|  What Is The Commodore 264 family? |
History Hardware
The Commodore 264 family was a line of computers made by Commodore Business Machines. It was the follow-up to the VIC-20 and the C=64, mainly targeted for business use. The 264 family includes the following computers:
116
16
232
Plus/4
264
364
Here follows a brief history of the Commodore 264 series, as described by Eng. Bil Herd, taken from his own comment he wrote in the Facebook group "Commodore C16/Plus/4" the 20th of June 2019.
The C116, C264 and C364 were part of a family of computers named internally after the main chip TED. This was a whole thought out concept by Jack Tramiel [JT from now] and his exec team, and included software such as Magic Desk and talking Magic Desk as we had hired one of the TI Speak & Spell guys. There was also a new floppy drive, printer (or old printer in a new color and model number) and a new monitor (1801/2). "Playful" ideas like the 232s were tried because it didn't cost anything to have it ready and it leveraged the fact that 64K drams had just come out in a 16x4 package, meaning that you could use less than 8 chips. In short this was meant to be an ecosystem. Yes CBM knew there was money in peripherals. >:)
The market was the business market, and I assume educational, cheap home with emphasis on text and a full color palette and enough sound to beep and boink. It was specifically spec'ed to not compete with the C64 market, if you wanted sprites and good audio we will still sell you a '64.
When JT left the whole concept dissolved before our eyes, peripherals went away and a couple of specific models were re-branded by a marketing department that had only ever known the successes of the C64. Since TED suddenly became overpriced and expensive we artificially created the niche using semi-compromised designs rather than the original concept of a $49USD C116, $79USD 264, at whatever the 364V was slated to sell for.
During this time CBM Japan/Tokyo did what they did best, rearrange existing pieces utilizing the expertise in high qty production and strong vendor ties and a couple of fill-in models were created. The original C16 was a single sided PCB as an example of scavenging dollars. It has been said that these models were an attempt to use inventory, but that inevitably doesn't work since soon afterwards new chips have to be remade, and if they weren't yet on the ROI curve they cost a lot.
No-one ever said lets design this for xxx spot of the world such as Eastern Europe, other than we usually considered the US market first. The fact shiploads went to Europe would have been some scavenging of inventory, similar to selling to Comb who finally sold it for the correct price of $79. The fact that the same TED chip and board could do either PAL or NTSC and so could be sold anywhere including Europe were part of the early genius of the TED, it was the first system I knew that you change a crystal and a ROM to convert from NTSC to PAL.
[...]
Whats not apparent in a picture of JT holding the CPU system was the existence the hidden CPU system known as a floppy drive which was also completed by Greg Berlin and Dave Saricussa during the same time.
I didn't have any regrets in the convolutions of the product, we worked for the company and if it helped the company then it was worth our time. While I might not agree with the exact approach (in addition to gutting the product line in general) I think even fewer modern-day people would have heard of the name Commodore or TED without some of the oddball machines. |
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