The Rise and Fall of Commodore

Andrew Leigh writes "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore by Brian Bagnall is fodder for anyone interested in the buried history of the personal computer. Whether you owned a Commodore computer or want to hear a new angle on the early stages of computer development, you'll find this book easy to pick up and almost impossible to put down. Bagnall has gone to a massive amount of effort in telling this tale, researching and interviewing the real personalities involved. It takes readers on an important and often emotional ride that will many times leave you shaking your head at how painfully it all went wrong." Read the rest of Andrew's review

On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore
author	Brian Bagnall
pages	557
publisher	Variant Press
rating	9
reviewer	Andrew Leigh
ISBN	0973864907
summary	Tells the story of Commodore through first-hand accounts by former Commodore engineers and managers

Before Commodore entered the home computer market, they were primarily a calculator manufacturer. The story begins in the mid 70's with the development of Chuck Peddle's famous 6502 chip, through to the release of the first personal computer, the Commodore PET. It then reveals how the VIC-20 became the first home computer to break the elusive one million barrier. Then comes the Commodore 64, and how the company made it the best selling computer of all time. The Commodore 128 is given plenty of coverage, along with the failed Commodore 16 and Plus/4 computers (which are probably better off forgotten). At this point, Commodore seems like it is losing its way, and the story cuts to the struggling company responsible for the original Amiga computer. You'll learn about the various Amiga models that followed, including the successful Amiga 500 and the pre-DVD CDTV and CD32 units. The hirings, firings, disagreements, discontent, resignations and celebrations that occurred during the company's run are given more than their fair share of coverage. It doesn't always show Commodore in the best light, which is what readers should demand from any history.

It's a sad truth, and the book describes this in an often bitter fashion, that the early history of computers seems to focus on Apple, IBM and Microsoft while Commodore's massive contributions to the industry are routinely ignored. The common misconception that Apple started the home computing industry is simply wrong. Commodore was the first to show a personal computer, the first to deliver low-cost computers to the masses, the first to sell a million computers, and the first to arrive with a true multimedia computer. Fortunately this book sets a lot of the record straight.

On The Edge delves deeply into the business strategies behind the company. Students of any business discipline will be well advised to heed the lessons about how not to run a company. One of the book's main characters and the founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel, was an incredibly ruthless business man. Whether you love him or hate him, he was ultimately behind the incredible success of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 computers. The book outlines how he managed to be the first to sell his home computers to the mass market through department stores, driving prices down and annihilating most of the competition. It also amusingly tells how he would regularly lose his temper and have what employees referred to as "Jack Attacks" when things went wrong. Many people referred to him as the scariest man alive and he probably was. Jack Tramiel unfortunately does not publicly talk about the Commodore days, so Bagnall was not able to personally interview him, however family members and those close to him give their personal accounts of events.

The book also explains how Irving Gould, the money-man and venture capitalist behind Commodore, constantly interfered when things were seemingly running smoothly. It is widely recognized that Irving Gould and Medhi Ali (the CEO he instated at the time) ultimately caused the sad demise of Commodore through 1993-94, yet the details of how it happened have always been sketchy until now. Thomas Rattigan, former CEO of Commodore, was interviewed by Bagnall and gives his personal thoughts and experiences during his time with the company. He also talks about his untimely dismissal by Gould. The later sections of the book describe how numerous marketing mishaps and poor business sense led to a dwindling stock price and an eventual filing for liquidation. Bagnall accurately describes the heartbreaking end to a great company that deserved much more success and recognition.

This book certainly does not shy away from getting its metaphorical hands dirty with the technical details and manufacturing processes involved in building the Commodore computers. If anything, more detail would be welcome here, as the personalities interviewed obviously drove their designs by an enormous amount of passion. Bagnall has interviewed all the original key players involved on the technical side, including the humble and personable Chuck Peddle. You'll read how he built the MOS 6502 microprocessor, with the talented layout artist Bill Mensch. The chip was used by not only Commodore but rivals Apple, Atari, and Nintendo. Many other notable and significant technical pioneers have also been interviewed and give their experiences and opinions.

You'll learn why your 1541 floppy disk drive was so unbearably slow. You'll learn how millions of dollars worth of Amigas were scrapped because of a cheeky message placed in the ROM by a disgruntled employee. You'll learn how exhausted coders had to take naps at their desks while code compiled on a mainframe. You'll also learn why those tedious "peek" and "poke" functions weren't built in as BASIC commands for easier usage on your C64.

Interestingly, Steve Wozinak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computers, claims in his new book (titled "iWoz") that he invented the personal computer and provided Chuck Peddle with the idea for the first Commodore PET. When you read On The Edge, you'll find that it tells a different story. Chuck Peddle receives a great deal of coverage, and after reading about his efforts you will feel this is deservedly so. His efforts have gone largely unsung and On The Edge may well be the first step towards him earning the title of being the father of the personal computer.

