The billion dollar question is whether the company’s performance in the early 90s would have been any better with a competent CEO like Rattigan still at the helm, or whether they would have run out of road in a market that was moving away from Commodore’s bread-and-butter of wedge-style home computers and proprietary professional computers. Counterfactual history is always fascinating.

The CPU in the CoCo 3 was way better than the 6502 derivative in the C-64 but the C-64 had much better sound. The CoCo 3 had nice high-res RGB graphics but no sprites. The C-64 had sprites, which made programming graphics much easier. And the C-64’s color palette was less garish. It came down to what you wanted to do with the machine, the CoCo 3 could do things the 64 wouldn’t, like run OS9 and it could theoretically at least have a much better selection of programming languages. But the C-64 had a much larger software library available in spite of being less powerful. I had a C-64 and traded up to a C-128 and didn’t feel at all limited by it until the late 80s when I saw an Amiga and a PC with VGA and Ad Lib.

I saw the Color Computer 3 at Radio Shack with cm8 but my friends owned Commodore 64

The Commodore story is full of weird connections! I sure wish it had a happier ending but I’m the guy who has Commodores hanging on my wall in my office so of course I do.