| | The following material is speaking notes for a presentation I made (Jim Butterfield) at York University on Friday March 18th,
2005. Since they are speaking notes, they are not exactly in
publication form; and, at the presentation, I might well have omitted
some material and added other stuff (especially in response to
questions).
- A little about myself.
I’m Jim Butterfield. My first encounters with computers took place
back in 1963. My background was math and electronics, working mostly in
the field of telecommunications. My first machine was a computer
nobody had heard of: the Collins C8401, programmed in assembly language.
So when microcomputers started to arrive in 1976, I had an advantage
over most hobbyists: I’d worked with computers for a dozen years or
more. I was in a good position to write about these devices, which were
unfamiliar to most readers. And I did so.
Most of my experience was with Commodore computers. What follows
will be from that viewpoint, and I’ll talk almost exclusively about the
8-bit world. It was a fun time.
I should mention that I have never been an employee of Commodore, or
owned stock in the company. My viewpoint is that of an outsider,
although Commodore personnel have always been open and frank in
responding to the many questions I have asked over the years.
- Industry prologue.
By 1963, transistors had replaced vacuum tubes, and the industry had
settled into a form of stability. Although there were a number of
computer manufacturers, IBM enjoyed over two-thirds of the market.
Industry watchers often referred to ‘IBM and the seven dwarfs.’
Why did IBM dominate? In part, it was because they had been in the
data processing business long before the arrival of computers. Using
Hollerith punched cards, IBM had an array of “unit record” equipment
such as keypunch devices, tabulators, and sorters; they had decades of
experience in handling data.
A second reason for IBM’s strength was that they leased their
equipment rather than selling it. And with the lease came support, with
system engineers on site or on call. Industry people talked about being
sheltered by the “IBM umbrella.”
And, as a general rule, software was free. Assemblers, compilers,
report generators … phone your IBM rep and he’d send over a copy. Need
personnel training? IBM would do it free. Or, at least, at no extra
charge.

III. Underground fun.
Even in those days, computer programmers and operators would have
secret amusements. Secret, because senior management would have
misgivings about ‘horsing around’ on a multi-million dollar computer.
Pictures were drawn on the line printer, patterns generated on
punched card or paper tape, games were created and played, jokes were
being played on co-workers, and music was being played on these
computers. Note how the word ‘play’ seems to be repeated.
The seemingly impossible job of playing music on computers that had
no speakers was accomplished in several ways. The hammers of line
printers could be carefully timed to produce sounds of a selected pitch;
the paper-advance chain could be declutched and made to furnish drum
rhythms. And a transistor radio placed adjacent to the CPU, where it
would pick up the electromagnetic emissions, would play a selection of
popular numbers.
IV. Transitions
In the time frame between 1963 and 1971, there were a number of changes that helped shape the nature of microcomputers-to-come.
Minicomputers started to gain acceptance in 1965 with the Digital
Equipment Corporation PDP-8. These “minis” were stripped-down
computers, designed to sell for a paltry $10,000 or so. In the early
days, magnetic core memory was a major cost impediment, and attempts
were made to circumvent it with other resources. I recall that the
PDP-8S used a serial memory (a mercury column delay line). It was said
that if you stamped on the floor, you could change its memory contents.
Minicomputer technology didn’t have much effect on future
microcomputers. But it’s interesting to note that a powerful user
group, DECUS, grew around the PDP series, and may have been a precursor
to microcomputer user groups that appeared much later.
In 1965, General Electric introduced “Time-Sharing” service, where
users could concurrently make use of a central computer. The terminal
device was usually a Teletype™ machine. The major impact of
time-sharing on the future microcomputers was its choice of language:
Basic, both adored and vilified.
By 1971, the expensive and labour-intensive magnetic core memory that
had been the heart of computers started to be replaced by semiconductor
memory. This set the stage for ongoing price reductions, which we
still see today.
