Re: C65 Classroom Computer

Den Thu, 13 Dec 2018 09:32:27 +0100 skrev Anders Carlsson
<anders.carlsson@sfks.se>:
> Steve Gray wrote:
> 
> > For those of you not on facebook, Fred Bowen showed pictures of a 
> > previously unknown C65 variant without floppy disk. It appears to
> > have an RS-232 port, RGB port and expansion on the back, single SID
> > and two big custom chips. I'm blown away!
> 
> What does "classroom computer" refer to here, an idea to actually
> launch a school computer in the very late 1980's, based on a
> souped-up C64 (which I consider the C65 to be) in a world where
> various 80186 based custom computers already had torn up the market
> and regular PC compatibles were slowly getting their feet into
> schools?

Agree, who would buy that to a school?

A more plausible theory might be that they realized that disk drive
mechanics weren't really Commodores big thing and it might be better to
let the customer buy a third party drive?
 
> While I understand that the C65 project mostly was a part-time
> project for bored engineers and may not have been prioritized by
> Commodore, making one final 8-bit home computer may have made sense
> (cmp the Amstrad CPC 6128 Plus, the Sam Coupé and a few more), but if
> indeed it was a project to get into the educational world, I hope not
> too much of the money Commodore anyway wasted around those days
> (should probably coincide or slightly predate the CDTV project) went
> into it as it would seem pretty much like a dead end.

I wounder if the C65 actually made that much sense to Commodore? The
others you mention afaik used Z80 and both Amstrad and the makers of Sam
Coupé had to buy all chips on the open market. On the other hand,
Commodore manufactured the Amiga OCS/ECS chipset themself so I would
guess that the cost of making an Amiga 500 board wouldn't differ that
much to making the boards for Sam Coupé or the Amstrad CPC 6128 Plus.

> Did even the C128 become a school computer of any importance, as it
> at least runs a slow CP/M?

I've never heard of any school usage of Commodore computers except the
usage of various PETs (and educator 64) in North America.

Maybe someone could try to ask Mats Gabrielsson (or someone else who
could have the knowledge) about what quantities the VIC SWITCH did sell
(and the PET SWITCH / MBS-100 too).

IMHO it's kind of strange that Commodores various facilities in North
America afaik never made any "use more than one computer on a single
drive" hardware for school usage.

Also if Commodore had been really serious about sharing peripherals
they should probably had made versions of the disk drives with more ram
giving them more buffers, and making the share-hardware devices like
VIC SWITCH slightly more intelligent (adding some way for the drive to
know which client is talking to the drive).

I assume that those share-a-drive devices only really made sense in
rather controlled environments where the users mostly just loaded or
saved PRG files. Using SEQ files would afaik require the users to use
different secondary addresses and the drive would risk running out of
buffers.

But a classroom C65 might be usable if it would have some more advanced
way to use a common file server. At the time it would make sense to
use something else than Commodore 8-bit hardware as a file server, for
example a PC or actually better some kind of Amiga (as file server
software is something that might benefit from real multitasking). I
assume that for a classroom of students working on the same task it
would probably be enough to only use 3.5" 880k Amiga disk drives as
common storage. The teacher might simply have a boot disk for each
class / task to load the file server with.

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