Commodore Plus/4

~ the obit ~

Jack Tramiel wanted a machine with fewer chips in it. The Commodore 64 was outselling everything on earth and it was also expensive to build, because the video and the sound sat on separate chips that all had to be bought and placed. The answer was the TED, a single chip that did all of it, and around the TED Commodore designed the 264 series: the C16 and C116 at the bottom, and at the top a machine originally called the 264 that reached the shops as the Plus/4.

The original pitch was that a dealer would fit whatever application ROM the customer asked for. Commodore abandoned that by the summer of 1984 and shipped one fixed bundle instead, a word processor and a spreadsheet in ROM alongside two lesser programs, which is where the name came from. It arrived in june 1984 at $299 with 64K of RAM and a processor clocked about 75 percent faster than the one in the C64.

What it did not have was any way to run C64 software, and that was not an oversight, it was the plan. Commodore's stated intention was to grow the market sideways by selling to people who wanted serious applications rather than games. By 1984 those people in America were buying cheap IBM compatibles, and the ones who were not had already bought a C64, which by then cost $199 and had a catalog. The Plus/4 was competing for shelf space against the most successful home computer ever made, on behalf of the same company.

Commodore is one of the few 1980s computer brands whose name genuinely traveled, and it traveled as one machine. In Turkey it meant the 64 and nothing else, the way Hoover means a vacuum cleaner. So the distance I have from the Plus/4 is not the usual regional kind. It sits inside a brand I knew, as the part of it that never came up, and finding out later that Commodore spent 1984 building a computer to compete with its own hit is a very particular kind of surprise.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

Tramiel posed with the new machines at the Consumer Electronics Show in january 1984 and left Commodore on the 13th after a fight with the board. The line he had commissioned shipped five months later into a company that no longer had the person who could say what it was for. Marketing settled on calling it the productivity computer with software built in.

The reviews took that claim apart quickly. INFO and the Commodore magazines pointed out that the bundled applications were weak next to what you could buy on cartridge or disk for the C64, and that a buyer wanting real business software had better options at the same money. Built-in software that cannot be replaced is only a feature while it is good enough, and this was not.

~ what really happened ~

Commodore discontinued it during 1985, about a year and a half after launch. That was not the end of the machines, because the unsold stock went to liquidators who kept selling Plus/4s cheap for years, which is the same fate the Commodore B128 met. It had vanished from Commodore's main markets by 1988. Germany bought more of them than anywhere else and kept a user base long after the company stopped caring.

Tramiel, meanwhile, bought Atari's consumer division in july 1984 and spent the next several years attacking Commodore from the other side of the market. The 264 series is the last product decided by him and executed by people who did not agree with him.

~ the funny part ~

The Plus/4 had a real 6551 UART on the board, capable of 19,200 bits per second, where the C64 faked its serial port in software and struggled past 2,400. On paper this made it far and away the better machine for a modem, at the exact moment when going online was about to become the reason to own a computer at all.

Nobody used it. Commodore never sold a 2400 bit/s modem for the thing, most people were on 300 or 1200 anyway, and the one genuine advantage the Plus/4 held over the machine that killed it went unnoticed until retro enthusiasts dug it out decades later. It is the whole product in one detail. Correctly engineered, and pointed at a use that the company arguing with itself never got around to explaining to anybody.

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