This, in turn, spawned another product that was to become important
in the future microcomputer world: the floppy disk. Magnetic core
memory had been non-volatile: once loaded, it kept its contents even
when power was off. Semiconductor memory needed to be reloaded, and the
8-inch floppy disk was created by IBM for this purpose. Initially, it
was a read-only device, whose contents would be created at the IBM
production facility.
V. Emergence of LSI: Viatron (1970), then Intel (1971)
As fabrication techniques were advanced, more and more elements could
be packed onto an integrated circuit chip. The first chips were
flip-flops and gates. Then came larger assemblies such as shift
registers and ALUs (arithmetic/logic units). Inevitably, a complete CPU
(Central Processing Unit) would be placed onto a single chip. With a
collection of chips such as CPU, memory, input/output, and some sort of
control logic in a ROM (Read Only Memory), a complete computer system
could be put together.
The first microcomputer that I know of was made in 1970 by an
almost-forgotten company called Viatron. Viatron’s main marketing
thrust was terminal devices as inexpensive substitutes for Teletype™
machines, which were priced in the $1,000 to $1,500 region.
Viatron’s concept and design was good, and they advertised massivly
in Datamation magazine. But their fabrication plant had poor chip
yields, and eventually they disappeared from the scene.
The Viatron era called for some technical innovation. CRT display
devices were rare and generally costly; modestly priced printers were
virtually unknown. Viatron’s use of converted television displays and
“printing robots” seems quaint today.
Intel entered the microcomputer field in 1971 with the 4004. It seems
almost as if Intel wasn’t planning this as a product; they needed to
find a quick way to fulfil their contract to build a calculator for a
Japanese firm, and devising and programming a microcomputer seemed to be
the quickest method. But once the 4004 had been devised, the
electronics industry accepted it quickly as a general-purpose component
which replaced wiring with code. Motorola announced their 6800 chip very
quickly.
VI. The emergence of “hobby” micros; early user groups
There was a rush to build. Even before computers were offered in kit
form, hobbyists were salvaging parts and building logic devices. A
friend of mine, Julien Dubé, salvaged some magnetic core memory from a
telecommunications relay device, and restrung the little ferromagnetic
doughnuts into a working memory, with a view to creating a small
computer of his own design.
Kits came on the market from various small entrepreneurs. Electronic
houses produced their own versions, which consisted of a circuit board
and a bunch of chips loose in a plastic bag. Sometimes the supplied
circuit boards had printed circuit connections; other times you were
expected to make the connections yourself using wire wrap techniques
(rarely soldering). Sometimes the parts worked, sometimes they were
defective, and sometimes incorrect wiring would wreck the chip. A
saying of the times was, “All computer chips are powered by smoke; if
the smoke gets out, the chip will fail.”
When the December 1975 issue of Popular Electronics described the
Altair 8800 computer, available in kit form for about $500, the computer
hobbyist world took off.
The Apple I was also a kit that you needed to assemble yourself. The
founders of Apple – Wozniak and Jobs – liked the new, inexpensive 6502
chip, and designed their system around it.
Users started to get together and swap notes. In the Toronto area,
TRACE (Toronto Regional Association of Computer Enthusiasts) was under
way in early 1976. An amazing assortment of machines was under
construction. Some liked the Intel 4004 or 8008, some the Motorola
6800. Memory was whatever came to hand, seldom more than 256 bytes. And
input/output … paper tape, toggle switches, home-brew keyboards, LED or
LCD character or numeric displays, arrays of LED lights. Whatever you
could get your hands on, or afford. There was little commonality
between one home-brew machine and the next.
Oddly, few of the builders had any idea of what to do with the
computer once it was complete. This may have been due, in part, to the
shortage of programming skills; and lack of standardization across the
assortment of machines also posed difficulties in conceptualization.
In 1977 and 1978, the Ontario Science Centre invited TRACE members to
display their home computers to the public. One member’s computer
controlled a model train set; another played simple logic games; one
played simple music tunes. And I believe a couple just sat there,
perhaps blinked lights, and looked pretty.
VII. The struggle for standards
There was an attempt to introduce some standards into this tower of
Bit Babel. Two areas of concern seemed to be: a standard wiring
concept, to connect several boards; secondly, a way to exchange data.