Commodore Business Machines was a company that produced superior computers for the mass market. Their legacy deserves to be told and more importantly heard. Computing history didn't just involve the big players that still exist today. Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack, and others all shaped the future. On The Edge is an experience that will change the way you view computing history and maybe even entice you to dust off that old Commodore computer that's been sitting in the cupboard. Bagnall tells it like it is and also leaves you thinking "what if?" many times. The great stories are filled with characters that anyone who works in the IT industry will recognize in their own workplace. It truly demonstrates the fragility and ad-hoc nature of not only Commodore itself, but the entire industry back then. It really makes you cringe in disbelief at how some stupid and insignificant decisions shaped the future as we know it now. No one could have known how important these decisions were back then.

At a hefty 557 pages, On The Edge is good value. Bagnall's informative and relaxed writing makes it a breeze to travel through decades at a blistering pace. It sheds some much needed light on a period of history clouded by revisionism.

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You can purchase On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

10$ Cheaper at Amazon

It is 10 bucks cheaper at Amazon [amazon.com]. (That's an associate link - if that bothers you - just go search it at amazon- 'on the edge' returned it as the top hit for me.)

The Rise of the Amiga has been postponed..

I never had a C64, but I have fond memories of the Amiga - although it eventually died a death in the face of the PC et al. I guess not many people wanted adventure games that came on fourteen floppies. Strangely, though, there have been multiple aborted attempts to revive the Amiga since then, with the name changing hands several times. Nothing's ever come of it though.

Re:The Rise of the Amiga has been postponed..

fourteen floppiesWell in my day we couldn't afford the fancy floppy drives, so we stored everything on cassette tapes (Quiet Riot ones if I recall) and we liked it!

Signed,

Vic20

Remember the calculators?

Ah, the nostalgia.

I had a Commodore calculator, the kind you plugged into the wall. It had a single-line orange flourescent display that had an annoying hum (the more digits that were lit the louder it was). It did though have a single register memory key, which was somewhat novel. Otherwise it was limited mostly to just +, -, /, and x.

I first played on PETs. I still remember the joy of discovering all the different variants of it that people had. Some had green screens, others amber, and I think I remember seeing one that had purple pixels. But the membrane-style keyboard was the most futuristic looking (and hardest to use).

Then I did all my "serious" programming on the C64 and wore out many 1541 disk drives. In fact my c64 still works, but unfortunately not the drive. Once you learned all those magic PEEK and POKE numbers you could play God, or so it seemed.

Then it was on to the Amiga 1000 and 2000. I had three floppy drives on the thing (thank goodness for the included schematics) before I could finally afford a newfangled hard drive. Eventually I upgraded it all the way to a Toaster Flyer system before the company folded up and I had to move on. Which was horrible, until Linux came along.

I remember seeing a C64 in the Smithsonian a few years back. That sure made me feel old.

Re:Remember the calculators?

It's a joke! Back in the day you defended your machine against all comers. All the systems had plusses and minuses, so everyone had an angle. The Apple II was more expandable, and had a faster disk drive; the C64 had sprites and better graphics; the TRS-80 had... well, I'm sure it had something, but everyone I know just called it the Trash 80 and was done with it. In reflection today, owning all the 8-bits as an avid collector, I can say that the Atari 800 walked all over the C64 and the Apple II, but it was also released later than either of them, so of course it would be better.

This book though is the real deal. It's easy to learn the history of Apple, we all know about Steve and Steve, and any halfway avid nerd knows about the legend of Breakout, the Steve's selling blue boxes to raise money, Atari & HP turning down the Apple, etc.

Commodore's story has been way less well told, and that's why this book is so great. The C64 was really the first PC that was in reach for the average consumer, yet if you just look at the popular press, it's as if it never existed.

Amiga

Amiga 500.

We will always miss you.

Why not buy from the author?

I absolutely LOVE this book. Why not buy it from the author?

I miss Commodore.

The Vic-20 is where it all started for me. I moved on to a 64 and then a 128 when they became available. Today I have a working example of every machine they publically released stored in a closet along with drives, printers, and monitors.

Wait! Wait! I know this one!

Rise: Chuck Peddle
Fall: Jack Tramiel

Re:Wait! Wait! I know this one!

Well, Peddle was only there for a short time. Jack Tramiel built Commodore up in the beginning, being Commdore's founder and everything.

He did do something in the early eighties which nearly killed Commodore. Tramiel went to war with TI in the so-called video game wars, furious that TI had undermined its calculator business in the eighties. The Commodore 64, which was selling well at $600 (supposedly close to 10x what it actually cost to build, even then) was repeatedly subjected to price cuts and a massive marketing campaign, which ultimately came close to destroying Commodore's cash flow.

At the end of the period, Irving Gould, Commodore's effective owner, fired Tramiel, who left and then went to Atari, which he basically saved from oblivion.

Commodore went bankrupt for the first time shortly afterwards. It recovered. And then went bust again.

Commodore's main problem at the end were a bunch of technical managers with agendas, and some lousy decisions made as a result of it. A case in point, the AGA chipset.

