>>106188099
For once, CBMs legendarily incompetent marketing department isn't to blame. Their engineers had to be FORCED AT FUCKING GUNPOINT to actually innovate.
Take their entire 8-bit line - from the fucking KIM-1 to the C65 - each revision is just the last one with another custom chip.
>pet - kim-1 but with a 6545 and a decent os rom
>vic-20 - pet with custom video/sound chip replacing 6545
>c64 - vic-20 with custom vic-ii chip replacing vic-i and separate sound chip
>ted series - c64 with oh-shit-part-counts-are-spiralling-lets-replace-our-four-custom-chips-with-one-do-everything-vlsi
>c128 - c64 with a cp/m machine superglued to it, also lets go full circle and come back to 6545, but lets make it some crazy inhouse hackjob variant instead
>c65 - c64 and lets try the ted idea again by trying to shoehorn everything into monstrous vlsi's, also make it only 80% compatible with the c64, also we're still using basically the same os we put in pets 15 years ago lol
Only with the Amiga did they break the mould - because they bought the whole fucking company off-the-shelf, nobody at CBM had anything to do with its design or engineering of it.
With this in mind, when faced with the choice of "let's redesign the 1540 to use our new, awesome 6526 CIA with working shift registers, making it ten times faster with this computer we're making that has ten times as much RAM", or "add more NOPs to the DOS to get around badlines lol", it was inevitable they'd go for the latter.
