Post by Vanessa E.The Spectrum-48k had an MSRP of about £175 in April 1982 ($308). It had
dropped to about £130 by March 1983 ($192).
That's american prices. As I said, the [Commodore]
cost around 400 *POUNDS* over here. That is not 400
dollars, that is 704 dollars. And that was in '83 when
it appeared over here. Not '82.
Your country's merchants and government couldn't see past their nationalism to
allow fair trade and fair competition, a condition which was well known in
the UK in that time period. After you factor in tarriffs, retail markup,
VAT, etc., it's no surprise how expensive a C64 was there. Also bear in mind
that inflation, general standards of living, average income, the effects of
recession, inflation, etc. vary from one local region to another, and
certainly from one country to another. *That* is why a piece of hardware
worth $400 in 1982 here sold could go for $704 in 1983 there.
I'm sure the same held true for almost any foreign-made product entering the
UK in that time period. That's your country's fault, not the manufacturers'.
For those of us who actually live here in the USA and *buy* the stuff here,
$400 for a Commodore 64 was reasonable.
Likewise, because of the market here, a Spectrum 48K would have been regarded
as *too* cheap, and probably lumped in with the more sophisticated toys
(rather than with other computers/electronics), despite it being a capable
machine. In later years, some retailers did the same with the C64 and the
recent C64-DTV (the same holds true today for just about every computer-in-a-
joystick, it seems).
Post by Vanessa E.So, INITIALLY the C64 cost twice as much as a Spectrum.
Yes. Twice as much in '82. Which was 4 years into the maggie years of
millions of unemployed and a recession. Besides, by the time it was released
over here the spectrum had won. It'd had a year to gain its foothold.
Again, that's the government and retailers' fault.
Post by Vanessa E.At the respective heights of their popularity, the two platforms had
similar prices for stock machines without added peripherals, and that's
what matters in the 'real' world.
No, what matters in the real world is which gets "in" first and which is
most affordable at (and within a couple of years) of launch. The machines
needed to setup a userbase from which all the software would spring.
Sure, if the competition doesn't show up quickly enough. The actual hard work
of marketing, whether you are first to market or not, plays the biggest role
though. Make the consumers think that your product is better than the rest
of the competition, and they will buy it. Get in soon enough after your
competition hits the market, and you can knock them out of the lead position.
No single model personal computer before or since has broken the C64's sales
record. The world wanted the C64 far more than it wanted the Spectrum, it's
as simple as that.
Post by Vanessa E.Post by Andrew HalliwellThe disk drive cost about as much again.
The 1541 drive had an MSRP of $400 (£212)
400 pounds more like.
Yet again, your government and retailers take the full blame here.
Post by Vanessa E.at release in January 1982. As with
the C64, the drive was updated several times to reduce cost and improve
reliability. Cost dropped like a rock over a couple of years' time as I
recall (can't seem to find a good source for this).
Stupid design though. Utterly terrible QA too.
Most C64 users who didn't use a fast loader (a slim minority) would probably
agree. I used fastloaders as appropriate, but moved up to better drives as
soon as I got the chance (faster, more storage, more reliable, etc.). Those
who stuck with the 1541 did so because it was "good enough".
"let's design a disk drive for the [Commodore] 64 that's compatible with the
vic.
The vic will only be able to handle a serial line in, but we can design
around that... oops, I forgot to make that track on the pcb, looks like the
[Commodore 64] will have to do serial only too
Wrong. The VIC-1540, which came out first, was designed for use with a
VIC-20. The 1541 was literally a 1540 with a different ROM that could adjust
for the timing differences between the C64/128 and VIC-20.
Commodore would have continued to use a parallel bus as on the PET series, but
the supply of cables they used up to this point dried up. Jack Trameil was
upset by the dependence on a proprietary cable, and explicitly ordered that
the next bus use "a cable that anyone can manufacture", and so they
implemented what we usually call the IEC or just "serial" bus. The fact that
serial is easier and cheaper to design and produce (and usually plenty fast
in modern buses like USB, SATA, etc) probably weighed heavily into Jack's
decision.
Despite that, going serial was their first mistake. They should have just
stuck with the parallel bus and found a more common connector.
Sorry I didn't notice before we shipped thousands of the things.
What do you mean? of COURSE I didn't test it!"