The AGA chipset was supposed to debut in an enhanced A3000 (the 3000 was a very respected, if expensive, 32-bit Amiga system), called the A3000+. Shortly before the A3000+ was supposed to be finished and shown to Commodore's international affiliates, there was a change of management, and the project cancelled. Instead, AGA was to be put first into a lower cost machine, called (IIRC) the A2200. Low cost consumer machines were suddenly considered Commodore's future direction, and they also designed an "A300", a replacement for the Commodore 64 based on old Amiga (ECS) technology, and an "A600", an AGA and standards compliant replacement to the A500.

All of which made some kind of sense, I suppose, but there was no replacement for the A3000.

After that, Commodore's managers decided to rename and reprice everything before announcing these wonderful machines to the public. The A2200 became the A4000. The replacement to the A3000. (This would be like Ford replacing the Lincoln Town Car with a design based upon the Escort.) It, and the A600, were delayed.

Meanwhile, the A300 was renamed (at the last moment) to the A600, and sold at the same price as the Amiga 500, which was abruptly dropped. The A600, as released, had some of the keyboard missing (so it couldn't play some Amiga games), and was no more powerful anywhere else. The machine did have a PCMCIA slot and a laptop hard drive interface, but these didn't really pacify anyone.

A few months afterwards, the AGA machines were released. Despite AGA, the A4000 was considerably less desirable than its "predecessor", and far more expensive than the A2000 it was supposed to replace. The A1200 was a good replacement for the A500, but was sold at a much higher price.

So in 1993 or so, you have Commodore:

1. Seriously short of money, partially thanks to "Business is War" champion Tramiel.
2. Seriously short of money, mainly (at this point) thanks to an ill-fated entry into the PC market (dumb managers)
3. Releasing two lemons and a bitter orange as replacements for long-in-the-tooth but popular machines, and having no money to back it up (dumb managers)

If they hadn't had cashflow problems, it's tempting to speculate that all four machines would have been launched, and done so as replacements for the machines they were supposed to replace. As it was, they needed the money. That said, the A3000+ appears to have been killed by a manager of the type who wants to make an impression, rather than out of any technical or marketing awareness.

Tramiel can't really be blamed for all of this. He made one error, and he'd probably argue it wasn't an error to begin with, by the end of the "war" Commodore pretty much owned the home computer market, or was one of a top two (depending on country: ie Sinclair and Commodore in the UK owned the home computer market.) Irving Gould, who appointed a series of replacements for Tramiel and kept firing them until Me

Ahhh, those were the days...

Commodore 64 + external floppy drive + 300 baud modem = endless fun dialing into local BBSs until all hours of the night.

Hidden ROM message?

I went from the TRS-80 to MSDOS, so I missed the Amiga wave. But this part of the review intrigued me:

You'll learn how millions of dollars worth of Amigas were scrapped because of a cheeky message placed in the ROM by a disgruntled employee.

Some Googling brought me back to Slashdot, and a previous story involving the Amiga [slashdot.org]:

The 500, while still a cool box, wasn't a great technological leap forward. It was merely a mass-marketing-wrapped version of the 1000. (And Commodore poorly mass-marketed it!) As the easter egg [eeggs.com] hidden inside one of the later versions of Workbench said: "We made Amiga, they [Commodore] f*cked it up".

It's a good read

I'm ploughing through it in my spare time (up to 75% so far) and am enjoying it. Its style is quite casual - it's a bit of a rambling tale, all over the place. It also could have done with a bit of copy-editing (grammar, spelling, etc) but other than that, a fascinating insight on the birth of the home computer industry.

The failure of the Amiga comes down to one thing.

Marketing.
If Commodore owned KFC they would have marketed it as "a greasy warm dead bird in a cardboard bucket".

At the time take a look at the Amiga vs the IBM PC AT and the Mac as far a cost vs features.
The Amiga was so far ahead it makes your head hurt.
That is the proof that marketing is the most important thing in computers. If having the best product wins then the PC would have died the death that DOS deserved back then.

Of the Amiga

Anyone who's interested in Commodore and/or the Amiga should also sheck out this Journal Entry [slashdot.org] by squiggleslash. Its a good read and very informative.

*sniff* I miss Amigas.

Commodore also destroyed the Environment

And to top it off....

Commodore's former chip fab facility is on the EPA's superfund site for extreme damage to the environment.

http://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/super/sites/PAD0937301 74/index.htm [epa.gov]

I hope Medi Ali and Gould burn in hell for what they did. They ruined a perfectly good computer/OS AND dumped toxic waste!

Big deal....

(Cue jokes about Microsoft dumping toxic waste with every new Windows release.)

Virtually every manufacturing plant operating prior to 1980 or so is on the Superfund list. Dumping (or "storing") toxic waste was just part of doing business until then. Practically every company making anything at or before that time has at least one Superfund-listed plant somewhere. IBM has at least three. HP has four or so. Sun and Unisys each have one. Intel has two.

These days, companies have wised up. They've learned that China has no such legislation.

A good value?

At a hefty 557 pages, On The Edge is good value.

Hogwash. I get the Gideon's Bible for free every time I travel, and that thing's got like a thousand pages -- now there's a bargain!

