Commodore Plus/4

A Commodore Plus/4.

The Commodore Plus/4 is an 8-bit personal computer developed by Commodore International and first sold in 1984. Although the Commodore 64 was already released, it had the reputation of a gaming computer. The Commodore Plus/4 was billed as a business oriented computer like the Commodore CBM-II before it. The name "Plus/4" comes from the fact that the computer came with four office programs built into its RAM which could handle word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and graphing. The new hardware was not compatible with any software or hardware from earlier Commodore models, but, because the same architecture was used on the budget Commodore 16, there was a lot of compatibility with it. The Plus/4 computer was a flop in the USA and was discontinued after only a year.

The computer uses a MOS 7501 CPU while video and audio was processed by the TED chip. It came with 64 KB of RAM and boots into Commodore BASIC.

Personal

Growing up, I didn't even know the Commodore Plus/4 existed and only learned about it as an adult reading about retro video games. After learning that it was weaker than the Commodore 64 and designed primarily for business use, I had little interest in it.