Wrong. The design error was inside the 6522 VIA chip used at both ends of the
serial bus. The hardware serial port on the chip failed to function as
expected once it was put into the machine. An error inside a custom-designed
IC is fairly easy to cause during design, and hard to fix if it makes it past
initial testing and on to mass production. Nevermind the cost to produce a
new run of fixed chips. As a result, the designers has to re-route the board
wiring to use a few PIO lines, and cobble together a bit-banging routine to
use it. The flaw was spotted before shipping began on the VIC-20, but it
was too late to re-design the chip.
That was their second mistake.
The C64 had a different chip (6526 CIA), and the serial port on it functions
to spec, plus the fix to the 6522 would have been easily doable, but
Commodore decided that it was more important for the 1541 to be compatible
with the VIC-20 and kept the design as-is.
That was their third mistake.
Commodore fixed these mistakes with the C128/C128-D and 1571, 1570, and 1581
drives. CMD serial devices also support this protocol, as did some printer
interfaces.
Even the spectrum's tape loader was quicker.
Post by Vanessa E.I expect this to come up, so I'll say it now: Neither machine *required* a
floppy drive to be useable, but the C64 market quickly adopted them anyway,
as 5 1/4" media was cheaper (in the US anyway), faster to access, and more
reliable than audio cassettes.
Yes, but then, your proprietory tape deck was pretty shite too wasn't it?
What was the default loading speed on that thing again?
A Spectrum 48K loads from normal tapes at about 140 bytes per second by
default. A Commodore Datasette loads at about 50 bytes per second by
default, so you have us beat there.
A video on Youtube claims the Spectrum can load at about 3.3 KB/sec with a
fastloader and a very high quality audio source like a PC's sound card.
A Datasette loads at about about 1 KB/sec with a fast loader and normal tapes.
Since the overall CPU performance is about the same between the two machines,
I suspect the C64 could match a Spectrum if given the same high quality audio
source in place of the Datasette, and an appropriate fastloader.
As to your tape-versus-1541 argument... A 1541 loads at 300-400 bytes per
second or so by default, 2-3 times faster than your stock tape routines.
With a fast loader and no added hardware, it does about 8 KB/sec.
More recent serial drives (1581, CMD FD or HD) can load a bit faster than this
8 KB/sec mark.
A Parallel-connected 1541 (via the "User Port") can load at a top speed of
around 20 KB/sec. The port can do about 45 KB/sec a stock C64, and 330
KB/sec or so with a Super CPU accelerator in place.
Most Expansion-port-interfaced drives do anywhere from 15 to 50 KB/sec,
depending on the device, while the port itself can DMA data in or out at 1
MB/sec. As I understand, the record stands at something like 200 KB/sec
coming off an IDE64+hard disk, with a SuperCPU.
Did it come with the machine? Or did you need to buy it too?
Cos that just upped the price even more if it didn't come in the box.
This depended on which packages your local retailer chose to carry. Some
C64's came bundled with a Datasette, others commonly had 1541's or joysticks.
Having been around a couple of years before the C64 came out, they were
already cheap (about the same as a normal tape recorder), so it didn't matter
if you got one bundled or not. I can't give you a number, as that was too
long ago and that info seems to have been lost to the far reaches of
someone's stack of C64 magazines in a back closet somewhere. :-)
Third-party clones were also available (I had one).
Whether you had to buy one for the C64 or not, you still needed to buy one for
a Spectrum as well, even if it was just a simple tape recorder and cables.
Oh, and when you were counting the number of [Commodores] and spectrum 48s
sold... Did you factor in the fact that the rubber keyed 48 was superceded
by the spectrum+ in 1984? Most if not all spectrums sold after 1984 were
either plusses or one of the 128 variants.
I am unsure whether the site I got my figure from counted all 48K models, or
just the rubber-keyed ones. Another site claims about 5 million were sold in
the UK, including the Spectrum+. I can't seem to find anything else relevant
right now. Even World of Spectrum doesn't seem to say. If you have an
authoritative source, please edit the Wikipedia article to include a final
sales figure, and repeat it here, if you don't mind.
Oh, stop with the "commode" remarks, especially when responding to someone
whom you should know by now doesn't regularly call your machines anything
other than Spectrum (or Amstrad, etc). I expect a little respect in that
regard, just as you surely would.
--
"There are some things in life worth obsessing over. Most
things aren't, and when you learn that, life improves."
http://starbase.globalpc.net/~vanessa/
Vanessa Ezekowitz <***@gmail.com>