Great story of executive excess

I had a family member who worked at Commodore during the twilight years. The story I remember most was CEO Medhi Ali's weekly routine. He'd spend two days a week in Canada, two in the USA and three days in the West Indies to avoid paying taxes on his exorbitant salary in any of the countries. This is in the days before widespread cell phone usage and I remember having to manually route mail (SMTP addresses with a series of %) to my family member.

Great book, free shipping

I've really enjoyed it. It was well written and told a great and entertaining story.

You can download free chapters at http://www.commodorebook.com/ [commodorebook.com]

They offered free shipping when I bought mine from the site.

Overall good book, but has a few issues

At a recent get-together of a half-dozen or so ex-Commodore/Amiga engineers, we were discussing this book. The overall opinion, including of the one person who was interviewed for it, was that it was pretty good at covering the early Commodore days, the C64 and Tramiel issues, but the coverage of the post-Tramiel Amiga days (especially the later parts) was a bit spottier and had some factual problems. The author's main contacts are with the C64 and Atari ST/Tramiel crowd, so this isn't surprising.

I personally don't remember any large number of Amigas scrapped for the "they f***ed it up" message; in fact I'd seriously doubt that. And there were easter eggs in every version of the OS, usually far more extensive than that one.

Also, there were no "mainframes" at Commodore; the biggest iron was a Vax 11/780(if I remember right). And none of the software builds were done on that; all the Amiga SW was built on Sun-2's (early on) or on Amigas directly. By 1989ish, only a few libraries were still built on Suns - I think Workbench.lib was the last holdout, or close to. For AmigaOS 2.0, I ported AmigaDOS and all the remaining BCPL filesystems and commands to C and assembler built on Amigas. The "darkest before the dawn" story is likewise close, but not quite correct. (It is legendary, though.) However, while we weren't waiting for compiles, there were interludes in the 2.0-2.04 days when we did sleep in some offices and storage rooms on cots, and had a freezer full of frozen meals, plus lots of delivered pizza, italian, etc.

Admittedly, the employees were upset enough about the (mis)management by Mehdi Ali (much more so than Irving Gould) that at the "Deathbed Vigil" party when bankruptcy was declared, we burnt Mehdi Ali in effigy in my backyard.

The old offices are now QVC Studio Park; you can tour them. A few people at QVC know about this; when selling the C64-in-a-joystik a year or two ago, the host mentioned that the building used to house Commodore. It is truely absolutely huge....

Note: I haven't read the book yet, though others in the group discussing it had, and one was a major interviewee.

Re:Overall good book, but has a few issues

The misrepresentations are this article's only, the book is accurate about the Vax and the Workbench easter eggs.

I still have mine

While I used other pc's the first one I ever personally owned was a C64. Later I sold it and bought an Amiga 500 which I used up until grad school. It sits in my closet and occasionally I will pull it out and play some of the games that were specific to the Amiga. Its still the only pc I own (no macs so I can't speak about them) that can access two seperate floppy drives and not grind every other system process to a halt.

Commmodore's Legacy is LINUX

Linus Torvalds first computer was a Vic-20.

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.08.97/c over/linus-9719.html [metroactive.com]

He says the simplicity of the design of the Vic-20 enabled him to learn in a way that today is much more difficult. Read the last paragraph below.

-

IN 1981, LINUS WAS A toothy, pale-skinned kid with a blond cowlick living in a suburb of Helsinki, where the weather is cold year-round, save for a few 70-degree weeks in the summer. That year, 11-year-old Linus inherited a Commodore Vic-20 from his grandfather, a professor of statistics at the local university.

As the cathode ray tube's blue light cast a glow on his face, he sat in his bedroom, books lining the wall from floor to ceiling. Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, Robin Hood and all the Tarzan books. On a shelf: a plastic model of the Wasa, a Swedish ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. The Wasa, painted in meticulous detail and outfitted with working sails and rigging, took months to finish.

When the first computer arrived, the other projects fell by the wayside. Long past his bedtime, small fingers tapped the dark brown keys of the Vic-20 keyboard. His first achievement on the Vic-20 was the simplest computer program possible: a two-line "GOTO" program in Basic. Once he tried to impress his little sister, Sara, by programming the Commodore to repeat "Sara is the best."

Next he tapped out his first full-fledged video game written in machine code, in which a submarine sails through a moving underwater tunnel, remaining stationary as the operator controls its vertical movement. The craft's captain must stay alive by dodging the "large nasty fish" in the tunnel. As the game progresses, the tunnel constricts. This amused Linus for hours in his bedroom. He stored the program on an audiocassette and took it to school to play with friends.

In hindsight, Linus believes starting on a very simple computer gave him an advantage that today's whiz kids don't have. "Modern PCs are much more complex," he explains. "No kid sitting in front of a Pentium could ever understand all its parts thoroughly."
-

I hit L, SHIFT-O to the QUOTE and then DOLLAR

If you know the dir of the nerdcore rhyme [frontalot.com], then holler! (see PA Theme)

TI99/4A

My uncle had a TI994A. It was the _only_ computer to have. He talked my dad into buying me one. At age 13 I used it to learn basic (type in them line number!). My uncle made fun of commodores. He called them "commodes." I didn't realize the fan following until years later and /.

