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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.
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.
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.
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.
It is 10 bucks cheaper at Amazon. (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.)
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Isn't "A New Angle" the title of the latest Strokes single?
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.
Amiga 500.
We will always miss you.
I absolutely LOVE this book. Why not buy it from the author?
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.
Rise: Chuck Peddle
Fall: Jack Tramiel
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Commodore 64 + external floppy drive + 300 baud modem = endless fun dialing into local BBSs until all hours of the night.
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:
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
*sniff* I miss Amigas.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Barnes and Noble is selling this book for $29.95, but Amazon.com is only selling it for $19.77!
Save yourself $10.18 by buying the book here: The Rise and Fall of Commodore. That's a total savings of 33.99%!
Yeah, I'll also need a side of mashed potatos, slaw and 4 biscuits please.
And to top it off....
1 74/index.htm
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/PAD093730
I hope Medi Ali and Gould burn in hell for what they did. They ruined a perfectly good computer/OS AND dumped toxic waste!
ok...That was either the worst poem or the best rap song I've ever read.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ah, the nostalgia.
/, and x.
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 +, -,
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.
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.
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/
They offered free shipping when I bought mine from the site.
Foo: a greasy warm dead bird in a cardboard bucket
Bar: Yeah, I'll also need a side of mashed potatos, slaw and 4 biscuits please.
And an oversized wax-lined cardboard conic section of water, carbon dioxide, artificial flavor, and high-fructose corn syrup, please.
To go.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Can someone make this available in a Vorbcast?
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.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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.
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.
The sound chip used in Commodore 64 was spectacular for its time. In fact it is on Byte Magazine's list of most important microchips of all time.
But the marketing went beyond stupid tv or press ads. At a time when the Amiga really stood a chance to cash in on the presentations/art biz, C= releases the 500 with a BLACK AND WHITE composite port! Why? They saved about 25 cents on additional components.
Then the color adaptor came out, and it's like 6 friggin inches long (oh, and the monitor pass thru was also on the end of this), making your machine stick out even further from the wall. What in the hell were they thinking?!
I do not blame the engineers - I've met some of them - and I can tell you that they were as pissed off as I was!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Linus Torvalds first computer was a Vic-20.
c over/linus-9719.html
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.08.97/
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."
-
If you know the dir of the nerdcore rhyme, then holler! (see PA Theme)
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....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
That barebones, pathetic BASIC made every C64 guy an ASM person moving to C later. Look at background of very advanced coders of this time, you will figure it too.
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?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
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.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
One of the most surprising stories is about what Holocaust survivor Jack Tramiel liked about the Germans. No, please don't give the answer in this thread, let all the others read the book too without spoiling it.
As you say, when the Amiga came out (I had one of the first Amiga 1000s) it was far and away the most impressive personal computer on the market - processing power, graphics, sound, multi-tasking OS, etc. Five years later (or maybe less) Apple and the PC market had caught up and passed it and the Amigas that were being sold were only marginally better (woo-hoo, now it has a hard drive and more memory). Putting everything into the custom chipsets was a fantastic way of squeezing out that performance when it premiered, but it locked the hardware (and the tightly coupled software) into a time warp outside of Moore's Law.
I do have many fond memories on my C-64 (and my Amiga). I've still got a mostly working SX-64 in my closet, but I'm not sure the disk drive is in good shape - the last time I tried, I couldn't read most of the floppies I have.
I did learn to program in BASIC and 6502 assembly language on my C-64 and we wore out many joysticks playing Summer Games and M.U.L.E. on it.
My personal personal computer experience went like this:
TRS-80 Model 1, 4K RAM, Level 1 Basic (eventually upgraded to 16K RAM, Level 2 Basic, but I never had a disk drive for it)
C-64 (I skipped the Vic-20) with several 1541 disk drives
SX-64 (bought used from a friend who bought a C-128)
Amiga 1000
(started using Macs at my college job and a few PCs in school, but most schoolwork was done on a Vax and an IBM mainframe)
Packard Bell 486 (my first PC)
I've lost track of how many different PCs I've owned since then.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The BBC Microcomputer
Instead of one of those C-64 children's toys.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
LOAD "*" ,8,1
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
Don't worry he's probably an Atari fanboy :-)
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)
It looks like a Markov chain to me.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Dude, how the hell are you?
