Posted By
JamesC
on 2004-12-18
12:41:07
|  Re: Commodore 16 memories: 1984
As well, I remember Christmas 1984. My parents had taken my little brother and myself shopping in October, and at the local Montgomery Ward store we saw the Commodore line of computers. The Commodore 64 was displayed, turned on, running in BASIC mode (that's all that most stores did, they didn't bother showing the capabilities), and there was some VIC stuff on clearance. On its own desk was a Commodore Plus/4 with a hand-out brochure for the store to send home with customers. The Plus/4 wasn't hooked up, let alone turned on, so my parents couldn't see exactly what 3+1 was.
I was asked my opinion, and I voiced the 64 because (gesturing with my arm to the shelves of software) "look at all the games for it". Naturally there wasn't much for the Plus/4, and what little there was was business stuff and at full retail price.
The local KMart had the Plus/4 and the C16 for $299.95 and $99.95 respectively, but KMart had no software selection for these machines. KMart salespeople probably believed that all Commodores were compatiable (a lot of people seem to think this even now) and that C64 software will work on any Commodore ever built.
Christmas Day 1984, I awake to unwrap a Commodore Plus/4 complete with a Sears & Roebuck (Sears & Sampson to you, Lando!) sticker on it. My parents didn't even buy from the salesperson who devoted almost an hour to them..... they bought down the street for $5 less.
After Christmas, I quickly learned that Plus/4 stuff is unique to itself by searching the local stores for additional software and hardware. I found the 1341 joystick complete with a sticker on the box "for the Commodore Plus/4 and 16 only", quickly reduced to a clearance price of $7, originally $14.99. I bought a non-Commodore tape deck (Data Master, sometimes one of those will pop up on Ebay) complete with Plus/4 adapter for $9, originally $20. My father threw a fit about that cause he planned on giving me a disk drive the following Christmas..... in the meantime, without a disk drive or cassette, all I could do was type in everything over and over again, or leave the computer on for days at a time. 
The 1541 did arrive in time for Christmas 1985. By then I was pretty good at opening and closing packages without my parents knowing, so I had already gone through the 1541 manual and messed with the Test/Demo diskette three weeks prior. 
My father's reasoning for buying the Plus/4 over the 64, even though the Plus/4 was $100 more? "The Plus/4 came with a typing program and you can draw with it. The other one could only play games." What a salesman that guy from Wards was!
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