[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

I only knew of the Commodore 128D lookalike called the PC-1. That was the same price as the Atari PC1 (almost identical specs) and these 8088 PCs came a fair bit after the Amstrad PC1512, also cost £100 more than the 8086 based PC1512.

Amstrad designed their own chips for the PC1512, and built it in the same far East factory as the CPC range. Problem was that to get around IP issues and reduce the price they strayed from the IBM PC standard. Some of the peculiarities include a non-standard keyboard with incompatible communications protocol, power supply in the monitor (like the CPC), and a 640x200 16 color graphics mode that wasn't used by anything except GEM. You couldn't upgrade the video to EGA or VGA because the on-board controller couldn't be turned off, but you wouldn't want to do that anyway because you had to use the original monitor to power the computer.

The 8 MHz 8086 wasn't as fast as you might think either. One reason is that it has 8 bit instructions that tend to split memory accesses so it's only ~1.5 x faster than an 8088 at the same clock speed. The other reason is the peripherals and video controller are still all 8 bit running at ~5 Mhz.

I had a PC1512 with hard drive and 'paper-white' analog monochrome monitor. The screen display looked pretty nice but the long-persistence phosphor made action games awkward. My workmates and I had fun playing Leisure Suit Larry on it in 4 glorious shades of grey and PC speaker sound!

These sound like Gould 1984 projects to me. "Gould replaced Tramiel with Marshall F. Smith, a steel executive without a computer or consumer marketing experience."

Commodore PCs were designed and built in Germany. They did rather well over there, for a time being the biggest selling PC clone in Germany. They did quite well here in New Zealand too - in part because they were better built, more reliable and easier to set up than typical Taiwanese clones.

Very few PC-1's were made. It was designed to counter Atari's PC1, which was introduced in 1987 for $599. They needn't have bothered though because Atari's PC clones bombed.

Atari PC1: The Atari IBM-compatible

Atari made a line of PCs in the 1980s, which seems contradictory because it is... in hindsight, it’s easy to see why the Atari PC1 was a mistake and how it impacted the rest of the line...

The PC1, introduced in 1987, sported an 8088-2 CPU and a highly integrated motherboard for the time. Building in video, serial and parallel ports and a disk controller allowed Atari to make the system smaller and cheaper, and the system fit nicely in an Atari Mega ST case. Atari also included ports so you could plug in Atari ST-compatible external floppy and hard drives into the system.

But there were problems with this approach. First, the presence of only one floppy drive was a problem. A single-drive PC wasn’t very useful in 1987. Popular PC software frequently used two drives. So by the time you bought the PC1 and an external floppy drive, the system wasn’t any more compact than a more traditional PC and it lost most or all of its price advantage too.

Second, the PC1 didn’t have internal expansion slots. Atari built EGA graphics into the system, but in 1987, VGA graphics came out. If you had expansion slots, you could upgrade to VGA. But not with Atari. A year or two later when sound cards started appearing, the PC1 didn’t have anywhere to plug one in.

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Tramiel is the sort of person who would be at MOS first finding out if they could make a compatible CPU and pay nothing to anybody, just like with the 6800 vs 6501 (then 6502).

Except Atari did make PC clones under Jack's direction, and they used Intel CPUs.



Commodore did a lot better with their PC clones than Atari did. This blows out of the water the theory that Jack would have managed it a lot better.

BTW Commodore wasn't the only one to get a license to make 8088's and not make use if it. MOSTEK did the same. They didn't receive any of the assets required (schematics, chip layout etc.) to clone it. The same may have applied to Commodore. The rights may have just been so they could get another manufacturer to make the chips for them without worrying about being sued.