Because they believed only a small fraction of customers would care a lot about a better Basic interpreter, whereas the vast majority would care about price. As for giving things away for free, Commodore was already engaged in a cutthroat price war with Texas Instruments that almost sank the company. They could not afford to give anything else away for free.
Simons' BASIC was still interpreted. If you wanted graphics and performance, you used Assembler.
Many/most people were using a disk speed-up cartridge like Epyx's Fast Load. You could only use one cartridge at a time. If they placed Simons' BASIC in the C64 ROM, that could have made it less compatible with existing software.
They didn't want to pay the licensing cost for an application that only a minority of C64 owners would have wanted.
Licensing software from a sixteen year old would have been challenging and in 1983, Simons’ Basic was not an obvious winner. It would not be surprising if most people at West Chester were unaware of it.
Commodore's BASIC 2.0 was already in ROM on every C64 motherboard. You can't just add Simons' BASIC to the ROM without a hardware revision, and doing a board revision costs money . The cartridge was the practical solution
It would also eat up even more RAM, so your 64k computer that "normally" gave you only 39k for BASIC, with Simons' BASIC loaded you would be down to 30.7k.
Simon's BASIC was buggy. Some worked great some didn't work well at all (like line renumber) IIRC there was an updated version out there..
Second, I think the power of the 64 was its' limited BASIC but it was a good start (still the best line editor of most systems, just cursor up change the line, press return and done), The no-frills in the language but not in the capabilities made it a platform where there was no one definate way to do graphics or sound so there was a lot of experimentation most good, and some downright awesome. I think not having those features baked in the ROMs made the community a lot more dynamic.
> I think the power of the 64 was its' limited BASIC
I am torn about this. Forcing people to use machine language for anything serious makes sense. The 10,000-strong C64 software library exists. Your point about the great screen editor is well taken.
On the other hand, what about all those who would have experimented on their own more if they could have done things with CBM BASIC 2.0 that Atari BASIC has out of the box? Applesoft BASIC has more graphics support than CBM BASIC, too, and there was never a problem with converting experimenters into "real" developers.
Commodore wasn't run by engineers trying to help you write code; it was run by a guy whose literal motto was 'Business is war.' Jack was obsessed with price wars, and to him, every single cent mattered.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadReally? Selling what? The TI99 was never a serious competitor for anything.
Simons' BASIC was still interpreted. If you wanted graphics and performance, you used Assembler.
Many/most people were using a disk speed-up cartridge like Epyx's Fast Load. You could only use one cartridge at a time. If they placed Simons' BASIC in the C64 ROM, that could have made it less compatible with existing software.
They didn't want to pay the licensing cost for an application that only a minority of C64 owners would have wanted.
Second, I think the power of the 64 was its' limited BASIC but it was a good start (still the best line editor of most systems, just cursor up change the line, press return and done), The no-frills in the language but not in the capabilities made it a platform where there was no one definate way to do graphics or sound so there was a lot of experimentation most good, and some downright awesome. I think not having those features baked in the ROMs made the community a lot more dynamic.
I am torn about this. Forcing people to use machine language for anything serious makes sense. The 10,000-strong C64 software library exists. Your point about the great screen editor is well taken.
On the other hand, what about all those who would have experimented on their own more if they could have done things with CBM BASIC 2.0 that Atari BASIC has out of the box? Applesoft BASIC has more graphics support than CBM BASIC, too, and there was never a problem with converting experimenters into "real" developers.