When the chance came to get my paws on a Commodore 128D AND it was my birthday to me it just had to be had. I have other 128s, but the D machine was very much a goal and it had to be the D and not the DCR which was so much of an exercise in cost cutting it makes the thing hugely difficult to repair. This one though is in excellent condition and still has the cable hooks at the back, plus of course the space underneath where you hooked up the keyboard for transporting via the very handy handle on the left hand side of the machine. An idea borrowed from Apricot perhaps? Their Xi machines had a similar arrangement but the handle was at the front, not the side. The Amiga 1000 also could store the keyboard underneath, but not in such an elegant way as this machine, and it didn't have a carrying handle.

The C128 was already an excellent machine with its multiple CPUs, CP/M compatibility and C64 mode in hardware. Yes, you could type GO64 while in BASIC and after answering affirmative to the 'really?' prompt you ended up in a 100% C64 environment. The Commodore 65 couldn't do that because it emulated the 64 in software. The 128D had a built-in 1571 floppy drive for reading GCR and MFM formats, and uses the same board as the stock 128 but obviously the keyboard and power connectors were different because one was external and the other was internal. In the stock 128 they were the other way round.

This is one of Bil Herd's finest designs, and if you haven't seen the history of how the C128 came about I urge you to search it and watch it. Absolute nail biting seat-of-the-pants stuff, similar but significantly more hairy than how the original PET (with Chuck Peddle at the helm) was conceived and exhibited for the first time.

Anyway, this machine is fully JiffyDOS'd and also came with a SCART switchbox for helping the switch from 40 to 80 columns on your SCART TV. It doesn't work in the way I expected though, so I need to drag out my 1084S monitor with its RGBI input and test the machine properly. It's in perfect working order so I spent last night feeding it disks from one of my other 128s with a modicum of success - after all, usually it was difficult to guarantee that something written with a 1541 or 1571 floppy could be read on another identical drive, but things worked out quite will. Couldn't get Chuckie Egg working though.