History
Due to the popularity of the C64, the P series was cancelled in the United States before it could be officially released; however, a few dealers who received preproduction units sold them. As these computers had not received approval from the Federal Communications Commission, this caused legal problems for Commodore. The units were recalled and destroyed, but a very small number exist today, in private collections. At least one model, the P500, was commercially released in Europe but only sold in small numbers.
The most common of the B series was the low-profile B128 (called the CBM 610 in Europe), which had 128 kilobytes of RAM. The B128 did not sell well, and ultimately Commodore's inventory was liquidated by Protecto Enterprises ("We Love Our Customers"), a large Commodore mail order dealer based in Chicago, Illinois. The Protecto ads for the B128 bundle, including a dual disk drive, monitor and printer, appeared in various computer magazines for several years. The terms of the liquidation deal did not allow Protecto to advertise the computer's manufacturer, so it was simply referred to as a "128k computer". The Commodore name plate was legible in the photo in several of the ads, however.
After discontinuing the CBM-II range, Commodore handed its documentation, schematics, and all other information over to CBUG, the Chicago B128 Users Group.
Among these materials was a prototype motherboard using an Intel 8088 processor, which hints at the possibility the line could have been made IBM compatible if production had continued.
CBUG went on to develop a library of software for the computers. Its library, however, paled in comparison to the large software libraries enjoyed by the C64 and Commodore VIC-20.
The rounded case design of the high profile CBM-II series would later be used in redesigned versions of the original PET/CBM computers, (such as the CBM8296) that the CBM-II line was designed to replace.
Read more about this topic: Commodore CBM-II
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)