Ah, Commodore, the company that brought us such great and venerable computers like the 64/128 and the Amiga.  These computers really defined computer gaming in the 80’s for a lot of fans that preferred keyboards to joysticks (though both were offered).  As most computer users of the old days know, there were attachments for these computers called disk drives (today gamers have it so easy with their built in drives).  It is interesting to know that way back in the early 90’s (close to a decade after the C64 was released- talk about longevity) Commodore was planning on releasing the C64 with a built in disk drive.  The competition was already doing this with their computers and IBM compatible PC’s were only getting more popular so Commodore felt it was time to follow suit.  Introducing the Commodore 65, man what a brilliant name for such a device.  What would the Commodore 128 variant be?  The 129, or possibly the Commodore 130?

Seriously though, this is an interesting prototype as there are so few available, so far none in this well-kept condition.  Commodore was hoping to cash in on a reworking of the original C64, especially if it would cut out the peripheral makers and give them another method of pushing the, by then cheap as all get out to produce, hardware.

It was not all about profits with the Commodore 65, though it was surely high on the list.  There was a quantifiable concern with the external disk drives that were available for the Commodore 64 at the time- the 1541 drives.  1541’s were slow to load games, give a cursory look at memes for retro computer games and you will see that most complain about the load times.  That is no lie.  Load times could be atrocious depending on the complexity of the game.  It didn’t really matter what you were playing, whether it was a scrolling shooter or a Role Playing Game (RPG)- it was probably going to take more than a minute to load.

We cannot verify if this built in drive has improved the speeds though.  It is probably a benefit of the design since this would be closer to silicon to silicon connections rather than going through slow BUS ports and across a cable.

Source: Ebay via Retrocollect

Carl Williams

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