News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running CP/M?. Parent comment

Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by ajross on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:34PM (#33926169)
> To me, the biggest tragedy was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to package the A3000 as a low-end Unix workstation.

This is another bit of Amiga lore that is a little spun. There was no space in the market for a 68030 Unix machine in 1992 though. Even SPARC's days were numbered. Not two years later we were all running Linux on Pentiums, and we never looked back.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by mixmastamyk on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:45PM (#33926269)
I wasn't aware of this at the time, but they had AT&T Unix on them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_3000UX

$3400 in 1990 is pretty high, but I guess cheap for a "workstation." The average business would probably just suffer on a PC with DOS and Lotus 123 or something.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by kevin_thibedeau on Friday December 09, 2022 @04:05PM (#33926443)
> The average business would probably just suffer on a PC with DOS and Lotus 123 or something.

386 PCs were going for $3500+ in 1990.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by mixmastamyk on Friday December 09, 2022 @08:54PM (#33928979)
386 was five years old by that point, though you can spend as a much as you wanted of course.

But a 386 and graphics are not needed to do what I mentioned.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by kevin_thibedeau on Friday December 09, 2022 @09:04PM (#33929044)
Prices didn't fall that quickly. 386s were premium until the 486 came along and $3500 is still a drop from the introductory pricing where they went for $5000. The 386 was an export controlled supercomputer and the market reflected that early on. 286's were the mid grade with 8086 still available for budget PCs.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by icedchai on Friday December 09, 2022 @06:36PM (#33927966)
I basically said this exactly same thing in a previous post. Why would Sun need Commodore? They had their own 68K systems and had moved on to Sparc anyway.
[ Parent | on HN ]