The S-100 bus was conceived as a standardized way to pass information
between the various units of the computer. It included schemes for pin
numbering and for power distribution. It was in use for a number of
years until the IBM PC juggernaut took over.
A form of standardization existed for paper tape input and output,
carried over from teleprinter days. An attempt was made to generate an
audio data standard, mostly for data storage on cassette tapes, called
the Kansas City Standard. It didn’t take hold.
The Basic language was starting to creep into the scene. Hot debates
were taking place between users on the west coast of the USA as to how a
simple Basic interpreter could be constructed in a small amount of
memory storage: 8K, 4K, or even 2K. “Tiny Basic” was produced as a
free program; to publish it, the authors started a publication which
they called “Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and
Orthodontia.” At that time, Dr. Dobbs was conceived as a public domain
vehicle; all material in it was free from copyright. The publication
still exists, but the whimsical name has been truncated to “Dr. Dobbs
Journal.” … and its contents are now copyright.
A side comment on whimsical names: when Gary Kildall developed a
standard operating system, he called his distribution company
“Intergalactic Digital Research.” A few years later, as IBM entered the
field, the “Intergalactic” was dropped. In a similar vein, Commodore
called their first home computer “PET”, perhaps after the “Pet Rock”
fad; but later regretted the name as they tried to convince the
marketplace that their products were serious business machines. I’m
sure they were not influenced by the fact that “PET” means flatulence in
French.
VIII. The KIM-1

My first microcomputer – other than a logic device powered by rubber
bands that I had constructed years before – was the MOS Technology
KIM-1. KIM stands for “Keyboard Input Monitor”, which was the operating
system of this tiny single-board machine.
The “engine” of the KIM-1 is a 6502 microprocessor. This chip was
designed by a group of ex-Motorola employees, who took the design of the
Motorola 6800 and introduced new concepts and improvements. Leading
the team was Chuck Peddle, a name you’ll hear again in this
presentation.
The 6502 was a late arrival into the early microprocessor world.
Motorola and Intel chips had already gained acceptance; and even though
the 6502 would outperform them, its merits were not immediately
recognized. So MOS Technology priced the chip well below the
competition: the 6502 was $25 in single unit quantities; competitive
chips were around $150 and had to be ordered in batches of 100.
After the 6502 was completed, and legal disputes settled, MOS
Technology decided that they should produce an “engineering sampler”
board, which would show what the chip could do. They populated the
board not only with microprocessor, RAM, and input/output; they also
added a teletype interface, an LED display, a 20-key keypad, a facility
for audio output and input (to save programs), and an operating system
called KIM. And the board was factory-assembled; all you had to do was
to add a power supply and you had a complete system.
Here’s the important part: because the board came pre-assembled,
everyone had exactly the same system. For the first time, you could
swap programs with other users and be confident that they would work
without being “touched up” to fit the system.
I wrote a few programs – games, amusements, utilities – and wrote MOS
Technology to see if anyone wanted them. They wanted them for
themselves in order to demonstrate the KIM-1, and had also heard from a
fellow in the Cleveland area who was starting a newsletter. And thus
began “Kim User Notes”, edited by Eric Rehnke.
The newsletter acquired hundreds of subscribers. MOS Technology must
have been amazed to see this intended engineering prototype become a
popular home gizmo. In time, it also became widely used as a training
device.
About that time, I heard from a young fellow who worked at Honeywell
who said he was working on a program for the KIM-1. His name was Peter
Jennings, and his project was to write a chess-playing program in the
KIM’s tiny 1K of RAM. He did it, too. In these days of gigabyte
memory, it’s sometimes refreshing to think that Peter could play chess
with only a little over 1K … even if it didn’t play at a grandmaster
level. Peter later went on to be one of the creators of code for
Visicalc, the first microcomputer spreadsheet program.
IX. Publications, and The First Book of KIM
Meanwhile, there had been a few personal-computer publications.
