And so TI not only dropped the price of the 99/4A all the way down to the US$299 price of the VIC-20, they offered an additional $100 rebate. Management decided that if they could just get the computer into the hands of users, a presumably positive response would spread by word-of-mouth, and sales would improve as a result. Two years later, in 1981, TI released the 99/4A, which improved the keyboard widely criticised in its predecessor, but it still failed to attract the attention TI thought it deserved.
While it was the first 16-bit home computer, its US$1150 price was higher than even the Apple II, and with a small software library in comparison to competitors, retailers struggled to sell it.
In 1979 microchip and calculator manufacturer Texas Instruments had introduced the TI99/4, its first attempt at entering the emerging home computer space. At a US$299 price point sales were initially modest, but rival Texas Instruments, making a play for the bottom of the market, would heavily discount its TI99/4A, and start a price war with Commodore that culminated with both computers selling as low as $US99. 1983 had seen an explosion of home computer models of varying capabilities and at various price-points – however, the question on everyone’s minds was not who was going to win, but who would survive.Ĭommodore’s Jack Tramiel saw an emerging market for low-cost home computers, releasing the VIC-20 in 1980. There’s so much more the family can do with a home computer! You can balance your chequebook, write letters, go on-line, learn spelling and math – and play games, of course, but only after homework is done…Īnd after the fiasco of the previous Christmas, Santa didn’t really need all that much convincing to try something else. In the early 1980s software developers realised there was enough of a market to write games for them, and parents began to see them as a viable alternative to videogame consoles. But what else was little Johnnie (or Janie) going to do with their time? How about a home computer? Magazines promoted home computers as a viable alternative to videogame consoles, the latter having become largely loathed by parents.ĭuring the late 1970s home computers had made the same technological advances videogame consoles had, with colour graphics, improved sound and features such as joystick controllers. Imagine you forked over US$30 (US$80 in 2018) or even more in Australia with its ‘luxury’ import tax for an ET cartridge to give little Johnnie for Christmas and he hated it! You would’ve been totally over this whole videogame thing.