The C=64 began at US$595 -- which was still a bargain for that time -- and you had to go to a computer store to buy one. in NYC, those were generally snooty places that catered to Suits. So the price drop to US$199 within a short time was an even bigger shock.

It was a big shock to Commodore too, apparently.

According to "Commodore - A company on the edge" it was a snap decision by Tramiel to get back at Texas Instrument (who nearly caused Commodore to go bankrupt during the "calculator wars") while they had the chance, because he realized TI was essentially bleeding money on their computers to build a software market - at one point TI was losing $100m a quarter on the home computer business .

So he slashed the price of their hardware and cut the price of all Commodore's software titled in half, preventing TI from raising their hardware prices again, and cutting off their air-supply by making it near impossible for them to make back their losses through software sales.

While Commodore could afford it, thanks to ownership of MOS etc. that pushed their manufacturing cost extremely low and meant they'd still make a profit on every machine sold, they shafted their retailers massively by not giving them any time to shift existing stock before announcing the price drop, and it ended up costing them a lot and apparently infuriating Irving Gould and contributing to Tramiel getting ousted (the other big factor was his ongoing attempts to get his sons into high level positions at Commodore).

But it made TI announce plans to exit the home computer business pretty much immediately...

here in ireland most schools and libraries has an apple ii. but they were expensive fragile things that nobody understood or touched. when the c64 came out our school got 6 linked to one floppy drive. we went nuts over them. but when it came to a my first computer i went with a zx spectrum as most of my friends had one as it was slightly cheaper.

in my class of 24 or so. 3-4 spectrums, 1-2 c64s and 1 amstrad (poor sod, great computer, few users so few software swaps available)

Outside of the UK and Ireland I think the Spectrum gets most love for being to a large extent responsible for the hard push Commodore made for low price. Tramiel wanted a ZX-81 killer early on, so we got the VIC 20, etc...

Sinclair Research were really impressive in managing to get something out that cheaply, and outside of the UK I don't think they get enough credit for the impact they had on the computing industry through the competitive pressure they created.

The interesting thing is Commodore made or almost made almost all the mistakes Sinclair made with the Spectrum models. Often more than once - they only got away with it because they were totally schizophrenic and had multiple competing teams and were so chaotic that eventually winning solutions came out of it.

E.g. the crappy keyboards on the early ZX / Spectrum machines, which was a big part of making them perform so poorly outside of the UK and Ireland. Commodore did that with the first PET, then again with one of their later home machines, as cost cutting measures - they didn't learn the first time. But they often confined their worst mistakes to a single market, and so quicker saw the cost of their mistakes and fixed them.

The first PET was much earlier than the ZX-80 and 81. And a bad keyboard was the only way a ZX-80 could be affordable.

I know, which is why I mentioned Spectrum as the mistake, not ZX-80 and ZX-81.

The bad keyboards did undoubtably impact sales of the ZX-80 and ZX-81 too, as it was facing competition from "cheap enough" machines with proper keyboards pretty quickly, but it's hard to say it was a mistake to build them that way when they were released.

The Spectrum is a different story, which is why I called it out as a mistake. Sinclair continued their tradition of crappy keyboards with that as well, and by then that was a deal-breaker for a large part of the market. Their machines were - together with the Oric 1 - often derisively referred to as "doorstops" even in the press, even though the Oric had a slightly better keyboard.

By the time the Spectrum+ came out, they (and Oric...) had fixed that mistake and it was clear what a difference it could be: The new model outsold the old 48K model (which was identical apart from the case) 2:1.

But the Spectrum+ had atrocious failure rates (the Spectrum had failure rates of 5%-6% - there are reports of failure rates of 30% for the Spectrum+). As a result I don't think I even ever saw one of them. Many dealers internationally never carried them.

When the Spectrum 128 came out, it was too late. I remember my friends and I were impressed with it - it was great "for a Spectrum", but by then "everyone" had already picked camps, and Spectrum was largely dead in the water outside of the UK and Ireland. Not even the subsequent +2 and +3 after Amstrad acquired the Spectrum could make up for that - by then the C64 was too cemented as the dominant 8-bit machine pretty much everywhere but the US and UK, only the UK of which the Spectrum had an established presence of note.

Commodore on their hand made their second attempt at a crappy keyboard with the Commodore MAX Machine (Ultimax/VC-10) in 1982, as a cost cutting measure.

That's what I was referring to by repeating mistakes - the MAX Machine was quickly cancelled after poor sales.

Commodore knew better, but tried again anyway, but because they always had a ton of different projects and different models, and different models were released in different markets, they saw the failure in Japan, and never invested much in getting it sold elsewhere, and cancelled it quickly to focus on the C-64. So unlike Sinclair, a failing model (or three) didn't affect them all that much - they had other models that sold well in most markets.

There's a long range of variations of the C16/C264/Plus4 range, for example, that were pretty much ignored by many Commodore subsidiaries, because they saw them underperform in other markets and didn't really want them.

Sinclair on the other hand didn't have better alternatives until it was too late to get a bigger international foothold.