First official C64 in 36 years

[muse]

The history that I have read is not clear on that. I keep reading something about the deal having not happened only due to a mere $15,000. But if what I read about Jack being a cut-throat businessman are true, then perhaps it could be said that his intentions with the then-in-the-garage (and therefore easily purchasable) Apple were to eliminate a potential competitor as much or more than any tech he may glean from the purchase. Good thing for the world of computing that Jack's negotiations with the two Steves fell through.

There's is an interview with Chuck Peddle on YouTube ( see if I can dig it up ), maybe it's the VCF east ones... they are long but audio is bad, he discusses the early days of Apple, he was good friends with both of them and helped Woz get the 6502 working in the first Apple prototype.

He shared some details about how the meetings with Tramiel as he was present, Woz was not there. In Chuck's opinion, they were no where near close to signing a deal and Jobs could sense that he just wanted to screw him over the same way Jack screwed over Bill Gates, paying a $25,000 one off payment for the basic.

Jack wanted something like $15,000 for Apple. Steve obviously walked away frustrated and later told Chuck, "Screw Tramiel, I don't like him anyway"

 

[JDW]

Jack wanted something like $15,000 for Apple. Steve obviously walked away frustrated and later told Chuck, "Screw Tramiel, I don't like him anyway"

Just imagine if Jack had added one more zero to that number though. Seriously. Two young guys still in the garage at the time, with no knowledge of what the future would necessarily bring. The larger the number, the more likely they might have considered it, despite having disliked Jack T. Then again, it may not have made logical sense to pay too much more than $15k (in 1970's dollars) for what two kids in a garage were doing.

Anyway, if you ever do find that video, I'd love to see it.

 

[muse]

Just imagine if Jack had added one more zero to that number though. Seriously. Two young guys still in the garage at the time, with no knowledge of what the future would necessarily bring. The larger the number, the more likely they might have considered it, despite having disliked Jack T. Then again, it may not have made logical sense to pay too much more than $15k (in 1970's dollars) for what two kids in a garage were doing.

Anyway, if you ever do find that video, I'd love to see it.

Here you go. Start watching from the time embedded in the URL by hitting play

The VCF videos are also good, there's some more detail

 

[JDW]

Here you go. Start watching from the time embedded…

I watch the timestamp in your video and here is what Chuck Peddle said…

“Steve wanted $300,000 for the company, but Tramiel wanted to give him $50,000.”

That seems to give evidence to what I was thinking previously, that Steve would have sold the company if the number would’ve been big enough.

enunciates FIFTY clearly and even the Closed Caption text shows that. But since 50 and 15 are often misheard, that explains all those mistaken $15,000 figures I’ve been reading about.

The propagation of similar errors happens a lot, actually. I did a lot of research before I produced my Macintosh Portable video and I found Youtubers and blogs were claiming the price tag was $7300, but when you do the research, including magazines and newspapers and official Apple documentation from the time, there was no such price! It was in fact $6,499 for the upper end configuration. And yes, I did check exchange rates to see if it might’ve been Australian dollars or Canadian dollars but no, that $7300 just was an incorrect number that people repeated without doing their own research to find out if it was accurate or not.

Anyway, thank you for the video and for pegging it to the precise timestamp because I found that info very helpful!

 

[muse]

Just imagine if Jack had added one more zero to that number though. Seriously. Two young guys still in the garage at the time, with no knowledge of what the future would necessarily bring. The larger the number, the more likely they might have considered it, despite having disliked Jack T. Then again, it may not have made logical sense to pay too much more than $15k (in 1970's dollars) for what two kids in a garage were doing.

Anyway, if you ever do find that video, I'd love to see it.

It’s hard to imagine a long term working relationship between Steve Jobs and Jack. Their philosophies about what a computer should be were completely different.

Commodore’s approach was always technology first. Build the hardware, push the silicon as far as possible, and only then decide what products to make and who the customers might be. Jobs operated from the opposite direction. For him, everything started with the user experience, and the technology existed to serve that vision, not the other way around.

Commodore’s access to an in house chip fab meant they could design highly specialized custom hardware. That shaped their entire problem solving culture. Apple, by contrast, often viewed Commodore’s and Atari's machines as overly complex. When Jobs first saw the Amiga Prototype, he famously complained that it had too much hardware.

But from Commodore’s perspective, that complexity was the point. Their strategy was to build machines that were difficult to clone and then sell them at a price that discouraged competitors from even trying.

 

[muse]

Woz regaled the encounter with Commodore at the 25th Anniversary Celebration Of The C64 in 2007. Jobs wanted a few hundred thousand dollars, and also wanted to be in charge of running the Apple program at Commodore. I assume, the money demanded was an upfront investment for stock/parts and hiring staff that would work under Steve at Commodore.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Got an E-mail from New-Commodore saying that Founders Edition units ship in February. We'll see how they compare to the Starlight units.

 

[JDW]

@ClassicHasClass
Someone posted the content of that letter in the the C64U group on Facebook and I read it prior to seeing your post. It basically said when I was thinking the whole time. Namely, that users of the Starlight edition, mostly complained about keyboard flex and because of that, I knew the delay to ship the more expensive Founder’s edition was probably triggered by an investigation into the cause of that flex. And that’s kind of what the letter said.

The question will be how much keyboard flex Founder’s owners will experience even with Commodore having now addressed the issue.

On my beige unit I really don’t notice any flex at all. Flex on the LED lit models seems to have something to do with the fact they used to transparent keyboard PCB, although the letter says there was an assembly issue at work as well.

Commodore is clearing being careful here to better ensure people who paid the highest price the machine won’t be unhappy with it.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Hope so. I decided not to buy a basic beige - I'm treating this as a successor to the 64, and I think it should look accordingly. The Founders edition seemed most appropriate.

 

[muse]

I think those editions would have looked great with the just the standard non transparent keyboard PCB but I can see why they went with that to show off more of the internals.

I hope they fix the problem soon for those who have ordered them but I'm happy with the original cases and I'm glad RF went with "breadbin grey" which is a slightly lighter shade of brown rather than the darker brown. My original we bought in late 85 was definitely a lighter brown, almost grey... to be fair its very close to the original colour of my 1541.

What will Commodore.net do next? I suspect that they'll work with Trenz Electeonics and the Mega65 team to release the Mega65 under the Commodore branding, Peri hinted of this in one of his videos where he briefly mentions the Mega65 with its badge conspicuously removed and goes on to say that it deserves a Commodore 65 badge.

The original machine was suppose to be c64 compatible ( a go64 mode like the c128 ) and featured a 4510 MOS CPU with bitplane graphics and a blitter, however the combination was a poor choice due to the limited ram available to do anything practical with bitplane graphics. The Mega65 offers bitplane compatibility with the c65 but also offers enhancements such as 4 x SID support, 4 audio DACs for digitized sounds, additional character mode features found only in 80s arcade machines. It has a Raster ReWrite Buffer which practically gives you unlimited sprite capabilities on top of the standard 8 24x21 sprites known in the c64.

The Commodore 65 was supposed to be the successor to the Commodore 64 but Commodore shelved it for the Amiga which had more memory and a Motorola 68000 . A few prototypes exist, in fact you could actually buy them as Commodore was bleeding money and they sold off anything they could to remain in afloat. Here's an ad I took a screenshot of in Amiga Computing Issue 69 / January 1994.