Hacker News Reader

It's a fair cop against the II+ but there are other things in the comparison which are mildly hinky. I find their characterization of POKEY a little unfair, even though I think SID is superior, and the CP/M option on the C64 was nearly useless because the 1541 didn't read MFM formats. (Much more useful on the C128, but you needed a 1571 disk drive, and by 1985 CP/M was on its way out.) The keyboard criteria are also somewhat of an Apples-to-Commodores comparison, so to speak. Still, it's hard-hitting ad copy and it was Tramiel's Commodore -- he was determined to win, by golly.

Wasn’t POKEY out of tune due to limited frequency register? Making it hard to produce music that sounds good.

But there was the Apple 80 column card option with full ascii. Add USCD Pascal and suddenly it morphed from plaything to a programming-for-computer-science trainer.

The Apple is almost five years older than the C64, an eternity in that era.