Engineering wise, I think the 264 series as just fine and were better than the '64' series. Tho i agree it was not dramatic and was more incremental, it was an improvement for their 8bit line. The practical issue was lack of mainstream software support. I think they were one of the first real episodes of "well, its better hardware, but not fully compatible" and the fall out that happens when no one writes for/buys them due to that. ( Atari had that same issue, tho i forget which model line, ( xl? i don't remember now. been too long ). They were also better hardware than the previous generation, but were only like 90% compatible with previous, so they sort of got left out to dry )

They both also came out at a bad time, consumer market was moving away from 8 bit from what i remember.  Sort of too little to late syndrome.

Mon May 18 2026 16:23:33 EDT from setho

The C16 and Plus 4 were both terrible machines. Never really fully baked.


The C128 was a great machine. Probably their best outside of the Amiga line.....

And i could be wrong on commodore users moving to 16 bit.   Us Atari folk were..  and of course the PC and Apple communities were starting the migration...

I think we've touched on a basic intrinsic difference between you and I that goes beyond our politics - but may influence that, too - in a weird metaphysical way - that may at least partially explain our friction. 

I ran a Citadel on a C-128 in CP/M mode on 2 1571 disk drives for several months - that a Sacramento Citadel developer ported just for me, just for the C-128 CP/M mode. I was lucky - to be in Sacramento - one of the hubs of Citadel development - where someone was there who would do that for me, right? I've always been... the dumbass with smart friends who would help me do things a bit beyond my pay grade - and that did turn into a lucrative career for a long time. 

But anyhow, so many BDOS errors that eventually all the Sac Cit devs convinced me to dump it and get a MIC-504 and an Adds Viewpoint terminal as big as a Microwave and run my Citadel off that. And that worked well, on a dual disk system, for a long time... until I bought a Nec V10 8086/286 clone with an ESDI controller and a 140GB ESDI 5.4" full height hard drive that made me the biggest Citadel on the West Coast for the blink of an eye. 

I also had everything else during this time, Commodore 64, 128, Atari 520 and 1040 ST, Amiga 2000... I had a lot of free cash for a 17 year old... and instead of cars and partying - I bought computers. 

The Plus 4 and C16 were hated. They had no real purpose. They were real oddball systems among any of the 8 bit systems at the time. I would have rather hand a TRS80 or a CoCo - an Apple II+... oh, I had one of those for awhile. A Lazer 128. Anything was better than a Plus 4 or a C16. Well, a Sinclair was worse. But an Atari 400 was more desirable. 

I never fell into... well, not true - into the Atari/Commodore wars. Commodore were better for most things. But Atari didn't suck - and did some things better. 

Man... whatever side you were on - those were better times. 

Mon May 18 2026 07:37:20 EDT from Nurb432

Was never really a commodore fan, other than the 128 could run CP/M native and wasn't the size of a microwave, or an overly priced Apple Ii GS with a Z80 board made to run CP/M, ironically from Microsoft.. ( which i did have, but paid almost nothing for it )..  But i did have a Plus4 at one point due to a 'deal i couldn't pass up'  ( and was given a C16 as a bonus ) and i thought at the time, they were nifty and better than the vic20/64 line.    Still preferred my Atari tho so it became closet food, later on museum dust collector..

 

But i did see a sx-64 once at a store. "well, that is interesting, wonder when Atari will do that"  lol.  But honestly 5" was a bit small, perhaps it was ok for games but trying to do 'work' on it, not for me. Even something like a kaypro was pushing it, but was 'doable' .  I think later on that plasma display HP had on one of theirs, same thing, sure its portable and interesting, but too small. At least i think it was HP, but either way it was the same basic form actor as the SX, just dos+plasma. Its been a while so i could have the company wrong.  Osborne, same issue.. I was given one of them along the way ..  neat, but too small to "use"

oh, i totally agree they were out in left field due to the push-back of not being 'compatible'. I only speak of the tech, i do think it was an improvement, not drastic, but incremental. But, if no one buys them or writes for them...its academic even if it was drastic. And not just the +4, but in general, important lessons were learned. Even apple of the day learned  it with the 'architecture cross over' period with "universal binaries".

And related, compatibility concerns is why the iAPX 432 architecture never took off. It was a much better than the 8088/86, but failed due to that reason. And yes, that is where 1/2 my current nickname comes from.

Wed May 20 2026 01:15:10 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

The Plus 4 and C16 were hated. They had no real purpose. They were real oddball systems among any of the 8 bit systems at the time. 

And along these lines of greatness that never took off.. id love to have got my hands on an Atari Transputer.. 

Well, the Apple failure was the IIgs... an 8/16 bit machine when Amiga was a 16/32 bit machine. And Ig - I think the Amiga was kind of a bridge between the 16 and 32 bit machines for Commodore - but it is all so hazy now - and with the fact that we jumped timelines whenever they turned on the Large Hadron accelerator so you can't trust your memories to be right in this reality - I never know what is true anymore. 

Was it Mr. Bubble or Mr. Bubbles? Did the Fruit of the Loom have a Cornucopia or not? Was the Amiga a 16 bit, a 32 bit or a 16/32 bit machine? 

Depends on your timeline, I think. 