:D
Good to see some of the old stalwarts are still kicking around.
Heh, I found my copy of Deathbed Vigil just the other day.
BTW, I tried running BLAZEMONGER! in emulation a couple of weeks back, and it set fire to my computer and knocked up my cat.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
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.
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.
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.
Where was the marketing for the IBM PC, then?
I hazily remember a TV commercial touting the PCjr, and the "How ya gonna do it? / Gonna PS/2 it!" jingle is still a brainworm fifteen years later -- but both of those models were failures.
IBM PC's didn't sell well because of good marketing; they sold well despite a lack of marketing, because they were IBM's.
You can get your copy of this great book here: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/produc t_info.php?products_id=368
www.amigakit.com - Amiga computer store
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 (My apologies if someone already posted this, but I didn't see it.)
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
http://bellsouthpwp.net/h/e/heymanj/Amiga/Amiga.h
I thought so much of it, that I bought enough shares to paper a good sized room - and lost it all
I bought the book to understand what kind of cluster f**k management was. I would make the book required reading for any graduate level business management (MBA type) course so that they understand that bad management + good products still equals failure.
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
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.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
My list..
8 years pass..
Oddly, I still have the TRS-80 Model 1 and its Monitor in custom-built cases in the garage. All the others are long since gone, though.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
This is off topic but thanks for my house and my job.
I learned how to program on a Commodore 64 I got in November of 1982. I then learned how to do even driven programing on an Amiga 1000 I got in 1985. I love to program the Amiga. It was a good ten years ahead of the PCs of the day.
The Amiga taught me so much that I use everyday on PCs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The Atari 800 and C=64 were so close to each other in capability, it would be hard to call one significantly better than the other. The C=64 was much cheaper, certainly. And both were far better than the Apple ][ for games.
Did it run Linux! (okay, the voices in my head told me to type that.) True, I had the PET at school, I bought the Vic-20 and 64 with my own money, and finally had the 128 when others were getting the Amiga. I remember sending thermal printed papers to professors and have them bitch when they left them in sunlight. Don't forget...before there was even the idea of /. there was the magazine, Compute!
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.
No, but it did run CP/M, which was a cross-platform OS. Does that count?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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??
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I think it was really that Commodore couldn't decide if the Amiga was a home computer for games/education, a business computer, or a professional multimedia computer. Of course, it could be all three, though least of all the business computer since it didn't do text very well.
You really can't market the Amiga 500, with a picture on the box of a kid in open mouth glee playing games, along with the Amiga 2000, with business/multimedia production, at the same time successfully. But it was when Commodore got distracted by PC clones - I remember their very unremarkable offerings - that things really went downhill.
Someone created a Windows executable of Bruce Lee. (Actually, it might be available for multiple OSes.) I've played it and it runs well. You don't need an emulator. I don't remember where I downloaded it otherwise I'd post it. Just do a search. You'll find it.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Have you noticed a distinct lack of USB 5.25" drives? I'm fine with a wall wart for power, but nobody even makes a USB floppy controller chip that recognizes 360k as a valid format. (There's one that'll do 1.2MB, but not 360k.)
I've been encouraging Jens Schoenfeld to make a USB Catweasel controller for those of us without PCI slots. I suppose it's probably easier to put PCI slots on a laptop, though.
Perhaps I'm just in it for the absurdity factor.
In number of games available for piracy C=64 certainly took the cake :-)
I started with the 800XL but eventually longed for and got a C=64 for pretty much that reason.
I'm not sure if the C=64 *was* better, BUT...
* you saw it pushed more... I don't think the Ataris could have done "Skate or Die", say...
* on some EA games (back wheen they used that clever ECA logo and even more clever copy protection) ported between the two, IMO the 8bit games feel a little slower and more plodding.
Apple II seems to have been the best for hacking, Atari 8bits for light programming, and C=64 for games....
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Anonymous Coward wrote:
That barebones, pathetic BASIC made every C64 guy an ASM person moving to C later. Look at background of very advanced coders of this time, you will figure it too.
I admit an ASM book on the C=64 I tried kicked my ass back then.
I know a lot of the 2600 homebrewers of today cut their teeth on the old Atari 8bit ASM.
And it seems like a lot of people who got really smart about computers at low levels had Apple, which seems to have been very friendly in that direction.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 157 contains an entertaining interview with the author.