I still have my TI99/4A. It doesn't work though. Heavy as heck....

6502 also in

The BBC Microcomputer

Instead of one of those C-64 children's toys.

Fond memories of my VIC-20 / 64

LOAD "*" ,8,1

Atari 130XE!!!

What makes me smile about todays computers is that the PC versus the MAC was very similar to the Commodore versus the Atari. I was an Atari user, both the 800XL and 130XE. I always felt that these machines were MUCH better than the equivalent Commodore machines of the time. Especially with sound voices and graphics capability. Of course, looking back now, wow...I will NEVER enter another program into my computer from a magazine into a hex editor. Nothing describes disappointment like spending 7 days entering in hex code for a game I will refer to as Tekken 0.000321, only to discover you can't move forward or backward, only kick or punch...kind of like rock, paper, boredom. So, for nostalgic purposes only... Commodore sucks! Atari for life! (And now I want to go find an emulator for either and play Bruce Lee)

I'm jealous...

Wow, I'm jealous of all you guys that had floppy drives on your Commodores. I only had the cassette tape recorder!

I had a VIC-20, then a C-64 (and used various others: Sinclair, TI99/4A, TRS-80 Model III) before moving to the dark side (early PC Clone: EaglePC). I worked with a guy that bought the first version of the Amiga - we ran Fortran-77 on it.

Commodore Alive and Well

I appreciate the concern, folks, but I'm doing fine. A little shaken, perhaps, but reports of my rise and fall have been greatly exaggerated.

Ah, the glory days ... and the new C64 t-shirt.

I'l never forget that little beast. I remember saving up for months on my paper route until I was able to go into Service Merchandise, plunk down some $700 in cash, and walk out with a brand new Commodore 64, 1701 monitor, and 1541 hard drive. Hell, I still remember the days of the ol' VicModem running at a screaming 300 baud. When my friend got 1,200 baud, the speed difference was incredible.

I will definitely be getting this book. What wonderful nostalgia! "poke 53280,0" anyone?

One of the T-Shirts at ThinkGeek is of the exact setup that I mentioned above with the phrase "I Adore My 64". My shirt finally came in on Monday after being back-orderd for about a week.

I Adore My 64 [thinkgeek.com] (My apologies if someone already posted this, but I didn't see it.)

AMIGA FOREVER

To chime in with everyone else: AMIGA FOREVER.

I can't claim I'm posting this from my 1000 or 2000 since I'm at work, but they both still run. In 1987 I was, to my knowledge, the only person on campus with a full-color, stereo, multithreading PC, at a fraction of the cost of the monochrome Macs and the VAX mainframe. When someone else got one, we cabled them together and played full-color, networked jet fighter games and people's heads exploded watching them.

6502 was neither the first or the best micro chip.

All the pages of gushing over the 6502 is pointless.

The Intel 8080 was first home computer system microprocessor chip. The Motorola 6800 was next. And after that came the MOS Technology 6502, which was a variation of the 6800. Then Zilog introduced the Z80, which was the basis for a whole lotta CP/M systems.

All were very good micro chips and had a lot of systems based on their use. I wouldn't say that the 6502 was the best of the bunch.

VIC-20 and C-64 BBS's

Ahhhh the good old days.
C64's and those awesome Western Digital modems that ran at 450baud!! when you connected to another WD modem.
and we thought that shit was Super fast!
I think about those days often now...running a BBS in the Philly area was lots of fun.
Anyone out there remember the NightOwl BBS group?
I ran NightOwl 13(I think I was #13 anyway...lol)
All you old Phreaks still have your copy of PhoneMan 8.0??

Great podcast interview with Bagnell

The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 157 contains an entertaining interview with the author.

Great book, but patchy

I bought the book directly from the author, and mostly enjoyed it, but it really could do with a good subedit. The author's hero-worship of Chuck Peddle is barely disguised, and the rampant Apple-bashing does wear a little thin after the first few times of telling us how crappy Woz and the Apple ][ were and how Chuck and the PET were much better.

Also, I was a little disappointed the book jumps right into the Commodore story in the 70's: the first couple of decades of Commodore's typewriters-and-calculators business is deal with in a few pages. The Amiga story seems pegged on as an afterthought; less than a 3rd of the book deals with the Amiga and Commodore's demise, surely subjects worthy of entire books in their own right.

Overall though, it was worth the purchase, and hopefully there'll be a 2nd edition addressing these flaws.

Disgruntled Commodore Employees

My favorite bit wasn't the Amiga easter egg mentioned in the review (which generally required two people, and a long series of events like ejecting the floppy with several keys held down, each event done in a specific sequence to trigger), but a comment in the source code of the original Commodore 128 ROMS:

"This kludge made necessary by the engineers at Commodore, makers of the finest semi-functional devices in the world"

For the curious. I believe the comment in the Amiga's ROM was from a hardware engineer claiming that it was the software programmers that ...ah...f'ed up the works. Something like that. I'm not about to drag my Amiga out of the attic to check the exact wording, sorry. Anyway, it would appear that the kiddies in West Chester didn't play nice with one another. Perhaps one more reason Commodore failed.

