Quote: "if you wanted to use the full 64k"
Well the memory problem on the C64 wasn't just limited to basic, the 64 included the ROM too, so in reality you only had 40K of RAM even for machine code programmers.
This meant - despite the name - that it had less memory than the Spectrum 48!
As for why Commodore went bankrupt, I was one of the leading C= techies in the country at that time and worked alongside several people any Amiga fan might remember, so perhaps I can throw some light on what happened.
The bankruptcy stems back a few years before Commodores demise and for it you can thank Sachi and Sachi. Yes as the post above suggested C= management where certainly inneficient as for instance, when an MD visited the Dutch branch and Medi Ally (spelling?) wanted to telephone them he didn't phone the C= offices or the hotel the MD was staying at, but instead the top Dutch brothel just down the road where the girls cost a few thousand dollars an hour - and they'd take half a dozen for the whole night.
What Sachi & Sachi did for C= was to give some amazing piece of very expensive and higly insightfull market research. Apparantly, according to the world famous advertising executives, the general public are scared of computers, but they are perfectly content with video recorders.
And thus was born the CDTV
CDTV's now constitute a major part of the Earths land mass having been manufactured in their tens of thousands in a bid to out-sell Sega's consoles, however they sold less units than you can count to in two binary digits because they where video recorders and not consoles.
The A1200/A4000 was a panic release by C= using old technology, they had far more up to date graphical architectures and Jeff (Porter) even had the worlds first dedicated 3D hardware chipset ready to go and even the first DSP sound chip, but Medi remained unconvinced that it would sell at the price they could produce it for, and rolled out the AGA chipset machines instead.
The AGA machines wheren't getting the massive sales figures C= needed, and now with CDTV very much dead they launched the CD32, a small but highly effective marketing campaign (such as the 'To be this good will take Sega Ages poster outside of Sega's head office which generated so much free spin off media in the news they could not have wished for more coverage) later and the firm almost made it.
However, the word 'almost' in the last paragraph is what consigns C= to digital heaven as the debts incurred during the CDTV fiasco piled them under, despite all the retail success they where actually having at that time.
So there you have it, if you get somebody who knows nothing about computers to do your market research then they will tell you that they know nothing about computers.
Pneumatic Dryll