During his time with a minicomputer firm, David Ahl had gathered
together various games that users had contributed, and published “101
Basic Games”. On the west coast, Bob Albrecht had formed a group called
“People’s Computer” and had produced a similar volume entitled “What To
Do After You Hit Return.” In both books, the programs were supplied in
the language Basic. They could be played on time-sharing systems, or
Basic could be fitted to those computers that had enough memory – not
very many of them in the early days.
Meanwhile, we KIM-1 users were contributing lots of programs to be
printed in KIM User Notes. I suggested to another user, Stan Ockers,
that perhaps we should bundle them together and put them into a book.
The editor of the Notes, Eric Rehnke joined us in the enterprise and we
privately printed The First Book of KIM.
As best I recall, we estimated our market at about 600 copies. We
printed 2,000, sold about 1,000, and the remaining copies burned up in a
garage fire. There was still demand for the book; people got mad at us
when we said we had no more copies. So a publisher picked up the
demand, and many thousands more were sold. There were also two editions
printed in Germany, one authorized and one pirated. The authorized
publisher never sent any royalties; the pirate publisher sent us secret
payments. Go figure.
X. Commodore stumbles into the computer market
In late 1976, we heard that MOS Technology had been acquired by a
firm called Commodore, which was known for making office furniture and
calculators. There was to be a new microcomputer system called the PET.
The KIM-1 thus became a Commodore product, which is why I sometimes
say that I programmed Commodore computers before they made computers.
Jack Tramiel was the founder of Commodore Business Machines. A
former inmate of Auschwitz, Tramiel had started out with a part-time
typewriter repair shop in the Bronx, supplemented by driving a taxi. In
1962, he moved to Toronto and set up a typewriter manufacturing
business. He soon switched to calculators, and these devices soon made
the transition from mechanical devices to electronics.
In October 1976, Tramiel took over MOS Technologies, which he
perceived as a manufacturer of display devices and semiconductors. He
got more than he bargained for. He also got Chuck Peddle, the designer
of the 6502 chip. And Peddle was determined to build a home computer.
Peddle had taken a look at a prototype version of the Apple ][, and
had wondered if Commodore should buy the company. He eventually decided
that Commodore should build a home computer of their own design, and
quickly talked Tramiel into it. An early model of the PET was shown to
Radio Shack, in the hopes that they would sell the unit; but Radio
Shack, in turn, opted to build their own home computer.
Commodore had undergone some trauma in its organization and
financing. As part of a new corporate financing deal, corporate
headquarters was moved to the Bahamas, and administrative offices were
set up in the Philadelphia area. But Tramiel’s heart apparently remained
in Toronto. The corporate airplane – the PET jet – was often to be
seen in a hangar at Pearson airport during the many years that followed.
XI. Apple, Commodore, Tandy

Three companies – Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack – seemed to
announce their models of a home computer simultaneously. The question of
“who was first?” will never be solved. Commodore displayed the PET at
the Consumer Electronics show in January 1977. Apple sold its first
unit at the March West Coast Computer Faire. Radio Shack didn’t enter
the field with the TRS-80 until August, but they were able to sell units
in quantity right away.
Here in Toronto, we first saw Commodore computers in quantity at the
Canadian National Exhibition. One of the Ex’s themes for that year was
“chess”. Commodore furnished dozens of PET computers, furnished with
Peter Jennings’ Microchess program, at a site in the Coliseum area;
visitors were invited to sit down and play chess.
With little access to a dealer network, Commodore had a curious
method of achieving sales. Buyers would send Commodore money – about
$600 US – and Commodore expected that they would ship the PET within
three months! A lot of PET deliveries in this area took place
immediately after the CNE closed.
XII. Commodore Design Excellence
The Commodore PET was a remarkable machine in many ways, with
features you did not find on its competitors of the time. Many might be
considered ahead of their time.
The PET, and all following 8-bit products, had “screen editing”.
