Commodore Plus/4

The Plus/4, launched in 1984, was Commodore's pitch to the "serious" home user. Its headline feature was a suite of four built-in productivity programs, a word processor, spreadsheet, database and graphics tool, all available at the touch of a key without loading anything.

Like its sibling the C16, it shared none of the C64's software, so it inherited the same fatal shortage of games. Worse, it fell awkwardly between two stools: the bundled software was too basic for genuine office work, yet the machine was too limited and too gameless to win over the home crowd it had turned its back on.

The result was one of Commodore's more intriguing misjudgements. There was nothing wrong with the idea of an all-in-one productivity computer, but the Plus/4 answered a question few buyers were actually asking, and paid the price. Today it is a curio, remembered more for its strategic muddle than for anything it did wrong technically.