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> Commodore threw together what they could to keep the C64 band together for one more tour, but... let's be honest, their last album sucked.

Exactly! Bil Herd said it was just supposed to get them through a year until the Amiga picked up. Nobody expected the 8-bit line to last so long with a multitasking multimedia powerhouse out there for under $1000.

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Amstrad managed to keep selling 8-bit CP/M machines as (semi) dedicated word processors well into the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

I had an PCW for ages. My dad got it so I could write up school reports. Screen was pretty crisp text. Main drawback is it uses a 3" floppy which was hard to find. Also only after purchase did I realize it was not IBM compatible.

Commodore kept selling the 64C until it entered chapter 11 in 1994, actually. It was the 128 that was an embarassing dead end, but the 64 had a huge base of software and there was still a market for a dirt cheap TV-connected home device for all the purposes for which it was ever useful.

It's hard to remember how fast things changed in the early era of computing. The killer app that finally put the knife in the 8 bit home computer was... the web browser.

Indeed, we went from ZX81 in 1981 to Amiga in 1985.

Every new project was obsolete or nearly so at launch.

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