (though there are many GUIs that are not good). I did like OS/2 Warp and worked for a company that released OS/2 software. Windows 2000 Pro was my favorite flavor of Windows until Win 7 was released. I don't care for writing GUI software.

[Scott Robison]

3 hours ago, Kalvan said:

And as for computers with good chipsets already baked into the system being on their way out, consider that the Sharp X68000 sold over 16 million over a lifetime of seven years (1987-1994) and three major chipset revisions.  If Sharp had marketed a version in the West without the expense of the Kanji font ROM and the Video RAM to support it, it could have sold at least half as many more, allowing it to beat out the Commodore 64 and NEC PC93/98 for best selling computer series before the Windows 95 era.

I've never heard of that machine until today. What information I can find about it online suggests it was hugely expensive, only sold about 1% of the number you quote, and was only available in Japan. I'd be interested in more information about it though, as two pages, one of them being Wikipedia, do not necessarily paint an entire picture. Wikipedia claims about 150,000 were sold, as contracted with almost 5 million Amigas.

Creating computers (and software for that matter) is a balancing act. There is always more you can do if resources are no object. But since resources are finite (time, money, silicon, elctricity, etc), it takes judgement to come up with a reasonable set of features that people are willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for.

[BruceMcF]

3 hours ago, Scott Robison said:

I'm not @rje and I haven't talked to him about it. I didn't *laugh* at your specs, but they seem overly optimistic to me for the technology that was available in the day for "consumer hardware" or effectively a game console.



Don't get me wrong, I loved my C=64 & C=128DCR back in the day. Wish I still had them. That's what appeals to me about the CX16. But I don't see any 8-bit being a realistic path forward for much past the C=128. ...

Yes, the C64 was a cash cow, the C128 lived off of being an upgraded C64 ... "it can play C64 games and it can also ..." ... more of that than we now perhaps recall was that the C128 really WAS an effective upgrade for GEOS users ... the only more commercially successful strategy would be to make it a more effective upgrade for a broader range of users. Money spent on anything 8bit other than tweaking the C128 to expand its market niches would have been money thrown down a rat-hole.

But Commodore was a company built on "own your IP, build them cheap, sell them cheap, and stack them high", and the 90s were an age when "build them cheap, sell them cheap and stack them high" was moving toward "with licensed IP" while "own your own IP" was moving towards "and charge people through the nose for the features you can get from our IP and not from the clone army".

So it may be that the Amiga or Atari ST or whatever 68K based follow up to the 8bits that Commodore made would have been destined to fade out, and the "better strategy" would simply have seen the fade postponed by a few more years.

[rje]

@Kalvan, I loved your post for the sheer level of rich detail.  It deserved more than a "like", and it wasn't a "thanks", so I chose joy... I think these reaction buttons are limited.

 

[Kalvan]

1985 would have been a busy year for me.

Just after Winter CES, I would begin negotiations with NEC, offering to license my patent with Micron for stacked Pseudo-SRAM in exchange for an architectural license for the NEC_µPD7720 DSP.  If I can't get a deal by Taipei COMPUTEX, it's still early enough that I can cut my losses and roll my own design, confident that I can stick it on motherboards by 1987.*

I will also begin R&D on CMOX flash, which, since I'll bring the white paper with me, should allow me to bring it to the market in computer hardware by the time for my next generation of computer hardware in 1987 at the 2 micron node, if not smaller.

in early May, once finals are done at U.C. Berkley, I'll take a drive down there and personally recruit Dr. Leon Chua, bringing him into the corporate sector two years ahead of schedule from when Hewlett-Packard would have poached him.  And since I won't allow any manager or the board to constantly yank funding just prior to a breakthrough in the development of the memristor, forcing his (chronically manpower turnover effected) team to start from scratch each time, I predict a breakthrough sooner than 2009, so process geometries will be much more forgiving to productization.  Also, this way Intel won't be able to steal the work and create an early version of Optane.

Just after the Fourth of July, I plan to begin development on Silicon-on-Interposer fabrication, placing the vias on a layer below the logic elements, so that chip sections can be placed to optimize chip geometry and allow more flexibility in element placement.  I don't plan for this development to find product application before 1992, but once I need, I'll need it bad.  Also that month, I'll begin joint development of TTL's 65832 core with Western Design Center.

Finally, sometime between September and November, I'll put in a tender offer for Dataram, as at this point, it is in financial dire straits, until its breakthrough contracts with HP and Digital Equipment in 1987.  This will allow me to put out my current and future RAM designs at materials and production costs, rather than have to pay cartel prices for it, something for which the period 1987-92 will become infamous for.  In particular, this should substantially reduce the production price of the Sharp X68000, and make the Amiga Ranger Chipset a practical venture for whichever company is TTL's customer for Hi-Toro Labs.  Either that, or when Edwin Meese files an antitrust suit over my memory fab ownership as a consumer OEM, I'll expose every dirty RAM industry secret during discovery if the judge doesn't grant my motion for dismissal.

*The reason I'm not going with the Texas Instruments TMS 32000 series is that Tramiel would try to launch a junk bond fueled re-aquisition (or at least make a spectacular effort) the moment he would have heard of this development, and neither I nor Atari could have afforded the distraction at that moment.