1984 - The Commodore 264 and V364
As new microprocessors and technology evolved, Commodore decided there was still life in the C64 series and at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vagus held in January 1984, they announced two new machines which they called the 264 and V364. Code-named
TED, after the Text Editing Device chip incorporated in the new machines, the 264 was to be positioned above the C-64 and have 60K
of usable memory as opposed to the C-64's 38K, although Commodore were adamant that the C-64 wasn't being replaced.
The machines were to be based on the MOS 7501 microprocessor and would be directed towards serious business software rather than
games, so they would include software for word-processing, spreadsheet calculation and graphics. The V364 was also to have a speech
synthesiser with a built-in vocabulary of 250 words. Existing VIC-20 and C-64 would not run on the 264 without modification,
sprites (so important on the C-64) would not be included, and for sound there would only be two tone generators.
Initial reaction to the machines was luke-warm, most feeling that there too few enhancements, and that Commodore hadn't gone
far enough. When the 264 eventually appeared in November 1984 it had become the Plus/4 and the V364 was nowhere to be seen.
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