▲ 15 points
Ask HN: Why didn't the C64 come with Simons' BASIC in the box from 1983 onward?
And maybe they could have even given the cartridge for free to people who have already bought a C64 without it.
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Because they believed only a small fraction of customers would care a lot about a better Basic interpreter, whereas the vast majority would care about price. As for giving things away for free, Commodore was already engaged in a cutthroat price war with Texas Instruments that almost sank the company. They could not afford to give anything else away for free.
There were multiple reasons.
Simons' BASIC was still interpreted. If you wanted graphics and performance, you used Assembler.
Many/most people were using a disk speed-up cartridge like Epyx's Fast Load. You could only use one cartridge at a time. If they placed Simons' BASIC in the C64 ROM, that could have made it less compatible with existing software.
They didn't want to pay the licensing cost for an application that only a minority of C64 owners would have wanted.
Wasn't it because Jack Tramiel was too cheap and just wanted to make use of his existing MS BASIC licence?
He would still have made use of the MS BASIC license, but the addition of the Simons' BASIC cartridge in the box from 1983 onward would have changed the lives of many hobby coders.
That doesn't make UncleSlacky incorrect. Tramiel was obsessed with reducing COGS and thus retail price, and bulldozed down anything standing in his way.
A more interesting possibility is the post-Tramiel Commodore including a ROM version of GEOS from 1986 onward, and selling it on cartridge form to existing customers.
Other possibilities:
* Launch Amiga 2000 and 500 in 1985 instead of 1000.
* Eschew Amiga completely, in favor of the Commodore 900 with Coherent. Instead of Amiga silicon, ship with a "VIC-III" for graphics and two SIDs for stereo 6-channel sound.
Cartridges cost money. They were running a business.
Simon's BASIC was buggy. Some worked great some didn't work well at all (like line renumber) IIRC there was an updated version out there..
Second, I think the power of the 64 was its' limited BASIC but it was a good start (still the best line editor of most systems, just cursor up change the line, press return and done), The no-frills in the language but not in the capabilities made it a platform where there was no one definate way to do graphics or sound so there was a lot of experimentation most good, and some downright awesome. I think not having those features baked in the ROMs made the community a lot more dynamic.
> I think the power of the 64 was its' limited BASIC
I am torn about this. Forcing people to use machine language for anything serious makes sense. The 10,000-strong C64 software library exists. Your point about the great screen editor is well taken.
On the other hand, what about all those who would have experimented on their own more if they could have done things with CBM BASIC 2.0 that Atari BASIC has out of the box? Applesoft BASIC has more graphics support than CBM BASIC, too, and there was never a problem with converting experimenters into "real" developers.
Commodore's BASIC 2.0 was already in ROM on every C64 motherboard. You can't just add Simons' BASIC to the ROM without a hardware revision, and doing a board revision costs money . The cartridge was the practical solution
Licensing software from a sixteen year old would have been challenging and in 1983, Simons’ Basic was not an obvious winner. It would not be surprising if most people at West Chester were unaware of it.
Commodore wasn't run by engineers trying to help you write code; it was run by a guy whose literal motto was 'Business is war.' Jack was obsessed with price wars, and to him, every single cent mattered.
It would also eat up even more RAM, so your 64k computer that "normally" gave you only 39k for BASIC, with Simons' BASIC loaded you would be down to 30.7k.
> Commodore was already engaged in a cutthroat price war with Texas Instruments that almost sank the company.
Really? Selling what? The TI99 was never a serious competitor for anything.
It was in the early 80s. It got to the point where Commodore offered $100 trade-in value towards the C64 for a competitor's machine, and near the end the TI 99/4a was deeply discounted to $49.99. So people would literally go buy a new 99/4a, then trade it in to Commodore to get $100 off. Tramiel likely felt it was worth that loss of revenue to get competitors' machines out of the market and replace them with Commodore's.