I hope...

...everybody knows that Peddle was Chuck Norris' maiden name :D

I had a PET ... it rocked!!

The PET with a built in monitor, tape drive and 5 inch keyboard! I wanted an Apple II, I got a PET. Of course, the PET was $300, and the Apple II was like $2500 at that time. The 64 I got later will always be in my heart, though.

Agree, Commodore's importance is underrated

I hadn't thought about it, because having lived through it the importance of Commodore is obvious to me, but on consideration I realize it has sort of dropped off the PC history radar.

To put it very simply, even though I was a programmer of PDP-12's, -8's, and -11's, and very familiar with Apple ]['s because I was working in a research institution that was in the process of adopting them, my first home computer was a VIC-20. For the simple reason that... I could afford one. The base price was $300. I bought a bunch of add-ons and my total cost was about $600.

At the time, an Apple ][ cost something like $2000 if I recall correctly.

The only thing in the same price neighborhood as the VIC-20 was the Atari 400 with a full QUERTY keyboard--of membrane keys. Ugh. Practically unusable. The VIC-20 had what the time was a very nice keyboard with a very comfortable, responsive "feel" to it.

Commodore's VIC-20 and Commodore 64 were the Model T of the personal computer era. Aficionados scoffed at them as cheap junk, but they were real computers that ordinary families could afford.

Hey, at a time when standalone modems cost $500, the VIC-20 had a crude but usable modem for about $60. If I recall correctly instead of frequency-shift keying between two frequencies, it just used one of the frequencies and turned it on and off. Like the Apple color video output, it was a nonstandard signal which standards-compliant modems could nevertheless tolerate. I did some work from home with it, and it was my gateway into CompuServe.

C64

My first computer was a C64, and I still have it.

Interesting read

Here [floodgap.com] is an interesting site detailing the various Commodore prototypes created as attempts to sustain the business.

Any Mainers remember...?

Anyone from southern Maine remember the old Peek and Poke newsletter?

Mike Procise, my old man, started one of the multitude of user groups, YUG, Your User Group, around here. I was around 13 then and those were fun times. He had me doing board level repairs on Commodores of various levels. There weren't many people around here who could actually fix a Commodore, so he made a little extra money and probably violated a child labor law or two in the process. ;) Calibrating 1541's, resoldering chips, playing with eeprom chips to customize people's commodore's right from booting, all in a days work for me back then. How much of a geek was I, at that age, where I remember being utterly thrilled to have met Jim Butterfield [wikipedia.org] in person at a Commodore convention.

Mike started the Peek and Poke newsletter primarily for the user group, but it grew larger and larger. Eventually Kinkos was getting far too much of our money so he started exploring ways of reproducing them ourselves. He bought an AB Dick "Desktop" printing press. It was a full fledged printing press that fit on your desk, providing your desk was able to hold something that weighed as much as a 383 magnum engine and shook like one too when it was running. It was eventually distributed to many hundreds, if not thousands of people, all over the place, with contributing writer's from all over. He was even nominated for a Jefferson Award, something given to people to recognize their contribution to a community.

Any folks who remember, send me a shout.

-- Andy

My Favorite Poke

I thought I'd share my favorite all-time poke statement.

Does anybody remember what poke 808, 234 did? The answer is (backwards) at the end of this post.

I used to have endless fun going to department stores and putting a simple program like the following:

5 poke 808, 234
10 print "This store sucks!"
20 goto 10

Then I'd just sit back and watch the fun.

Answer: .yek pots/nur eht selbasid tI

Of course it was 25 years ago, so I may have the wrong numbers.

What????

Commodore went out of business?

Great. I hope I they'll still ship the new OS for my Amiga. There's still an upgrade path for my A1000, right? Right?

as long as they spell my name correctly...

How can I recommend a book that misspells the name of one of the founders of Hi Toro (Amiga, Inc.).

Why Commodore failed

My first computer was a VIC-20. I learned BASIC and assembly language on a VIC-20, then a C-64, then C and 68000 assembly on the Amiga. I remember them all fondly. But I realized that Commodore was doomed when I attended AmigaCon and asked at a Q & A session why the Amiga did not support multiple monitors like the PC or Mac. I was developing medical software for ophthalmology and neurology, and needed to display visual stimuli for the patient on one monitor and electrophysiological data on the other screen. The Commodore representatives laughed at me and said "Why would we want to do anything that the PC or Mac can do?" Indeed. Maybe because they'll be in business in 5 years and you will not with that attitude? This was the ultimate in "not invented here".

Screen jumping

Anyone remember this?

My family always seemed to buy Zenith TVs and whenever the C64 would power on, the screen would (literally) bounce [vertically] for a minute or so until the PC (or TV) warmed up. I was only 14 at the time so I never bothered to really figure out what was wrong, but it seemed to only happen with Zenith TVs.

