Let's start off with our little Commodore one one six here which as the story goes from bill Hurd
Who is one of the chief designers of the machine? He was given a Timex machine out of a
Commodore filing cabinet and that basically said look, this is our competition
We won't have a nice cheap business machine preferably for around $50 and they had a chipset ready
which was the Ted chipset or the text editing display and
him and his team went off and basically designed the machine we've got in front of us it I
May often think in a lot of ways
this is a perfect little retro computer because the games load in no time at all because they're tiny because by the time it's
Loaded its basic. It's only got twelve point seven out of
Sixteen K. Anyway, yeah, and if you use this high-res mode, it has 4k
so no one does but it's more colorful than Commodore 64's capable of more colors and what came first then this other 64
Yeah, there's 64 was first so off the back of that. They were thinking right. We've sold some good computers here
Let's do something even better ago. Well, it wasn't even better know they wanted cheaper. So the Commodore 64 was
Relatively expensive for the mid-range budget computer and they were really keen to get one on the market
That would compete with the likes of time X and T r99 and all the other cheap companies of the day
But as it turned out the machine was left with absolutely nowhere to go because Texas Instruments exited the market so did Timex
So it's a mixture of bad business decisions and bad timing. Really? What year are we here?
81 82 I believe and it took an awfully long time for anything to happen because I think there are a fair few of
Internal squabbles going on at Commodore at the time. So the Commodore 64
Would have been still the flagship of Commodores range and then these were supposed to be much much cheaper machines
There were no frills
They certainly weren't designed for gaming. So they had no sprite capability the sound chip was
rudimentary I would suggest that they had one big chip that did the sound and most of the other functions and
Yeah, they were they were not
Really meant for entertainment
but
Of course the world of computing in the early 80s, that's kind of what people expected if you actually look inside it
it's a very very nicely engineered machine, but very quickly the
powers that be at Commodore put their thinking heads together and they came up with three more machines so they came out with the
C to 3 to the C to 64 which still gives the series its name and they v36 fault
Which was to be like the top end machine
so you had the 1 1 6 2 the bottom 2 3 2 2 6 4 and 3 3 6 4 and
The 1 1 6
Not much happened with that for quite a little while. They were concentrating on the 2 3 -
So they're all the same chipset. It just depends how much memory that all features they had
So the 2 3 2 had?
32k of memory and it was in exactly the same case as our plus 4 then there was the C to 64 which has obviously
64k of RAM and then the top-end one was the 336 for which for some reason that I can't fathom
Had speech synthesis built-in. So the team that designed the Speak & Spell
They actually put a lady's voice into the v36 for
Very very quickly. They ditched the 2 3 2 and
The Commodore 1 1 6 I think they produced about 50,000 of them all but if you ended up in Germany
We got boxed one over here. It looks like someone took a knife to it at some point and
Tried to stab the bolts to death. So yeah, that's all in German
when you think of say the Commodore 64, it's got this very slab like
Appearance this one not so much
what was the designer in-house the case was designed in Japan as I think most of the machine was and
it's a
Cultural thing I guess. So it just it does look very great as I say
This is one thing that drew me to the series in the first place
I I did really like the look of the machine and that made me more curious about it and
It was one of the first retro computers
I got hold of so this is I mean, we're here at the Center for computing history
But this is your machine, right? This is my machine
So you brought that especially influence I have yet. So I have to Commodore one-one sixes
I have got one in my case over there, which is a very low serial number. So that's number
What is it one five one two, so this is the one I tend to take them all care of
so that's looked how to
Keep the dust and the light off of it and then a little while ago
I got hold of this one because I've never seen one in a box
with my own eyes
So to get hold the chance of to get hold of one in a box and was that from a popular auction website?
It was indeed. Yes
Yes from a very Commodore oriented to sellers shall we say so it was fully restored as well?
Which was another big plus what needs to be done to a machine right like that
Well, the Commodore one one six has this very oh
It's a chiclet keyboard. So like the spectrum but the keys are even smaller and they do tend to roll about on your finger
What tends to go wrong with the keyboard is the connector?
will start to fray and
it's almost impossible to replace other things that you would need to be very careful of with the whole series is
the Ted chip or the eight three six zero and
the processors
Which is a seven 501 or eight 501 depending what machine you've got they get very very hot
So my advice is if you ever fancy getting hold of one of these machines
Don't even turn it on to try it put the heatsinks on before you even
Fire it up because those chips get amazingly hot as a little retro machine. I do quite like the series because
You know, you just want a quick fix of gaming they're only short little
Arcade games usually and they load in a couple of minutes even off of a cassette
So I do quite like it for that
Other things we should point out about the machine is of course
It does not have the usual Atari like connectors for joysticks. I've read on the Internet
Oh
That's to keep it incompatible with the Commodore 64 when other machines
it wasn't is purely because this was the one and only vision for the series and
The big nine pin Atari connector simply just did not fit in the case
So they had to come up with these little din plugs and that of course carried onto the cassette
Player here. The only one that is the same as the Commodore 64 is
The serial for printers and disk drives things
It does have which other machines of its ilk could do not have we have actually got a reset button
It's almost console like in it's shaping actually with venting on the back as I said before it needs the venting
Certainly, they knew they had a problem with heeds because underneath the keyboard here. We've got a great big metal plate and
That metal plate has got two prongs one goes down onto the processor
One goes down onto the ted chip to actually keep it a little bit cool
Something they didn't carry on in entirely
Into the rest of the series that eventually did arrive
When this machine was being kind of creative and designed and thought-out got jack'd remote the reigns at Commodore
But he was soon to leave. So did that have an impact on this had an enormous impact on this series?
It was a victim of timing as well in that
He was very very scared of
the Japanese flooding the market with cheap computer imports and he was also really worried about the budget computers of
sinclair and
texas instruments and
So that's why he wanted commodore to have their own cheap
Computer to compete with them but very shortly after this was completed this version
The Texas Instruments left the market. So did Timex and the reported?
Influx of machines from Japan simply didn't happen
so it was a victim of timing with that and then
Jack Tramiel was having
problems with the board at Commodore
There's various stories around the internet of what those problems were and
the last act
that he ever did for Commodore was at the CES where he is photographed holding the v3 64 and the
264 where they were launched at that show what happened next was a
mixture of marketing people getting involved and
Some rather strange design choices that made it very very hard for these for the machines that followed
to survive in the marketplace
and this was kind of a footnote to that, you know, oh and there might be a prototype of things like the spectrum whatever think
vaguely interested
You know, absolutely
Amazing if in a moment, I could jump up and hit my head on a block and something appears out of it
I do think there might be a Japanese company reaching for the phone at some point