Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running CP/M?

Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by bitwize on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:03PM (#33925856)

This is why I say the PC was doomed to win. IBM established the PC and then immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS, so the PC ecosystem became this mishmash of companies, each contributing to and extending the platform as a whole. Any one of them can rise and fall and the ecosystem as a whole would keep on going.

Commodore was mismanaged and died. Apple was mismanaged and nearly died. A proprietary computer ecosystem controlled by a single company is at risk of being run into the ground by incompetent management or sheer bloody economics. That's why the PC and not the Amiga, Old World Mac, or Atari ST became the basis of modern computing.

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Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by jecel on Friday December 09, 2022 @08:13PM (#33928685)

"immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS" is also a good description of the Apple II, but Apple was able to mostly keep clones at bay in their key markets. I believe IBM could have as well, but didn't initially care enough (the PC was a small part of its business, but micros were 100% of Apple).

Note that they took out 7 patents on the PC AT (286). When their attempt to take back control via the PS/2 in 1987 failed, they spent the 1990s getting chipset makers and clone makers to license their patents. Had they tried this in the 1980s the industry might have gone in a different direction.

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Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by tadfisher on Friday December 09, 2022 @08:59PM (#33929005)

I suspect the real answer is not commodity hardware, but commodity software. As in, it wasn't the PC that "won", it was MS-DOS on PC-compatible hardware.

You can't clone a Mac without their ROMs, and a clean-room implementation would fall quickly behind without a sustained effort. But Microsoft can sell anyone the disks, and your clone can respond to the right interrupt calls, and IBM can't do a thing to stop either of you.

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Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by mixmastamyk on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:53PM (#33926351)

Yes, multiple redundancies prevented complete failure unlike other platforms.

And the IBM stamp of approval legitimized the PC, starting the unstoppable tsunami.

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