Posted By
Trond
on 2018-06-06
05:40:34
|  Pre-production Plus/4?
The two gems in my small 264 collection is my C232 and the machine you see here, a very early Plus/4.
I am trying to make sense of this machine. I got it from the same person as the C232. He worked on the service center for Commodore in Norway when they shut down in the mid eighties, and saved them from the dumpster. As with the 232 it has a very low serial number (AA4 000133) a paper tag on the inside with a low number (000277) and was produced in Japan. The 7501 is from December 1983, and it seems to never have been installed with the rom software. But it says Plus 4 on the front and the back, not +4 or Commodore 264.
The paper serial number on the mainboard seems to fit in with crock's explanation in the c232 post in the hardware section of this site, that:
There is a typed paper serial number stuck on the bottom of the board with “000438” I think the serial number of 000438 is unlikely to represent the 232 board or more of them would have been found in the wild. I am also lucky enough to own a pre-production C16 board made within a few weeks of this one that has an identical format label with the number “000361” leading me to speculate that this serial number could refer to all pre-production 264 series boards coming from Japan.
What I am trying to understand, in that case, is when the Plus/4 prototype / pre-production machines went from being labeled 264 to +4 to Plus/4.
Based on the dates on the chips, the youngest one I can see was made in week 16, 1984, ie April of that year. When was the Plus/4 officially released for sale?
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