Instead of receiving information from the keyboard, the operating system
transferred the received keystrokes to the computer screen. When a
RETURN key was pressed, the system then read from the current line of
the screen, and took the data from there. This made screen editing
simple and truly WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”), and later
allowed some elegant programming tricks. This was far from intuitive
back in the days when much computing was based on teleprinter input.
Associated with this was the concept of keyboard interrupt handling.
Since most keystrokes were collected into a buffer for subsequent
delivery to the screen, the main system could ignore them and go on with
whatever job it was doing, allowing an interrupt service to take care
of this. The result was a “type-ahead” feature, not seen on other
contemporary computers; for those, the keyboard was dead until a program
specifically asked for input.
Computer input was thought of in those days as a teleprinter device
or equivalent. As such, input and output was upper case only; a full
ASCII capability was unheard of. Commodore added an upper/lower case
facility to the PET. However, the fixation on upper case was such that
lower case was “inverted” – that is, you had to shift to get lower case
letters. The Radio Shack TRS-80 had no lower case; the Apple ][ had
“slots”, or board plug-in positions, where upper/lower case could be
added at a later time.
The Commodore PET was introduced without peripherals such as printer
or floppy disk; it took almost a year for these devices to appear. But
the interface was already in place, and it was an interesting one: the
Hewlett-Packard GPIB (“General Purpose Interface Bus”), also know as the
IEEE-488 bus. It was possible right from the start to connect to
specialized devices, such as sensors, which had already been devised for
this bus. When the Commodore disk drives and printers appeared, they
would string together on this bus. It was decades before the
introduction of the USB (“Universal Serial Bus”) would use a similar
scheme.
The use of such a bus called for intelligent peripherals. When the
Commodore devices finally appeared, they had their own microcontrollers
and logic; in the case of disk drives, that included a sophisticated
DOS, which wrote data to disk in a more sophisticated way than other
drives of that generation. Although “back end computers” were known in
the mainframe environment, their use in the micro world was, to put it
mildly, innovative. Meanwhile, competing machines of the era had to
have DOS loaded into the main computer.
Commodore somehow made a deal with Microsoft for a perpetual license
for Microsoft Basic. I don’t know of any other manufacturer who obtained
such a license, and it gave Commodore a major competitive edge for the
entire life of its eight-bit products. Microsoft had not at that time
achieved major sales, and Bill Gates was complaining loudly and publicly
about software piracy. Perhaps Tramiel and Peddle offered a deal that
appeared attractive for the time. Microsoft later regretted the deal,
and internal memos within Commodore urged employees to disclose no
information about Basic, for fear of litigation.
In contrast, Apple initially had only “integer Basic”, whose
arithmetic was based on 16-bit integers. This gave speed, but limited
the usage. The Radio Shack TRS-80 had “tiny Basic”, as published in
Doctor Dobbs Journal. Eventually, both of them migrated to Microsoft
Basic; but royalty payments to Microsoft became a factor in their
product pricing.
Even when the competition joined the Microsoft bandwagon, the
Commodore version still had an advantage. “Commodore Basic,” as it was
called, had a 32-bit mantissa, which computer techs will tell you
produces about 10 decimal digits of numeric accuracy. Other versions had
only a 24-bit mantissa, perhaps to enhance speed; but this will give an
accuracy of only about 7 digits, which is not enough for financial
work.
XIII. The growth of publications: Newsletters to Newsstands
A proliferation of magazines and newsletters came with the advances in microcomputer technology.
Like Doctor Dobbs, BYTE magazine arrived early. Its first year
contained articles such as how to build your own wire-wrap tool out of a
ballpoint refill, and how to punch paper tape so that humans could hold
it up to the light and read actual text.
The Commodore world hosted many newsletters. “The PET Paper” was
told by Commodore to remove the PET reference, which they viewed as a
trademark; it became “The XXX Paper”, a title which might raise some
eyebrows in this day and age.
Len Lindsay published “The PET Gazette”. He became overwhelmed by the
volume of material arriving, and public begged for someone to take over
the job on his behalf. Robert Lock of Greensboro, North Carolina, did
this in autumn of 1979. COMPUTE magazine developed into a major
publication; in the late 1960s, it became the largest selling
microcomputer publication of them all. It ceased publication in the late
90s.
