The sweet spot for home turntable enthusiasts on a budget seems to be the $200 mark. This might be the best of the bunch.
One can only imagine the sake-fueled club hopping that led to the development of the Seiko Frequency drum machine watch.
Oddball Micros: Commodore Plus/4
By James Grahame
Commodore was one of the most prolific microcomputer design companies of the 1980s. They’re famous for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, but designed literally dozens of machines. Their oddball that intrigues me the most is the Plus/4 -- it just doesn't make sense.
The Plus/4 was built around Commodore's new TED single-chip computer concept. TED was originally envisioned as a way to profitably produce extremely cheap computers, although the Plus/4 was at the high end of the product line. The Plus/4 was intended as a follow-up to the C64 and VIC-20, but used a different microprocessor and system architecture (making it incompatible). It had a better built-in BASIC programming language and could display more colors, but did away with the sound generator and hardware-based graphic sprites that made the Commodore 64 so successful. Oh, and included a suite of low-quality built-in applications.
Regrettably, there was only so much fun to be had with a home machine that was focused on word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and a drawing program. One can only imagine the boardroom politics that resulted in this disaster making it to production.
Luckily, Commodore was to have future success with the Amiga.
