Re: MOS8520R4 - 1988 vs. 1991

Den Wed, 29 Jan 2020 18:55:47 +0100 skrev Gerrit Heitsch
<gerrit_at_laosinh.s.bawue.de>:
> On 1/29/20 6:34 PM, smf wrote:
> > On 29/01/2020 16:56, Mia Magnusson wrote:
> >> Like in the 1970's MOS chips ended up in other major companies
> >> products, including ROMs for Atari.
> > 
> > They kept issuing data sheets for chips that weren't used in
> > commodore products and there was a run of one of the c16 chips well
> > after the computer was cancelled.
> 
> I think you mean the CPU. They did make a new revision (R4) of the
> 8501 well after the 264 series was canceled. You can find 8501R4 or
> 8501 without the 'R4' with datecodes vom 1986, 1989 and 1990. There
> were also TED chips made with 1986 datecodes.
> 
> I don't think those were made to be sold to be included in other 
> products but to be sold as spare parts for repairs, we all know how 
> problematic the 8501 and 8360 with '84 datecodes were.

Agree. I think many people forget how slow the actual tech people did
use did evolve at the time. It's easy to think about Amigas and on the
PC think about 386 CPUs while in practice I don't think anyone did
throw away a C64 or a Plus/4 in the late 80's and I'm 100% sure that
8088 based PCs were rather common up until early 90's. The software for
the more advanced computers weren't that more attractive than the
software that ran on low end computers. Sure, there were a difference
but the entertainment value of the games and the productivity
value of the office software didn't differ that much between low-end
and high-end computers. (When Windows 3.x did sell in larger
quantities, and gaming switched over from Amiga to PC, things started
to evolve rather fast for a while though).

I assume that CSG did keep whatever stuff they needed to be able to do
another production run of old chips. Not sure what their minimum
reasonable quantities were, but as they even did prototype runs it
can't had been that large.

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