“The Transactor” began as a single sheet newsletter issued by
Commodore Canada. After a couple of issues, a young fellow called Karl
Hildon was hired to keep it going as a customer information vehicle.
Hildon built it into a respectable technical journal. When Commodore
tired of it, Hildon found another company in the Toronto area willing to
continue publication. The Transactor folded in the late 90s, but was
considered a major technical source during its lifetime.
XIV. The Toronto PET User Group – TPUG
Shortly after the arrival of the first few PET computers in Toronto, I
received a call from Lyman Duggan, who worked for Marconi. He wanted to
know why nobody was organizing a user group; I gave him the usual
answer. So sometime in 1979, about sixteen interested users gathered in
the rec room of Lyman’s apartment block, and TPUG – at that time,
called Club 2001, after the PET 2001 – was born.
Duggan ran TPUG as a private enterprise. He arranged program and
location, charged five dollars for attendance, and served coffee and
doughnuts. His wife, Cherie, had cassette tapes containing contributed
programs which sold for a dollar or two.
Attendance grew rapidly, and Duggan had to seek out ever larger sites
for the meetings. Then, with little warning, his employee posted him
to Florida. Duggan quickly nominated a board of directors to replace
him, and TPUG became a member’s club.
The Toronto area had quite a few talented people who could be called
upon to make presentations, offer opinions, or disseminate news. Apart
from myself, we had Karl Hildon, editor of The Transactor; Brad
Templeton, who later went on to become the publisher of Clarion online
service; Steve Punter, who wrote the first major word processor package
for Commodore, and numerous others. And I have a special affection for
the antics of Brett Butler, one of the first PET owners in the Toronto
area, who wrote a tiny program for his wife who was in the late stages
of pregnancy: tap any key, and the PET would show time elapsed since the
previous contraction.
Computer enthusiasts were regarded as mavericks. Few of those who
worked in the field of data processing would have any association with
microcomputers. I suspect the reasons for this are varied. Perhaps there
would be a loss of corporate prestige to admit that those little
thousand-dollar machines were capable of taking on some tasks, when DP
personnel had million-dollar machines as their private domain. It seemed
that some users would believe only what IBM told them; and, at that
time, IBM had no interest in giving any credibility to these pesky
little machines.
There were rebels. A Vice President of Air Canada used a Commodore
PET to plan fuel needs at various airports; but he had to hide his
machine from the DP mavens, who didn’t approve. A regional education
officer in northern Ontario supported microcomputers in schools, and
helped assembly a body of educational software; all the while, the
Department of Education wanted all educational flow to be centralized.
TPUG prospered, and its influence went far beyond Ontario’s
boundaries, or even those of North America. Today, it may be difficult
to comprehend the difficult in distributing free programs across the
country or around the world. We use the internet. Back then, you put
cassette tapes in the mail, or, later, floppy disks. And a central
clearing point produced better organization. TPUG was it, for many
years; most Commodore clubs across North America became associate TPUG
members.
Membership reached a peak in 1984 of about 17,000 members. TPUG now
had a full-time staff for handling memberships and mailing requested
programs, and another full-time staff to publish the TPUG magazine.
There was a lot of money flowing into TPUG, and it seemed to me that
this caused dissention between members of the executive and the staff.
An early online service, “The Source” opened for business in 1979,
and was soon followed by another, Compuserve. A service specific to the
Commodore 64, Quantum, became available in 1985. There started to be
other ways to distribute programs. And the internet was coming.
Online services, and a shift to other manufacturers computers, caused
a further decline in membership. And this caused disputes to become
more pronounced. It’s easy to bring in new equipment and new staff in
prosperous times; it’s not so easy to start cutting back. Many
old-timers dropped out of the TPUG picture. But TPUG survived, and is
still active today. I’m told that the next World of Commodore gathering
will take place this December.