Whiskey is the only thing consistent... well, no - not even that - it used to make me violently drunk and unpredictable - but Vodka was safe.  I clearly remember disliking Whisky and Bourbon for that very reason and preferring Vodka. Now - Vodka is what makes me end up in a fight at the night club or puking in the gutter waiting for the Uber - and Whiskey just gives me a bad headache the next morning. 

But going off-topic seems to be universal across all the timelines. We'll always have that. 

I think it was a fail due to same reasons as the others, but the hardware was better. And the OS, well it showed the way to the future. 

Much like the time i had a 128, the only real reason i had it really was to run CP/M. I got it for free. ( well the machine, not the Z80 card, for some odd reason i already had that. Not sure why or where i got that, but it was in my box-o-junk.. ). 

Fri May 29 2026 23:38:06 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

Well, the Apple failure was the IIgs...

Was it Mr. Bubble or Mr. Bubbles? Did the Fruit of the Loom have a Cornucopia or not? Was the Amiga a 16 bit, a 32 bit or a 16/32 bit machine? 

If we're going to bring up the Mandela Effect, count me in as part of the millions of people who thought the jingle in the commercial went "Mr. Bucket, you put your balls in my mouth"

From the developer's perspective, Amiga was full 32 bit from the very beginning.  Motorola 68000 CPU was 32 bit instructions with a 16 bit address bus, much like the 8088 was 16 bit instructions with an 8 bit address bus.  One of the most famous "low end unix systems" at the time was this one (photo below), the Fortune 32:16 ... named after the very architecture that Motorola used for the chip.

The problem with using the 68000 for a "real computer" was that it had no built in MMU.  Fortune (and Altos) added their own MMU's to the motherboard to provide proper memory protection for multitasking, something the PC world would not get until Intel and Motorola got their acts together later on.  Meanwhile, the Amiga had no MMU, as anyone who ever saw the Guru Meditation error knew all too well.

Well, the Apple failure was the IIgs... an 8/16 bit machine when Amiga was a 16/32 bit machine. 

Gonna call this out with a post of its own, because it deserves it.

The IIgs did not fail because it was 16 bit.  The IIgs failed because Steve Jobs wanted it to fail.

The IIgs was faster, cheaper, and had better sound than the original Mac.  It had a W65C816 CPU that could have gone 4 MHz (maybe even higher).  Jobs crippled it down to 2.8 MHz so it wouldn't beat his precious Mac in benchmarks.  

So they cheated it on developer resources, set the price way too high, and basically positioned it as an end-of-the-line toy for schools.   It could have competed with the Amiga and Atari ST.

It was just Jobs doing what Jobs did.  He neglected the IIgs just like he neglected his pancreas.

Ya, lack of support due to lack of interest.  I thought there were some compatibility issues too which of course burnt a lot of things, but i could be wrong, never really tried doing much with the one i had.. 

Hardware and OS was pretty cool from what i remember. Not ground breaking since GUIs were not 'new' at that point, but an advancement.

Jobs also did kill the Newton, just as it was about to take off. Still annoyed about that, i was a huge Newton fan.

Sat May 30 2026 11:56:31 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Well, the Apple failure was the IIgs... an 8/16 bit machine when Amiga was a 16/32 bit machine. 

Gonna call this out with a post of its own, because it deserves it.

The IIgs did not fail because it was 16 bit.  The IIgs failed because Steve Jobs wanted it to fail.

The IIgs was faster, cheaper, and had better sound than the original Mac.  It had a W65C816 CPU that could have gone 4 MHz (maybe even higher).  Jobs crippled it down to 2.8 MHz so it wouldn't beat his precious Mac in benchmarks.  

So they cheated it on developer resources, set the price way too high, and basically positioned it as an end-of-the-line toy for schools.   It could have competed with the Amiga and Atari ST.

It was just Jobs doing what Jobs did.  He neglected the IIgs just like he neglected his pancreas.

Ya, lack of support due to lack of interest.  I thought there were some compatibility issues too which of course burnt a lot of things, but i could be wrong, never really tried doing much with the one i had.. 

Hardware and OS was pretty cool from what i remember. Not ground breaking since GUIs were not 'new' at that point, but an advancement.

Apple II compatibility was actually pretty good.  IIgs had the "Mega II" chip which was basically an entire Apple IIc on a chip.  This chip also appeared in early Apple II emulator boards for the Mac.

It had a GUI that ran in color.  It even had a network  that was decent for the machines at the time.  The Apple IIgs was in all aspects a great machine and a worthy successor.  There is only one reason it failed, and that is, Steve Jobs deliberately made it fail.

It would have been really nice to see a continued evolution of the 6502 past the 65816. I learned assembly language on the 6502--such a simple instruction set. The tiny register file would have become a blocker, admittedly. But--out of pure nostalgia, I suppose--I would like to see a 32-bit extension of the architecture with a big register file, an FPU, and an MMU.

Same.  On all of the above.  But understandably, CPU makers don't invest in architectures that aren't getting any traction.  If the Apple IIgs had been a blockbuster, we would have seen it.  WDC had a 65832 on the drawing board as late as 1988, but by then the market had spoken: both Apple and Commodore threw their hats in with Motorola.