LittleAlexIt's a Commodore Plus/4, some already wrote this.
The Commodore Plus/4 is a 7501 or 8501 microprocessor-based home computer from the US manufacturer Commodore International.
The device was initially designed in mid-1983 under the name Commodore 264 as an inexpensive addition to the successful Commodore VC 20 and Commodore 64 home computers. In addition, the new model was primarily intended to take market share from the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The technical and design data of the computer had to be subordinated in particular to the maximum manufacturing costs of 50 US dollars specified by the company management. The special TED module was then used to significantly reduce the number of electronic circuits and design a smaller housing, but without maintaining backwards compatibility with Commodore VC 20 and 64. While the TED was still being developed, Commodore decided to realign the product towards an application-oriented device for smaller offices. The associated upgrade to 64 kilobytes (KB) of RAM and the implementation of the permanently installed 3-plus-1 application software ultimately led to a considerable increase in price and the renaming of the computer to Commodore Plus/4.
The device, which was initially only delivered in North America from autumn 1984, was advertised as a „productivity computer“ (home user computer) and offered in retail stores for 299 US dollars. Shortly afterwards, other sales markets such as Europe were added. Due to the poor sales, sometimes drastic price reductions quickly followed, which resulted in a complete sale by Commodore after Christmas 1985. The computer gained notoriety in West Germany mainly through the computer learning course that Aldi offered on sale from 1986, a package consisting of Commodore Plus/4 along with a data recorder and additional beginner literature.
Due to the low hardware and software compatibility with the previous models, a lack of graphics capabilities for the gaming sector (sprites) and only limited sound generation, the Commodore Plus/4 was not a great commercial success despite otherwise good technical key figures and powerful peripheral devices. In contrast to the Commodore 64, the Commodore Plus/4 was only able to contribute a small part to the original goal of wresting market leadership from Sinclair with only around 830,000 devices sold worldwide. Production –including the technically limited entry-level variants Commodore 16 and Commodore 116 – was discontinued in 1985 after gradual throttling, as sales of the older but better supported Commodore 64 reached unexpected heights. In addition, significantly more powerful successors were now available with the company's own models such as the Commodore 128 and the Amiga 1000, but also the ST series from its direct competitor Atari.
The integrated 3-plus-1 software package consists of four closely interlinked application programs whose data can be easily exchanged with each other using a simple window-based user interface. The built-in word processing, with its limited range of functions (formatting commands, searches, character replacement, output of 80 characters per line supported) and the cumbersome operation (control characters only effective when printed), is not suitable for professional purposes, nor is the spreadsheet due to the maximum screen column width of only 40 characters, the tables can only display small excerpts (3 × 12 of 17 × 50 fields) and are therefore very confusing. In addition, the included graphics program does not take advantage of the Plus/4s capabilities to display the table data, so that the number series can only be visualized in the form of roughly resolved column diagrams. With a maximum of 17 fields of 38 characters and therefore a total of only 999 storable pieces of information, file management also meets non-professional requirements such as use in warehousing.
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