Re: Commodore 16 mini-DIN ports - why?

From: Anders Carlsson <anders.carlsson_at_sfks.se>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 01:08:52 +0200
Message-ID: <D260CD4F01574BA1949A3EA8F373B3BC@zapac9ea002038>
So, I learned the following dimensions:

Commodore 116: external 26 x 18 cm, motherboard 23.5 x 15 cm
Commodore 16: external 40.7 x 20.4 cm, motherboard ??
Commodore Plus/4: external 42,2 x 23,8 cm, motherboard ??

TED developer's prototype: motherboard 31 x 18 cm, not sure if this ever 
came in its own case?

From Bil's video, I get the feeling that Ira Velinsky got some size 
parameters to work with, came up with a case design and then you had to make 
sure the board would fit within that case? I suppose the size parameters in 
that case were chosen to pack as many units as possible on a pallet to save 
shipping costs etc, or perhaps every square inch of plastic as well as PCB 
would add a significant amount to the production costs and thus cut in the 
sales margins.

Then again, the rubber keyboard on the C116 fills out the total area quite 
well, and it might've looked silly to place the cursor keys further from the 
rest. Possibly the function keys could've been placed to the right of the 
cursor keys if you had more width to work with.

See also this page which describes a prototype 116 that looks to have quite 
a bit of spare room on the PCB. Is that Bil's handwriting on those EPROMs as 
well? It also has a slightly different keyboard layout than the production 
model.

http://www.northnet.org/rayzor/cbm/116.html

Best regards

Anders Carlsson


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