"Single instance" machines - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

15 Dec 1998

...
  From: "Hans Franke"
&lt;Hans.Franke(a)mch20.sbs.de&gt;
 Subject: Re: "Single instance" machines

  > And by the way, to catch up with the title -
is there any
 > other Commodore B500 around, or a Pascal Microengine ?  
  I hear of more of the P/B500 in europe then here,
actually in the U.S. I think
 there are maybe three or so around, since they never were oficially released
 past the late prototype stage (due to one of Commodore's run-ins with the
 FCC).  Dunno how many (if any) they sold in europe.  
 I never have seen any B500 beside mine, but I know the P500
 story - just the B500 is more like the B128/CBM 600. 
So no joystick ports, or VIC-II chip?  Hmm, from examinging the PCB, I wonder
if it is a universal design, cause there are a bunch of unused pads here and
there (looks like it could sport 128k, and there was another connector pad
(besides the co-processor one), maybe for more RAM?

If anyone has a B-128 handy; pop it open, the joyport sockets would be in the
far left-hand corner, (if you look from the 'front' of the board)  I've been
curious about this.  :/

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...
  From: "Hans Franke"
&lt;Hans.Franke(a)mch20.sbs.de&gt;
 Subject: Re: "Single instance" machines

 CBM 9000 aka MMF aka SuperPET - still kind of a dream for most
 commo collectors (like the 900). Other than the most desired
 rare Commodores, the 9000 was a production unit and supported. 
Also alot of schools (secondary and more so, colleges) bought them. 

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Here is a clip from an E-Mail I had received from one of the 900 designers!

...
    I worked for Commodore back in then. 
Must have been something, Commodore was doing pretty well in the home computer
wars then.  
 It was fun :-)  I live in Denmark and we managed to put a C64 under every
 other xmas-tree that one year (we assumed that every house had a tree)

   I notice
you havn't got any of the CBM-900 computers ? 
I have never heard of them, I am assuming they are related to the 700 series? 
The only thing I got so far in that line (B/P series) is the P-500, rare in
itself.  Maybe one day I'll get more of those no rush though, I am a frugal
collector.   :)  
 The 900 was probably commodores biggest mistake, they canned it you see.
 It was a Z8001 based UNIX (Actually Mark Williams "Coherent") workstation
 with a BW graphical display (I think it did close to 1M pixels).

 Unfortunately they had to choose between the 900 and the amiga, if they
 had stuck to the 900 they would have owned the UNIX workstation market.

 The amiga wasn't bad either mind you.

 --
 Poul-Henning Kamp             FreeBSD coreteam member
 ///////////////               "Real hackers run -current on their laptop."
 "ttyv0" -- What UNIX calls a $20K state-of-the-art, 3D, hi-res color terminal

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...
  From: Roger Merchberger &lt;zmerch(a)30below.com&gt;
 Subject: Re: Value
 Common classics are hard to come by around here -- the closest thing to
 kinda rare I have is (that I know of):

 Trackball for an Atari 5200 (serial #786)
 Commodore B-128 (local college garage sale)
 2 Superbrains (local college garage sale; anybody have boot disks???)
 Tandy 600 (sent to me by a good friend in California 'cause it didn't work)

 I honestly don't know if these are actually rare... almost everything up
 here is rare (to me) and all of this wild, wicked stuff like OSI
 Challengers, Ohio Scientific, and who knows what... 
I don't think they are all that rare, but the B-128 and the Superbrains are
probably a couple of the more interesting classic computers...