XV. Product proliferation
The original PET 2001 was soon followed by bigger models, with more
memory or 80 column screens. Commodore did its best to drop the name PET
in favour of CBM, so as to establish a business image. At one time, it
even tried to disenfranchise one of its major retail outlets because it
thought the name was too frivolous: Batteries Included. The outlet set
up a subsidiary with a “sensible” name, and continued to handle
Commodore machines.
Commodore technicians built prototypes of many imaginative machines.
One of these, called the TOI, had a colour screen, graphics and sound
capability; it eventually became the VIC-20. The 22-column screen of
the VIC-20 made it of little utility with text applications, but it
worked well with graphics, and became popular as a game machine. The
VIC-20 was still a full-featured computer, complete with the Commodore
Basic language, and many people used it to learn computer programming.
There’s a believable story that, long before, the chip manufacturer
Texas Instruments had cost Commodore and Jack Tramiel a great deal of
money on plans he had made for a calculator. The story continues that
Tramiel swore revenge; and when Texas Instruments came out with a
computer of their own, the TI-99, he launched an economic war.
Whatever the truth of the story, it’s true that Tramiel was very good
at pruning prices, pressing suppliers to drop costs in order to allow
him to pitch extremely competitive retail prices. And with his next
product, the Commodore 64, he trashed most of the competition …
including Texas Instruments.
At one point, Commodore was offering $100 as a trade-in for any make
or model of computer. Since the Sinclair/Timex Spectrum was selling for
about $60 at that time, Commodore received a considerable number of
these units, still in their shrink-wrap packaging. The local user group
told me that Commodore had no use for these trade-ins, and they went
directly to the trash bit. At night, members of the club would pick
these back out of the trash, and turn them back in the next day for
another discount.
Doctor Wesley Graham, of the Computer Science department of Waterloo
University, thought that the CBM computers could be expanded and
modified so as to allow students to take language training on them.
Waterloo was already noted for its “training” languages, such as WatFor,
a training dialogue of Fortran. Together with hardware assistance from
BMB Compuscience, a retailer and hardware designer in the Milton area,
they devised “The SuperPET”, a machine with dual processors. One “side”
was a standard CBM computer; the other was a Motorola 6809-based system
fitted with several languages. Perhaps the most startling of these was
APL (“A Programming Language”), developed by Ken Iverson, which used a
completely different character set to undertake its computations.
The SuperPET was well respected and used in training environments,
but never became a mainstream machine. I often wondered if adding
language compilers – in addition to the interpreters that Waterloo had
furnished – might make it world-beating commercial machine.
XVI. Fun computers hit their zenith
Following the success of the 64, Commodore tackled the objective of
making a set of scaled-down computers: the Commodore Plus/4 and its
smaller cousin, the Commodore 16. I had some involvement in this
product: I was invited to introduce it at the Consumer Electronics Show
in Las Vegas, 1984.
Inside the Plus-4 and Commodore 16 was … almost … nothing. The
various support chips that had been needed to make things work had been
telescoped into a single interface chip called TED. So there was TED,
the processor, and on the Plus/4, an ACIA chip (similar to a UART) for
higher-speed communications.
Manufacturing costs must have been remarkable low for a computer with
so few parts. But before the show, the marketing mavens told me they
planned to set the price high so that it wouldn’t impact sales of the
Commodore 64. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams; the Plus/4 and
its smaller cousin bombed in the market.
They gave up on this new line, reasoning that the marketplace
required compatibility. Their next product was the Commodore 128, which
was highly compatible – a switch converted it into a 64 clone – but
could be switched into CP/M mode for anyone who wanted that style of
compatibility.
On the “business computer” side, Commodore meddled with expanded
memory. In Europe, they tried new cast stylings, and at one point almost
introduce “the Porsche PET”, whose case had been designed by the
Porsche team.
Then they tried another approach to higher speed and more memory.
The B128 and B256 computers were built, but Commodore couldn’t get them
going on schedule. Eventually, they were made to work, but it was too
late for the marketplace, and Commodore blew them out their back door
using a clearinghouse. It worked well, and many users loved them; but
it was a Commodore ex-product, and Commodore didn’t make them any more.
