Commodore Plus/4
Another interesting Commodore 8bit is the Plus/4. It was intended
as a follow-on system to the C-64 and was begun by Jack Tramiel prior to his
leaving Commodore. The Plus/4 had 64k of RAM, as well as 4 applications
built into ROM. The applications were a good idea in theory, but the ones
that shipped with the system were pretty limited. The Plus/4 used it's own
distinct case design, which was black in color, and even had a set of arrow
keys grouped together in the lower right corner of the keyboard. Unfortunately the dattasette port, joystick ports, and changes in BASIC were all incompatible with existing hardware and software, though one could use
existing serial bus items from other Commodore systems, such as printers and
disk drives. Like other systems which attempted to directly take on the C-64, both from Commodore and other manufacturers, the Plus/4 was a failure.
On April 29, 1994 Commodore International shut it's doors. Early in 1995,
German PC-manufacturer ESCOM bought Commodore, though they themselves would
go into receivership the next year.
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