Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Re: C128 D & 64C
Message-ID: <8360@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Date: 14 Jun 89 05:32:28 GMT
References: <919@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US>
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 64

in article <919@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US>, brendan@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US (Brendan Kehoe) says:
> 
> pcr@genrad.com (Perry Rothermel) wrote in comp.sys.cbm:
> 
>>I understand that Commodore has discontinued the 128D and in the near future
>> will stop making the 64C.
> 
>  I just read on a BBS about 2 hours ago the exact same thing, save for no
> mention of the 64C (that'd be shooting themselves in the foot, as well as a
> few  hundred software houses). 

See this bi-month's issue of Info Magazine for more (mis?) information
about this. The 128D is gone, apparently. They're still trying to
figure out what to do with the 64C. Sales are adequate but slowly
winding down. A mysterious "they" figures that next Christmas will be
the  64's last hurrah. 

I wonder if this ties in with the rumors about CBM trying to make an
ultra-low-cost Amiga-based video game? (further rumors rumored that
the effort was a failure, but... that's the fun with rumors, you never
know which way is up!). 

>  So why the HELL didn't they stick with the 128?? 

In a word: cost.

The moment Commodore introduced the Amiga 500, I stood up before a
user group and announced that the 128 would be discontinued within a
year. My reasoning was that I could get a 500 for little more than a
128+1571 costed, and people wanting to upgrade from the 64 would see
the 500 as the next logical step, instead of the 128. I was
frighteningly close to correct -- I think I was two months early on
the demise of the original ("flat") 128.

The other word is even more frightening: distribution. Many mass
marketers stopped carrying the 128 because sales of home computers
didn't justify the shelf space they were dedicating. For example, at
one local mass marketer, what was once two facing 6' rows plus a
half-row of floppy diskettes has become one-and-a-half rows and an
endrack for the diskettes. The 128 and 1571 were the first victims.

> 13 millioon 64's and 128's, they're just now deciding to go with the Colt,
> PC-ad nauseams, and pump up the Amiga line? Come on guys..that's like a
> 5-and-10 suddenly turning into Tiffany's because they saw that they could
> get more money faster with less people bitching about problems.

The 128 has a large circuit board, and is a complex machine. It is
simply an expensive machine to make. The only thing that keeps the
Amiga 500 more expensive, at the current time, is the cost of RAM --
the circuit board is about 1 foot by 8 inches, and the cost of the
A1000 custom chips was amortized long ago (and they are in old, very
cheap technology, something like 2.5 micron NMOS).

Commodore has sold over 500,000 A500s, mostly to games players in
Europe it seems. That pretty well skorches one of the major markets
for the 128, now that the Europeans have moved beyond CP/M into the
clone and MS-DOS world (thus flushing the 128 out of what little niche
it had in the business world). 

--
    Eric Lee Green              P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509     
     ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg     (318)989-9849    
"I have seen or heard 'designer of the 68000' attached to so many names that
 I can only guess that the 68000 was produced by Cecil B. DeMille." -- Bcase