Commodore 16

A Commodore 16.

The Commodore 16 is an 8-bit personal computer developed by Commodore International and first sold in 1984. Although the Commodore 64 was already released, the Commodore 16 was designed to replace the Commodore VIC-20 as Commodore's entry-level home computer, selling for under $100 in the USA, or, about half the cost of a Commodore 64 at the time. The hardware was based on the Commodore Plus/4 architecture so it could run software designed for that computer provided it fit within the Commodore 16's lower RAM. However, it was incompatible with the Commodore 64 or Commodore VIC-20 or its peripherals. The computer was a flop in the USA and was discontinued after only a year, but an even cheaper version called the Commodore 116 was released overseas which saw moderate success.

The computer uses a MOS 7501 CPU while video and audio was processed by the TED chip. As the name suggests, it came with 16 KB of RAM. It boots into Commodore BASIC.

Personal

Growing up, I didn't even know the Commodore 16 existed and only learned about it as an adult reading about retro video games. After learning that it was even weaker than most other computers at the time, I had little interest in it.