The Commodore Plus/4 was a home computer released by Commodore International in 1984. The "Plus/4" name refers to the four-application ROM resident office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, database, and graphing); it was billed as "the productivity computer with software built-in". It had some success in Eastern Europe, but was less popular in Western Europe. A total flop in the United States, it was derided as the "Minus/60"—a pun on the difference between the Plus/4 and the dominant Commodore 64.

Background

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In the early 1980s, Commodore found itself engaged in a price war in the home computer market. The hot-selling VIC-20 was a design accident resulting from MOS Technology designing a videogame chip it couldn't sell, and companies like Texas Instruments and Timex Corporation undercutting the price of Commodore's PET line. The Commodore 64, the first 64-KB computer to sell for under US$600, was another salvo in the price war but it was far more expensive to make than the VIC-20 because it used discrete chips for video, sound, and I/O. Commodore president Jack Tramiel wanted a new computer line that would use fewer chips and at the same time address some of the user complaints about the VIC and C64.

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