It started out development as a cost-reduced version of the highly popular Commodore 64, with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel intending for it to take on lower-cost personal computers such as the ZX Spectrum. However, a combination of Tramiel's departure from the company, confusion on how to price and market the family, and heavy competition would conspire to make the Plus/4 the least commercially successful of Commodore's main personal computer families (albeit with other individual models, including the Commodore 64GS, CDTV, and Amiga CD32, plus some of the more obscure versions of the Commodore PET, selling worse than anything in this family).
Like the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 before it, the Plus/4 was based around the widely-used 6502 architecture, though it was actually clocked substantially higher than in either of its predecessors. The flagship Plus/4 model also contained the same 64K of memory as the C64, while the C16 and C116 had to make do with, as their names suggest, 16K (the latter two models were largely identical spec-wise, the major difference being that the C16 used the same casing and keyboard designnote as the C64, while the C116 used a chiclet keyboard).
The major difference between the Plus/4 family and the Commodore 64 was its graphics feature set, which in many regards was closer to that of the VIC-20. It did bring in some higher resolution modes introduced by the C64, but sprite support was dropped in order to cut costs, making it much more difficult to create games for the platform; developers would often have to fall back on the VIC-20 method of using custom characters to piece together graphics. It did have the ability to display a fairly wide range of colors for an 8-bit machine, however. The system's sound capabilities took a noticeable dive from the C64 and even the VIC-20, giving it weaker sound capabilities than most of the other major personal computers on the market by that time.
Ultimately, the family proved a commercial failure, for different reasons among the models:
- The main Plus/4 model was fatally undermined out of the gate by its price being set at $299, which might have been reasonable for the time, if not for the fact that this was also the cost of the Commodore 64, a system which was superior to the Plus/4 in every regard outside of lacking a few of the Plus/4's graphical tricks, and had a far bigger and more established software library. Commodore tried to justify the price by pointing to the four productivity applications included in the ROM, but seeing how the C64 wasn't exactly short on this type of software, people could just pay for the aftermarket software on that system. The system was also left in an awkward mid-spot between the Commodore 64 and the Commodore (1)16, as it wasn't software compatible with the former, and software that was written for it was usually designed with the latter in mind, meaning its full complement of memory went mostly unused.
- The Commodore 16 (and by extension, the C116) was priced quite reasonably, costing just $99 on its first release. However, the adage "you get what you pay for" was very much in effect here, as people quickly worked out that they had the choice between paying $99 for a system with a limited software library, and whose games were typically slow, jerky, and had barely discernable graphics , versus paying an extra $200 (an amount that wasn't exactly small at the time, but also one that wasn't earth-shattering, either) for a system that in most aspects was still industry-leading, and had a far more extensive software library. Ultimately, the market for people looking for a super-low-cost home office computer simply didn't exist in anything like the numbers Tramiel was hoping to attract, and even the people who did fall into that category could usually be talked by salespeople into buying something more capable and more expensive.
After barely a year — with Tramiel's departure having robbed the product of its main advocate before it was even released, and with Commodore wanting to refocus on the upcoming Commodore 128 (which also struggle to attract software development for much the same reason as this family, but at least sold quite well) and Amiga — the family was discontinued, and the remaining inventory dumped mostly in Europe and South America at heavily reduced prices.
Specifications:
Processors
Memory
- Commodore Plus/4: 64K
- Commodore 16 and 116: 16K, though can be increased to 64K via after-market expansions.
Display
- 160x200 or 320x200 bitmap graphics, 40x25 character graphics
- 121 colors
Sound
- Two square waves, four octaves
- One noise channel, shared with second square wave