I would take my C64 to meetings and everyone would wonder why on earth was my screen jumping.
Oh the days..

dBASE almost on the Amiga

I got my start on the Vic-20 and learned how to write video games using 6502 assembler in just 3.5K of RAM. But I was so enthralled with the Amiga that I spearheaded a plan in Ashton-Tate to port dBASE III Plus over to the Amiga platform. Ed Esber allowed me to put together a full business plan and analysis for getting dBASE onto the Amiga platform. MicroIllusions was going to do the port for us and I was able to show (on paper of course) how we could make our investment back within the first year. But, sorry to say, the project got shot down in the board room. And I got dinged in my employee review for not being more focused on MIS projects. Who knows what could've happened if we had actually been allowed to port the product over.

Sigh.

Musical disk drives

God, I feel old. I learnt to program on a Commodore KIM. Nice computer, but I'll remember the hex (0xA9) longer than the mnemonics (LDA) that came in when I got the PET and an assembler. The best bit? The standalone hard disk drives had their own 6502 processor in them, and with a little trickery you could program it. I had a program to play music by bouncing the heads around. Not my drive, I hasten to add...

Commodore never sold a single 1541 drive

Instead, it sold a lot of 154I drives! :)
Check for yourself:
http://mark0.net/var/154I.jpg [mark0.net]
http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/1541.JPG [zock.com]

Bye!

A sad story

The demise of Commodore is a sad, sad story. Machines that everyone liked at home, that were well designed and straight forward to use, fell under the mighty axe of the corporate PC. Bad descisions were made.

I learnt to code in C on my A500. Guru Meditation was my friend... it will always have a special place in my heart.

*sniff*

The Amiga was great.

Fantastic technology for its day.
The ROM kernal manuals were a great way to learn about an
efficient real-world real-time multi-tasking system with a built in graphics system.
It was truly fantastic.

Today I use OS X and for different reasons I think that it is equally great technology
for its day.

To be more accurate, the C64 used the 6510

As the CPU, and the 6502 in the 1581 (disk drive).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6510 [wikipedia.org]

C64 forever!

My first computer

My first computer was a Commodore 64/128. I still have it up in my closet. My parents bought it for me when I was 6 or 7 years old. Man I remember playing on that thing during the long days of summer.

Ahh the memories.

Re:YOU FAIL IT

ok...That was either the worst poem or the best rap song I've ever read.

Re:Not many contributions.

Uhh, the Amiga? Why is that not innovative? It took years for other platforms to be capable of similar things, for anywhere near the low cost.

Re:Not many contributions.

Empirically, the C=64 did much better at games than its rivals, the Apple II and the Atari 8bits (Hmm, I think it was a newer if not better designed machine.)

Its SID sound chip was certainly well-regarded, and its Sprite capabilities were nifty.

Unfortunately it had a terribley barebones BASIC.

So it wasn't a revolution for home machines, but an evolution.

Re:Not many contributions.

IMHO the only thing Commodore gave to the industry was a bunch of kids who's parents could only afford a Commodore Vic or 64 and could progam assembly and squeze perfromance from a wickedly slow disk drive. There's nothing innovative about their hardware or software.

WTF?

Based on that line of reasoning, Henry Ford didn't contribute much to the auto industry either because he just made cars that the average person could afford, even though they were slow and rickety.

I don't know about you, but I grew up in that era, and there wasn't much else to choose from at the time. Making computers affordable and available to a wide variety of people was an amazing accomplishment for Commodore. The personal computer industry owes them a debt of gratitude.

What would you consider innovative anyhow?

Re:Not many contributions.

Jealous much? The fact that to this day it is still impossible for a PC, Mac or otherwise to display two screens with different resolutions *on the same display* is only the beginning of why your ignorance and snobbishness shows. Pre-emptive mutitasking, the Video Toaster/Flyer, Lightwave, and the genlocking abilities are other prime examples of why most of us are glad your opinion is just that. Heaven forbid we mention how it could boot a full multitasking OS with GUI in under 880k. Nah, not innovative at all...freakin' REVOLUTIONARY is more like it.

Re:Not many contributions.

The Commodore 64 had better graphics than the Apple II and it could be argued better than the Atari of that time.
The Commodore 64 had better sound than the any computer of that time.

The Amiga first mass market computer
1. with multi-tasking.
2. with stereo sound.
3. that supported sampled sound.
4. hardware accelerated video you could argue that the Atari 400/800 was first thanks to it's missile player graphics but Jay Miner was involved in the both.
5. The ability to sync the computers video with an external video source

Just about every innovation in personal computers was first seen on the Mac or the Amiga.

The PC didn't catch up the to the 1985 Commodore Amiga until around 1995 with the release of Windows 95.

Re:Wait! --- No, but...

No, but it did run CP/M, which was a cross-platform OS. Does that count?

Re:Not many contributions.

Amiga 500 gave me a passion for programming.

The funny thing is that we had just one television in the house. I had no screen (too expensive) so I ended up with an TV adaptor. I had to argue with my mother to get a full hour each day on my computer.

