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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

Commodore 64 units were so cheap they got sold in toy stores. This made computer shops angry at Commodore. So when the Commodore Amiga 1000 came out computer stores didn't want to carry it.

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In the UK it was completely different. You didn't go to toy stores to buy computers, we had a number of Electronics retailers and department stores that sold them. They were in Dixon's, Curry's and Comet (all electrical retailers, the former two still exist in some type of form), but also places like Boots (mainly a chemist/pharmacy), WHSmith (mainly a book, stationary and newspaper retailer), Department stores like Debenhams. There were no "mom and pop" computer stores. They were usually all on display, and all very accessible. We had a massive programme to learn about computers in schools so we all knew how to write some basic, and kids would walk up to them and code little demos (some version of "10 print "this store stinks": goto 10" was common). The computers on display differed, but you'd see ZX Spectrum, C64, Oric Atmos, Amstrad CPC range and other lesser known players. But Apple was unknown. Not one, ever. If you wanted an Apple you needed to go to a specialist dealer, and generally they were few and far between and super expensive.

By the time the 16-bit computers came about, they were mainly in stores like Curry's and Dixon's, and very accessible. I had an Amiga 500, and most of my friends did too, except one poor chap with an Atari ST.

There was a one "mom and pop" type store in my town by the time I got to my late teens. They sold a lot of the big box Amigas, some PC's and import consoles like PC-Engine. But they closed in the late 90's. I remember buying a used black and white TV from their closing down sale for £10.

In the early days eg Late 70's Apple was defiantly the Luxury end of the market in the UK - the "consumer" Personal Computer as a mass market item didn't come until several years later.

Apple was luxury in the UK until the iMac. I remember looking at the Beige G3 hardware and it being 3 or more times more expensive than my beige no name PC. My first Mac was a 6100 years after it was obsolete. I wanted to play with Macs, but they were stupidly expensive at the time.

Apple claimed you got more for less by using the MacOS/MacSystem instead of DOS/Windows. Apple made a lot of money being different than Microsoft. Easier to use easier to configure easier to troubleshoot.

I got a Mac SE and Mac IIcx 6Macs and a G3 iMac. I don't use them I collected them over the years to see if they go up in value.

What really angered them was when Tramiel dropped the retail price without informing computer stores first, and without offering to refund the difference between the old a and new retail price.

But, yeah, Commodore burned their retail network in the US time and time and time again.

Among other things the incompetent Commodore management did. Here was a company that did "vertical integration" Apple-style before Apple. They had their own CPU, their own video chips, their own sound chips, custom. They had a platform years ahead of their peers (just compare a 1985 Amiga to a 1985 Mac). But CBM was epically mismanaged, terrible at marketing, but great at paying their CEO big salaries and bonuses.

It is my understanding that a one time Commodore executives were the highest paid people in the microcomputer industry. Millions that could have gone in research, marketing, and just support programs vanished into the pockets of higher management even as Commodore was losing it's market share.

R&D at Commodore was always notoriously underfunded compared to the competition and compared to their size. Which makes what they achieved at their height all the more incredible.

The Commodore 16 and Plus 4 flopped as did the Commodore 9000 machine. Commodore had a PC Clone called the PC-Colt but it didn't sell well. Commodore did little to no marketing in the USA. Everything was sold in toy stores.

The original Amiga hardware (which was later sold as the 1000/500/2000) was developed by a startup which was later bought by Commodore. After the Amiga was a success, they failed to develop the platform further. Ok, it was arguably hard to introduce changes to the existing custom chips while keeping at least a degree of compatibility with old games that relied on all sorts of timing etc. details of the old hardware, but still... When the first Amigas with really improved capabilities (4000/1200) appeared in 1992, it was too little too late.

>their own video chips, their own sound chips, custom

Commodore made sure to fire designers promptly after every new product launch. C-64 custom chip designers founded Ensoniq in 1982, the year C-64 launched. Amiga team was "let go" before Amiga 1000 to 500 cost optimization redesign. This meant Amiga never got HD floppy controller - there was no one capable of upgrading PLL inside Paula.

Oh, we got some warnings alright! On a friday we get a call saying we had to drop the price of item X by $50-$100 on Monday.

Then we had to deal with customers who had just bought the same item in the last week or so.

What would you have considered the normal/preferred way of handling this? After all, hardware price drops were normal, that's how the market was expanded; wouldn't it be the case that no matter when the price came down, someone would've bought it the previous day?

Maybe in US, that never happened in Iberian Peninsula.

Spain and the UK were a ZX Spectrum zone.

Portugal saw a bit of Amiga penetration (at least anecdotally judging from my social group). But yes no where near the Spectrum.

I had an Amiga 500 in Spain. You could see them in some stores, but I did never met anyone else who owned one.

See my sibling comment. I was the PC guy among the high school gang full with Amigas.

Weekends spent doing protacker session, checking content of newly traded floppies, trying to stuff in 68000, and then coming home and trying to replicate something on a 386SX.

And Amiga when 16 bit days arrived, and there was no problem getting Amiga 1000s even on my tiny town.

I was the only guy on computer gang that got a PC instead, due to the way my parents saw it as a safer bet for the money being invested. Somehow they were right, regarding how computer market evolved years later.

So I was floating between PC and Amiga demoscene.

I was 13 when I purchased mine on lawnmower money. Getting a tape drive to store the hours of peaking/poking the games from the magazines was amazing.

Just found my original 300 baud modem and hardware/software moving homes. War Games, once I found out it was created on a Commodore PET, was a huge influence at the time. Not sure if I have a single monitor with an RCA connector anymore.

I bought my C64 and 1541 drive from a Walgreens around 1984, in Piedmont, California.

It might not have been exactly a Walgreens, but it was that type of drug store, with the electronics behind the counter.

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