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Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

But, again, Commodore refused to market it is a "serious" computer (while the platform may have arguably been superior to the IBM PC.)

Edit: The sad story being that Commodore marketing apparently was happy with merely selling in the home computer market, where Commodore machines sold seemingly by them selves, and didn't bother to bare the hassles of the competition of the business market. – Which eventually resulted in the end of the company.

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Even when Commodore and Atari attempted to market their 68000 machines as serious machines they were given no respect by the press. Both made a concerted effort in the late 80s early 90s to make workstation class machines and sell them into the expanding Unix workstation market, and had no success.

I distinctly remember picking up a copy of UnixWorld in about 1990 or so and seeing an Atari TT030 in it, with the caption "up from toyland" and a couple paragraphs describing the specs of the machine as being workstation class and it shipping with AT&T Unix and it being cost effective but how could anyone take it seriously coming from a home computer and games maker? That was the start of the last couple years for Atari and Commodore, they were both done soon after. Apple barely survived.

This is correct. The problem wasn't that the Atari and Commodore 68000 machines weren't "serious" computers. It's that they had the wrong pedigree.

CBM and Atari made powerful machines that came "up" from the home computer market. IBM made underpowered machines that came "down" from a mainframe manufacturer. It was an easy choice for PHB's to go with Big Blue. As they used to say: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

How Apple survived was something of a miracle. My impression is that it was because it gained early traction in certain industries with the first mass-market WIMP machine, and retained some air of "seriousness" because pre-IBM PC, 8-bit Apples were the "serious" business machine for the vast majority of companies. (Think 90,000 accountants all banging out VisiCalc* sheets.)

*The fact that iOS just auto-corrected my spelling of VisiCalc in 2019 makes my inner nerd smile.)

Apple survived into the 90s on the back of the education market, primarily with Apple 2 and 2gs systems, secondarily with Macs. IIRC it was hard to find CBM or Atari systems to play with (you could go into a BusinessLand or ComputerLand and play with Apple 2gs or Macs or IBM PCs or Compaqs, vaguely recall Atari had some sort of distribution deal with Sears).

Commodore was always weak in the US, and strong in Europe, while Apple was the reverse. Growing up in Norway,the first Apple product I ever saw in person was the single Mac classic my local computer store put in a corner and neglected, while Commodore 64s, 128s and Amigas,Atari STs , Spectrums and Amstrads were all over the place.

The precise set of brands that did well varied a lot by country, but Apple did poorly in most of Europe until the Mac started getting traction, and Commodore did well in most of Western Europe.

Part of it was that Tramiels US price war stunt figuratively burned Commodores US dealer network to the ground, but when before that done European markets, particularly Germany did far better.

Commodore was at one point one of the best known consumer brands in Germany, irrespective of category. Somewhat less so in Europe as a whole, but still a name mentioned alongside IBM etc by people who had no idea who Apple were.

I don't remember the Atari TT030 as being easy to buy. I had been developing on STs since the initial developer offer but have never seen a TT.

Commodore (or rather, the CBM brand) did have quite a standing in the European business market, especially in Germany. It may be argued that Commodore was rather letting this run as a niche segment than building strategically on this and the respective distribution channels, which were already established. Eventually, this segment starved to a non-dramatic end, for the lack of new products, or products introduced half-heartedly.

Regarding Atari, it's a not too well known historical footnote that IBM was considering to acquire Atari's computer division, when IBM gave up their various efforts of introducing a consumer machine of their own in the late 1970s. (There's even an "IBM-Atari" design prototype by Tom Hardy.) A broader knowledge of this may have changed Atari's image quite dramatically.

It found a niche in a serious industry (video). Commodore simply got ran over by WinTel. They forgot one big part of their success was low cost and being available in a large number of outlets. They didn’t have a cost successor to the C64. The 900 was not that either.

That is very far from the truth, and the truth was nowhere as simple as that either.

Commodore was a very serious and successful supplier of small business computers with the 8xxx and 82xx series.

The main problem was that in this segment Commodore came out of a typewriter/calculator mindset, so there were absolutely nobody who ever thought "lets connect computers together", and that set a hard upper ceiling how how large companies they could sell to.

Once a business grew, the CBM computers were replaced, not because they were unhappy with them, but because they were not big enough.

Heck, even at Commodore we used IBM S/34 internally.

See my earlier comment on this below. In Europe, the PET had been pretty much what the Apple II had been in the US. It is heart shattering how Commodore/CBM was unable to exploit this position (e.g., by providing an upgrade path to the next level) – whatever the internal dynamics behind this.

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