Commodore, noticing that during the era of 16-bit computers, their old cashcow, Commodore 64 was quickly losing its sales, set up a team to milk the last pennies out of the decade-old Commodore 64. They built a backwards compatible Commodore 65 that added features similar to Commodore's other computer line, Amiga.
C=65 had a built in 3.5" disk drive, high-resolution graphics and CPU at 3.54MHz (C=64 ran at 1MHz) with 128kB of memory (expandable to 1MB) - and most importantly, a C=64 mode, allowing the computer to run C=64's massive software and game selection. Commodore 65 never made it to the market and only appx. 50 - 200 prototypes were ever built.
After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, its assets were liquidated and the prototypes were sold all across the world.
Since those days, the Commodore 65 has begun one of the most sought-after collectibles in the computing history and some of those few prototypes tend to appear in various online markets for sale. We reported of one such incident 2 years ago when an "almost complete" Commodore 65 was on sale at eBay.
This time around, there's a fully functional C=65 on sale in eBay and it has already reached pretty nice bids:
To prove the prototype's condition, the seller has also published a video, demonstrating that everything works:
So, if you happen to have about $20'000 cash to spare for a vintage computer, you might want to place your bid now. The bidding ends 18th of May, 2019. Listing can be found here. Seller lives in Sweden, but will ship worldwide.
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 11 May 2019 19:01
