Posted By
Chicken
on 2009-08-18
08:27:13
 |  Re: A reply to "The Letter (3-PLUS-1)"
MikeZ...
Thanks for the input on the situation in the US. As I expected it was different from here. Also, many plus/4 users here bought their equipment in a later time frame (when discounters started selling those starter kits for a lower price). Of course "older" ppl bought the plus/4 here, too. But the missing umlauts kept them from using the wordprocessor (many letters to the editor of "Compute mit" dealt with this). So I really wonder, if there was a localized version planned. Especially to "older" ppl who already had type writer experience the different keyboard layout seemed to be "problematic", too. Younger ppl never really bothered because it's just a few things that are changed and we learned typing on the plus/4 keyboard.
You pointed out another big difference between the US and Germany (probably Europe): BBS was something for a very limited audience here. For two reasons... Expensive phone calls and the state monopoly for telecommunications back then. You couldn't just buy any modem but it had to be certified by the "Deutsche Post". Those were overpriced and often technically not up to date. It was a violation of several telecommunication laws to use an uncertified modem.
The magazines back then always had stories about illegal BBSs and raids on hackers. With a little distance you can only look back and smile about that because things have changed so much (btw, this was WEST Germany, you might not believe this... the "Deutsche Post" was pretty strict in those days).
Of course we all knew about BBSs but to most of us it was some digital wonderland we could never go to. Mail trading/swapping was the way to get new software.
Back to "3-PLUS-1"...
I browsed through some magazines yesterday which tested the plus/4 back then and they all had something to say about the integrated software. All of them read "It's not really useable for serious work". I doubt that those editors even tried to do some serious work with it. My guess is they just took a look at the word processor and that's it.
The test results list some pros and cons...
"Negative: - integrated software"
That's something I never understood. How can something you get as an extra be negative? Sure, if you had to pay lots of money for something you don't really need/want it's not ok. However, the plus/4 was cheap already.
Something else I noticed... Over the years I bought a couple of second hand plus/4s and all the "3-PLUS-1" manuals are in very good condition whereas the plus/4 manuals have torn pages etc. Obviously, ppl didn't even look at it. Which is sad because the German "3-PLUS-1" manual is well written (unlike many other Commodore manuals).
Another reason for the "unpopularity" of the "3-PLUS-1" is that many starter kits came with a datasette - most plus/4 software came on tapes anyway. Unless you had the pricey Turbo Plus cartridge you couldn't use the integrated software.
Here in Germany quite a few plus/4 users just didn't have a floppy drive (Usually those who later on got a C64.), leave alone a printer (quite expensive back then, too). Those who really wanted to do some "serious work" and got floppy drives and printers used some software that supported umlauts.
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