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Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

Stuart Castle Silver badge

Commodore definitely had a problem with marketing. They seemed almost as if they found good marketing offensive. A few examples:

1) The Commodore 64 GS. Take an out of date computer, remove the keyboard (and most of the other I/O) and package it up as a console, then bundle it with a cartridge that required you to press a key to start, and attempt to sell it for nearly as much as the user would have paid for a Commodore 64, which had both a keyboard and all the I/O required to access a huge library of software on tape and disk.

2) The CDTV. Take a fairly successful home computer. Add a CD drive and a weird controller, but remove the keyboard and floppy drive and place the whole caboodle in a CD player casing, then forbid stores from selling the resulting device anywhere near a computer and try and sell it to an already over saturated CD player market, despite their being no evidence of any interest in CD players being interactive. Then do the same thing again (CD32) when it failed.

Don't get me wrong. I am an Amiga fanboi, and would have killed for a CD32 (or CDTV). I'd like to think that with good marketing, the CD32 would have given Commodore enough cash that it could have developed a credible competitor to the Saturn and PS1, and I'd like to think that with good marketing of a their big box Amigas, Commodore would now be in the same position Apple are.

Sadly, that didn't happen. MS always had the advantage that they had the backing of IBM, and, particularly in the late 80s, there was a perception that no one would ever get fired for buying IBM, which likely helped PC (and therefore MS-DOS and Windows) sales massively.

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