Commodore was changing direction at this time and embracing the IBM PC clone market. This while the development of Amiga was also in full swing.

By the early 90's Commodore was no longer developing/designing their own PCs as they had done from the PC-10 through the PC-50. Instead, they turned to selling Commodore-badged units from contract manufacturers.

As part of this process, the case design changed from the typical two-tone beige of previous Commodore offerings (as seen in the C-64C, the C-128 and the Amiga 2000, for example) to a generic and as inexpensive as possible housing.

By the time the C286 LT came on the market, it seemed that Commodore no longer cared at all about a consistent "brand image": The C286 LT came from at least two manufacturers, with very different cases.

The IBM PC clone market was a fierce market where Commodore eventually lost.

As with many IBM PC clones, there isn't much to add to this machine. It contains a 286 in portable version manufactured by AMD.

The built-in hard disk is 10 or 21 MB and the amount of RAM is 1 MB and can be expanded to 5 MB. The default operating system supplied is MS-DOS 4.01.

The screen is a monochrome screen and has a blue color. A VGA color screen can be connected externally.

The BIOS can be set by the key combination CTRL-ALT-ESC and the Commodore C386SX-LT uses the same power supply and (12V) battery.