Anyone have suitable local knowledge about this, which has the appearance of a third-party wedge-style case for the C64, proudly stickered with a South Australia list of credits:
I see speculation that a computers-in-education contract would have provided the volume and the funding to make injection moulding worthwhile.
Original thread by Declan on Mastodon has a couple of photos:
via a thread at
It’s quite likely that this was a way to make the school contract % requirements to try and sell the units into State schools.
Microbee was manufactured and designed in Australia which gave it a leg up.
Apple developed the RAM expansion and PAL card and manufactured in Wangaratta
Maybe this was commodores way to do the same
I have one (And I’m in NZ)
AU didn’t get the C64c a while after it was released in other parts so a company came along and created the case to sell for people to transplant their breadbins motherboards into.
I’ve included an image comparing to a c64c Case.
Thanks for the additional information!
When we started the Case project, we found it was going to cost at least $50k in 1980’s money for just the mold to be tooled and made. We had an exsisting relationship with Evesham Micro’s in the UK through us makinig the Dolphon Dos under licence in Australia for them. So the company bet that sales in Australia and Distributed through the UK and Europe could make it pay, and it certainly did, numbers are a little fuzzy but it would likely have been 50K of them made and shipped.
We did sell some to Schools around Australia so they could make their computer rooms look all new, but sales to scholls were few and negligable.
We did however make a network for schools using the Commodore 64 and 1541 Drives allowing up to 16 computers to fast access (Dolphin Dos modified) a 1541 drive, they certainly sold well to Schools during the 80’s
It was a wild time…
The economics of those molds are quite something.
Would love to hear more about the network product.
