shavlul@ucscb.ucsc.edu (60231000) (01/23/91)
I believe that the very first 64's released to software developers (before they were sold to the general public) had the VIC-20 case and keyboard, which was vanilla white with dark (almost black) square-shaped keys. I bought one of the very first 64's (serial number around 3000) in October 1982. At that time, they already had the brown-tinted case and a keyboard with contoured keys. It had a different nameplate design than the later 64's, with a brown-letter/silver-background Commodore insignia and a stylish "64" in the same colors next to the power LED. Also it had orange function keys (like the VIC-20), and a defectively designed video chip which could only display light blue on dark blue without smearing badly (now you know why they picked those colors). This model was quickly replaced with the familiar model with grey function keys, a decent video chip, rainbow nameplate, and KERNAL ROMs that set color RAM to the background color when clearing the screen to reduce flicker (early ROMs always set the color to white), causing early programs not to work (the ROMs were revised again about a year later). Finally (after my time) they released the 64c, which is the one with the white case. The early 1541's were indeed white, and were really VIC-1540's (for the VIC-20) with a different ROM to make them run slower :-) with C-64's due to cycle stealing by the video chip. Before the 1541 was released in early 1983, our local Commodore store (RIP) used 1540's and had to blank the screen with POKE 53265,11 before every disk operation. These white 1541's were notorious for knocking themselves out of alignment (especially when you tried to copy that game your friend bought which used mucho disk errors for copy protection, and all you had was 1541 Backup, which takes over 20 minutes to copy ordinary disks). They released the brown 1541's about a year later (with the up-down drive door latch as had the white 1541's), which were of much better structural integrity. About two years later they released the ones with the rotating drive door latch, and since then I have lost track. One more bit of Commodore trivia: in the mid 70's, when Commodore was among the first companies that sold calculators at prices < $50, they had at least 2 "Mr. Calculator" stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, which later evolved to become Commodore computer centers. shavlul