What was the role of Commodore-West Germany?

Question

Most of the history of Commodore in personal computers took place while East and West Germany were divided, and Commodore maintained a significant corporate presence in West Germany. While I believe that the center for Commodore's R&D was Its Headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, I am curious about the technical contributions made by the facility in West Germany.

I'm not particularly interested in the regional sales, marketing, distribution, or assembly activities that were undoubtedly contributed. Specifically, I'd like to know about technical engineering or design done in West Germany.

Which Commodore products were significantly designed or engineered in West Germany rather than West Chester?

Answer 1

[Insert: Some site history While the German subsidiary (Commodore Büromaschinen GmbH), originally set in Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt, had facilities for import handling and distribution, this was soon moved to a distribution center in Braunschweig and accomplished by a final assembly line and a development center. At the same time the company moved into Frankfurt city. This was the setup from 1982 until the end. ]

Commodore Germany did in the beginning quite a lot adaptations and variations for the PET line. This includes rebadged devices like the 8026 daisy wheel printer bought from Olympia all the way to 'genuine' Commodore products like the 8028 based on the East German Robotron SD1152/253 printer mechanic (well, and several other parts, like switches, were bought from across the iron curtain). PET development ended with certain models of the PET-II line. After their demise the German surplus market was flooded with Commodore PET/PET-II computers as well as empty shells.

The first complete system developed in Germany would be the PC compatible PC-10 of 1984 (Introduction in the US 1986), followed by the Z8000 based CBM-900 of 1985. The 900 was scraped soon after introduction - it is said because of the upcoming Amiga - but the PC series was quite a success in Germany and other countries, running until the very end. Notable here the PC-1 (or Colt in the US). Hardware wise a shrunk PC-10/III developed in Braunschweig on request of Commodore USA to counter the Atari PC1.

The Amiga 1060 sidecar (1986) was as well designed and built in Braunschweig. It does make sense with their experience in PC machines. Similar (AFAIK) the various bridge cards for the Amiga 2000 were made and built in Germany. Now due even more heritage as the 2000 itself was designed in Germany as well.

If you ever wondered why the Amiga 2000 design looks so different from the A1000 as well as any other (US) Commodore, just compare it with the 900 and PC-10. The 2000 was intended to be sold in Europe and should fit the design of all other professional machines. In addition considerable part of the newer chipset designs (A3000) were as well done in Germany.

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There has been much more development after Commodore International went belly up, but that's a different story. BTW, it might be notable here, that Commodore Germany as well as Commodore UK were profitable until the end - and at that time generating about 2/3rd of all business.

Answer 2

The CBM900 came before PC10, the prototypes were sent out early 1984 (I started in Commodore Denmark on august 1st 1984 with half the job being supporting the CBM900).

I believe we got the first PC10 prototypes in early 1985, but they were embargoed because the BIOS was too identical to IBM's for legal comfort.

The 900 were designed in US, but the prototypes were built in Germany because they could handle the large PCB.

The cabinet was designed for the C900, and there were significant carry-over from that to both PC10 and the Amiga.

Answer 3

Commodore Germany developed the High Speed Grafik, a graphics card displaying 512x512i or 512x256 pixels on the internal monitor of a CBM 4xxx/8xxx. A follow up graphics card for the 8296, HRE, was also developed in Braunschweig.

The printers were already mentioned, they also did the MBS system that would let several pets share the same set of peripherals. Additionally some (or all?) of the later CBM 8xxx (8096, 8296, I think, maybe the -SK designs) were done in Braunschweig.

The reason for all this PET centered development is that the PET was pretty successful as a business computer in Germany (allegedly, they had about 20% of the business market in 1982). That's also why they started developing PCs: Commodore USA had decided to concentrate on the consumer market, but Germany needed a follow-up for their aging CBM line.

PCs developed in Braunschweig (there might be more:

• PC-5
• PC-10
• PC-20
• PC-30
• PC-10 II
• PC-20 II
• PC-10 III
• PC-20 III
• Colt
• PC-30 III
• PC-35 III
• PC-40 III
• PC-45 III
• PC-60 III
• PC-70 III

Th PC-10/20 had a motherboard that consisted of two separate parts. One of the explanations (there are others) I heard for that fact: The design was done on PETs, and the PET didn't have enough memory for designing bigger boards...

Braunschweig also developed the original A2000 design, that was later cost-reduced by Dave Haynie, the sidecar and most (if not all) "Bridgeboards" that contained a mostly complete PC on an Amiga expansion card.

Commodore Germany's chief of engineering Wilfried Rusniok joined Schneider Computer Division in 1988, which then developed the Schneider Euro PC, the most Commodore-like PC ever built ;)

The CBM 900 was not designed in Germany but in West Chester by Commodore's 'Unix Group'.