Sometimes they were all behind me in the sofa waiting to see the news. I was sitting in front of the television busy writing some dumb programs like drawing a polygon or something.

I had the shock of my life the first time that I saw the Amiga Workbench and the little Text To Speech application :-). I thought I would dedicated the rest of my life to make it intelligent, just like HAL :-).

There were dozens of innovation in the Amiga. Workbench, an extremely advanced sound card, the virtual disk...a rich set of command lines (unknown in the micro-computer world). Too bad you missed them.

Olivier

Re:How CBM lost me

You know, it's just the sheer sadness that drives people to still support Amiga. Fact is, that, conceptually speaking, the AmigaOS was far ahead of its time, and still is. The concept was and is very simple: A micro kernel, a multilayered driver system (resources, devices, and optionally, file handlers), and a real multitasking. I'm not saying this because I'm a fanboy, I'm saying this because I witnessed the advantages first hand, and still witness them. I still use an Amiga 600 for making music! Why? Because it's technically impossible to create music software for Windows or Linux that keeps the pace no matter what you're doing with the computer. On the Amiga, I can easily run my music, and do something else at the same time, without worrying about timing problems. And that's the problem: Timing. The AmigaOS was and is the only one that provides exact and predictable timing for all aspects of the operating system. Windows can't do it, by far, not even with DirectX, and Linux can't do it either, because neither is a real time OS, however AmigaOS is.

I gladly accept the design flaws in AmigaOS 2.x and 3.x, or even 4.x if it provides me with the flexibility that I need. Perhaps I might even check out MorphOS, or any other of these efforts. Recently, I ran AROS off a live CD on my present main computer, which is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 machine with 2 GB of RAM. Even Amiga Emulators like UAE still provide some advantages over their host OS. And that is something, that only AmigaOS can do.

Amiga Inc. is currently working on AmigaOS 5 (AmigaOS 4 was implemented by Hyperion Entertainment), and AmigaOS 5 will be multiplatform. I don't know how they'll solve the kernel issue, perhaps they'll take a Linux or BSD kernel, or write their own; or run it on top of the other systems, who knows. All I care about is, that *I* as a user, or developer, do not have to care about timing issues. If it works, I'll be all over it. :-)

I almost purchased an AmigaONE with AmigaOS 4, but unfortunately I was unemployed at the time and could not afford it. As it happened, a couple of months later, Eyetech (UK) stopped manufacturing the AmigaONE mainboards, and Hyperion halted development of AmigaOS 4 until a new hardware manufacturer has been found. However, that AmigaONE solution was very expensive; I hope they'll manage to reduce prices. I'm also unsure about the performance implications of AmigaOS 4. I hope it'll be as smooth as the old OSes. And if that shouldn't work out, perhaps AmigaOS 5 will be the cure, who knows.

And other projects like AROS and MorphOS look also promising.

To me, the loss of Amiga stifled my creativity. The Amiga was intended as a computer for creative people, and that's what it was. With its loss, an important tool went out the window.

The current operating systems, like Linux and Windows, can only partially compensate for that. And developers for these platforms have not the slightest clue about what creative people need. C*base for making music? Thanks, but no thanks.
   

Re:How CBM lost me

> Every bullshit story was lapped up by some of the most vocal, vociferous and plain delusional zealots and fanboys that ever existed

You're still butt-hurt over the ass-whooping that I delivered to you on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy, aren't you?

Re:Not many contributions.

This is one of the most clueless posts I have ever read in Slashdot. A complete troll.

The Amiga was light years ahead of everything else:

4096 colors ... closest competitor 32... Atari
True Multitasking ... no competition at all.
A proper channel processor (i.e. channel commands were handled by one of the three chips Gary, Agnes, or Denise ... not the CPU)
A Proper Graphics Processor with built in real time animation in the hardware.
A Proper Sound Processor.
Quadraphonic Sound. Closest competitor. Mono. Atari and Apple.
True Multimedia... fully compatible with NTSC (in US) or PAL (Europe) ... no competition at all.

Many PCs today actually have inferior graphics and sound to an original Amiga!

The guys who developed Amiga were geniuses. Commodore (their sugar daddy) was, I'll admit completely incompetent in every way.

I knew Commodore and Amiga was going to go down at an Amiga User's group meeting when the 500 was announced... The Commodore marketing guy comes in and states flatly that the 500 will have no hard drive because "our customers have no interest in hard drives". We all jumped him, but he was simply too stupid to get it. The 500's form factor was really clever with the works in the keyboard... Had they put a 20 meg hard drive in that machine, and allowed Toys "R" Us to sell them... Commodore would be Microsoft today. .. but no...

While Apple was giving Computers to schools (so kids knew and liked them) Commodore their demo machines at full price to their own dealers... Almost all simply had pictures of them! They shouldn't have bothered to even play... they brought no chips to the table. .. And Jack Trammel (sp?) had the dubious honor of making Forbes higest paid executive the year before they went backrupt. He was just another Kenneth Lay.