[rbanffy]

> an enhanced VIC-III

This chip wasn't ready when they were building the C128. It was later included in the C65.

But, apart from that, there is a lot Commodore could have done incrementally with the C64, making it iteratively more functional without breaking backwards compatibility that the company simply didn't want to.

> he was fighting the top levels of Commodore

The 128 shares a lot of sins with the Apple /// and comes from a very similar story. At least Apple learned something from the /// and made the //e, //c, //c+, and the IIgs (lovely, albeit kludgy, machine, which was an absolutely idiotic project that only took resources away from the Mac). Computer for computer, an LC with Apple //e PDS board was a smarter choice.

[cmrdporcupine]

IIgs was a lovely machine that was kludged and handicapped because they didn't want to take resources away from the Mac. They could easily have clocked it up 4mhz or higher and had a much more capable machine. But my understanding is they didn't want to eat into Macintosh market share.

But schools here in Canada at least were highly invested in the Apple II, and my school acquired a whole fleet of IIgs machines. They were pretty nice actually. If they'd clocked it higher it would have been a very worth competitor for Amiga and Atari ST. But they didn't.

They also priced it too high for what it was.

[rbanffy]

> handicapped because they didn't want to take resources away from the Mac.

They had resources. The IIgs had a ROM Toolbox, a lot of hardware and was, overall, a very complicated machine that took multiple iterations to be developed. Apple was trying to make a 16-bit Apple II since before the Mac.

That they didn't want it to take sales from the Mac, makes sense. The IIgs was an evolutionary dead-end. There was no successor for the 65816.

No matter what they did with the 65816, it'd still have segmented memory, few registers (somewhat aleviated by the single-byte address trick) and no way forward - no MMU, no FPU. WDC still makes them, and never made a 65832 or 65864. The ST and Amiga were excellent opportunities thrown away. Commodore could have the 3000 be the entry-level Unix workstation Sun would sell and, with that, gain a foothold of the technical and financial desktop market. Commodore had the professional video market thanks to the Video Toaster, but made machines where the Toaster wouldn't fit. Atari, OTOH, made a couple decent workstations, but never invested much in anything beyond gaming machines with tiny monitors. It found a niche in the Music segment thanks to its MIDI interfaces, the same way the Mac survived because if was at the right place to take hold in low-end publishing.

[cmrdporcupine]

I rode the Atari ST wave back then. Until I bailed and got a 486 and ran Linux in 93. Yes, Atari half-heartedly marketed the TT030 as a Unix workstation, but it never stuck. I still remember the headline of the little snippet in UnixWorld magazine about it "Up from toyland." Not taken seriously in the Unix market, really, and by the time they had a product, that wave (68k based Unix workstations) had crested anyways.

The real problem for both Commodore and Atari in that era (apart from moribund sales, small market, bad management, etc) was that Motorola was already working towards killing off the 68000 by the early 90s. I'm not sure what Atari or Commodore would have done if they could have held on another couple years. PowerPC ended up being a dead-end, too.

Yeah, I don't like programming the 816, either. But in that era it wasn't the worst. WDC made the 816 just for Apple, really. (And didn't do the greatest job imho, but whatever) If Apple had asked for it, they would have made an 832, added more registers, whatever. It would have been a hack... but so was x86.

Apple's problem was that until the LC (93? 94? 95? I forget. My mom bought one at my recommendation) they didn't have a reasonably priced low-end Mac to sell to people or schools who would have gotten something in the Apple II series in the past. They seemed to have lost a big part of the education market when they dropped/failed-to-advance the II line.

[rbanffy]

> reasonably priced low-end Mac to sell to people or schools who would have gotten something in the Apple II series in the past.

Even with the heavy discounts Apple gave to the education market (brilliant strategy, BTW) the Apple IIs were not exactly competitively priced. So much, in fact, PC clones ate away the educational market with a product with a much higher perceived value (kids would learn to use the computers that were going into offices).

[timbit42]

As a Canadian I am surprised to hear schools, "were highly invested in the Apple II". In Ontario and any other province I've heard about, Commodore PET, VIC-20 and 64 were nearly ubiquitous. What province were you living in?

Even if clocked higher, the IIgs didn't have the video power to compete with the Amiga. No blitter, sprites, or hardware scrolling.

What Apple product wasn't priced too high? Always have been, since day one.