It was becoming clear that Commodore was reaching a dead end in the
8-bit world. Commodore acquired the Amiga, originally planned as a game
machine, and reconfigured it for a business/entertainment market.
But that’s another story, and this presentation is following the fate of the Commodore 8-bit world.
XVII. Arrival of the IBM PC

When the IBM PC was announced in August 1981, Commodore users
couldn’t believe that anyone would try to sell a machine that was so
underpowered and overpriced. $3,000 for a little machine with 16K of
RAM, expandable to 32K, black-and-white only, disk drive extra? And
their first floppy disk drives could store only 160K of data, where
Commodore drives ranged up to 1.2 megabytes in capacity. And, powered by
an Intel 8088, it wasn’t exactly a 16-bit machine; just part 16 and
part 8.
But the name IBM had credibility, and it sold well, beyond IBM’s
expectations. At one point, I told Commodore that their mistake was in
picking the wrong first letter for their initials; change the “C” to an
“I” and they’d be in business.
IBM made frequent upgrades to their product line – from PC to XT to
AT. The machines became truly 16-bit, and were fitted with formidable
memory and improved disk drives. At each new product announcment, to
IBM’s astonishment, the new unit quickly sold its initial production,
and then sales dropped off radically. If it was off the shelf, user
didn’t want it; they always wanted the next generation.
All other brands of small computer were seriously impacted. To our
surprise, people would buy these expensive machines, borrow software
from their place of business, and set up these machine in their home.
PC user groups expanded at a startling rate. And when, in 1983, Compaq
and others broke the IBM stranglehold on the PC design, prices dropped
and sales exploded. By that time, the PC architecture clearly
outperformed the 8-bit computers in raw computer power, although they
still performed poorly in the graphics and games area.
Commodore introduced its own line of PC-compatibles in 1987. These
sold well in Europe and reasonably well in Canada. The US market was
never penetrated to any significant extent, and they ceased production
in 1993..
Oh, and just to prove that IBM isn’t perfect: their scaled-down PC Junior failed miserably.
XVIII. The Commodore empire disintegrates
Commodore had run out of steam on the 8-bit track, and were
concentrating all their efforts on the Amiga. It wasn’t enough, and
Commodore as we knew it broke up in April 1994.
Commodore was gone, but the name stayed. It was sold and resold to a
number of organizations, most of whom were in Europe, where the name was
viewed favourably by consumers.
XIX. Follow on: Loyalties remain.
Magazines scaled down and ceased publication. User groups dwindled.
But loyalties remain. Many users haunt thrift stores for old Commodore
computers and spare parts. There are continuing rumours that both the
Commodore computers and the Amiga will be reborn in some form or other.
Meanwhile, “64 emulators” can be run on a PC which closely match the
behaviour of the original machine. It’s not the same, of course; part of
the joy was the things you could hook up to the machine.
Small user groups still gather in Canada and the USA. In mid-May,
there will be a gathering in Louisville, Kentucky. In September, I
expect that there will be something in the Chicago area. There has been
talk of something in Las Vegas this year. And TPUG tells me that the
World of Commodore will take place once again in Toronto sometime in
early December.
Here’s a story of dedication and loyalty. Back in the Commodore
heyday, a young girl loved her Commodore 64 so much, and was so curious
about its inner workings, that she destroyed quite a few of them in
trying to find out how it works. She was determined that some day, she
would construct a Commodore 64.
Her name is Jeri Ellsworth, and she did it. She built a complete
Commodore 64 on a chip: processor, video, sound, operating system … the
whole works. Her most recent creation is the 64DTV, a Commodore 64 on a
tiny chip buried inside a joystick, including about 30 games of the era.
Without a keyboard, it’s hard to program, but it can be done. Without a
disk interface, it’s hard to store or load other programs – but a good
hardware hacker can construct one, and some have done so.
It’s quite a feat. And it makes me think that perhaps the Commodore 64 will live forever.
–30–
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