Commodore International · 1991–1993 · ~30,000 (UK); ~26,000 (Germany)
An Amiga 500 in a black hi-fi case with a CD-ROM drive and no floppy disk drive, sold for $999 to an audience that could never work out what it was supposed to be.
Commodore Dynamic Total Vision launched in April 1991 as an attempt to sell a computer to people who did not want a computer. Internally it was Amiga 500 hardware; externally it was a matte black set-top box designed to sit beneath a television alongside a VCR, operated by remote control, with a single-speed CD-ROM drive and — fatally — no floppy drive. The pitch was "multimedia", a word that in 1991 meant almost nothing to consumers. Retailers could not explain it, buyers could not categorise it, and at $999 nobody bought it by accident. Commodore then compounded the error by advertising it chiefly in Amiga enthusiast magazines, reaching precisely the audience that was waiting for the cheaper A570 CD-ROM add-on for the machine they already owned. Without a floppy drive the CDTV could not touch the enormous existing Amiga software library unless you bought an external drive, which defeated the entire aesthetic. Commodore discontinued it in 1993 and tried again, more coherently, with the Amiga CD32.