The Commodore 128

I recently talked a bit about my early tech geek love affair with Commodore. Now I'm feeling nostalgic. I'll probably write one or two more Commodore themed entries over the next few weeks.

The second computer I bought was the Commodore 128. The 128 actually had three different modes of operation. In order of importance these were...

1. Commodore 64 (A nearly perfect emulation of the classic Commodore 64)
2. CP/M (The grand daddy of all personal computer operating systems and the basis for DOS 1.0, which helped launch Microsoft's long period of dominance)
3. Commodore 128 (The Commodore 64 multiplied by two and with a much nicer Basic programming language than the 64)

The concept of putting two different general purpose processors in one computing device (the 8502 for the Commodore modes and the Zilog Z80 for CP/M) was an interesting one but since both were eight bit processors in a world that was rapidly transitioning to sixteen bit processors such as the Motorola 68000 the Commodore 128 was a bit of a throw back. The decision to build and sell a machine like this one probably goes a long way towards explaining why the original Commodore went broke. It essentially tried to be everything to everybody while not being very good at pleasing any of the audiences it was trying to appeal to. Obviously that isn't a winning strategy.

The thing that the Commodore 128 did reasonably well was pretend to be a Commodore 64. The only problem was it cost a lot more than a Commodore 64 to make which translated into a higher price. It was a mediocre at best CP/M machine since it ran at about half the speed of contemporary CP/M systems. Add in the fact that CP/M was also on its last legs by that time and it's unclear if a better CP/M mode would have helped.  The Commodore 128 mode ended up being largely useless since very little software was created for it though GEOS was kind of fun.

Commodore had a lot of success in the late 70's building their PET line of business computers. The 128 seems like the bastard step child of a C-64 and a SuperPet 9000 with a bit of Altair somehow mixed in. The Commodore Amiga was an external acquisition. If I were to guess I'd say the 128 was the dying gasp of the "old" Commodore and one that took time and money away from the Amiga line which was the companies future.

So lets summarize, more expensive than the C-64 with additional functionality that almost nobody cared about. Not a good combination. I've also read that the 128 cost about as much to make as the Amiga 500 but had to be priced much lower to make the differentiation between the two clear.

To be fair, I really enjoyed my time with the Commodore 128. I hardly used the CP/M mode but I did play around with the enhanced capabilities of the 128 mode a fair amount and that helped me progress down the techno geek path.

Image via Wikipedia

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