Europe's best-kept business secret - Now revealed in Britain

It's the beginning of the end for Commodore, as the company is now fully on the IBM-compatible gravy train, leaving behind its roots as the company which launched the world's first modern PC in January 1977 - the Commodore PET - then the VIC-20 - the first micro to sell over a million units - followed by the Commodore 64, said to be the most-widely-sold 8-bit computer of all time.

As well as the venerable Commodore 64, the company was also selling the outlier Amiga - the Motorola 68000-based wonder machine of the late 1980s - but otherwise the rest of its range was pretty much variants of the same IBM PC. 

And that was its problem, as although most of its PCs were said to be well built, they were, well, just one of many other compatibles around - neither demonstrably better nor particularly cheaper than the competition.

On the up side, at this point in time Commodore was still able to claim that it was now the second-biggest supplier of microcomputers in Europe.