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

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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