The TV ads are such a small amount of marketing that it really isn't funny.
That only counted for the home user. The Amiga was actually very successful in the home market. I would guess that a lot more people had Amigas at home than Macs or and maybe PCs.
PCs sucked for games.
It was in the bussness/corprate and education world that Commodore got killed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't have a copy of the book; thanks for pointing out the rough spots.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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.
Having first learned 8080 assembly, I ended up fairly despising the 6502 for its dearth of, well, everything -- registers, speed, 16-bit operations, stack space...
The 68000 was a very nice architecture by comparison, and the ARM was even nicer than that. I rather liked them both.
As fate would have it, I have my hands in an HCS08-based part at the moment (6800 derivative), and it's like programming a 6502 again, except with all the shortcomings fixed.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
My list of computers I own. At work I have more than I can count.
Atari 2600 with a basic cartage.
Commodore 64.
Amiga 1000
Amiga 2000HD
Pentium something with Windows 95.
Now
IBM thinkpad, a PII server, an AMD X2, MacPlus, Ti 99/4a and Amiga 3000T:)
I really want an Atar Falcon, Atari 800, Commodore 128, Commodore 64, and a Colorcomputer. My wife's mother has an Apple IIC that I will bring home at Christmas.
Someday I may add an Amiga 4000 or Amiga 1200 to the list as well.
I would love a NeXT cube but those are expensive.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And the only thing you give to the world is the inability to distinguish whose from WHO IS.
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:
...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.
"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
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
The 6502 was the best because it was cheap.
I so wished that Commodore had used the Z-80 in the C-64. It was so much better then the 6502.
Of course very few chips could match the 6502 for speed. It was much faster at a given clock speed than just about anything.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The 6502 was nowhere nearly the best of the bunch (the later 6809 kicked its butt), but it was the cheapest of the bunch. That's why it became such a popular microprocessor. It was around $20 when it was released, and competing chips were well over $100 each. MOS had the right idea. Don't make it great... just make it good, and affordable. The whole Commodore philosophy mirrored the MOS philosophy. The C64 was never the best computer on the market, and yet it outsold every other one out there, because it offered a lot for the money.
...everybody knows that Peddle was Chuck Norris' maiden name :D
My List:
TRS-80 MC10
C=128 (Apples suck, dude!)
Apple Macintosh SE (well, it's not a ][e)
Amiga 500
Mac Colour Classic
Quadra 630
Unremembered Windows laptop #1 (Win95)
Performa 6400
Acer (I think) Windows laptop #2 (Win98)
PowerBook G4
Graphite iMac
HP something or another that everyone in the company received free (it was big news then)
Power Mac G4 Quicksilver -- still have, about to sell
Homemade something or another #1 -- still have, for sale if I get home
Tivo from Sony -- I telnet'd in, so that counts, right?
PowerBook 5300 with non-burnt batteries (handmedown)
PowerBook Aluminum
Homemade super thing #2 -- still have, my MythTV box and NAS server and ssh gateway
3 XBoxes -- still have, they count, right? They run Xebian and mythfrontend
iMac 17" Core Duo -- still have, it's almost new.
iMac 24" Core 2 Duo -- well, I haven't seen it yet, but I know FedEx delivered it.
Holy crap! Now I know why I'm broke all the time and have a boring car and haven't given my wife a boob job yet. Can't ever let her see this list... I *did* tell her the two iMacs were the last computers we'd ever need.
--Jim (me)
Of course not. The 6502 was quite a basic micro processor, even by the standards of that time. It worked, but it was difficult to write any meaningful code for it, i.e. if you wanted to keep a little bit of sanity for yourself! ;-)
I never programmed the 6800, but once I wrote an emulator for the 6809, and I liked the design much better than that of the 6502.
The most comfortable to program was perhaps the 68000, closely followed by the Z80. The Z80 had 22 registers in total (2 x 11 registers). Now, eat that, 8080!! ;-)
I learnt 8086 assembly in the early 90ies when I was faced with MS-DOS for the first time! Yuck!!
Nowadays, Pentium 4 processors are quite nice as well, especially with all the MMX, SSE and SSE2 instructions and the additional registers. Unfortunately, no compiler is using these for regular code generation. It would make code much faster, methinks. I wonder how fast my 2 GHz processor would be if the instruction set was actually used, eh! (I had indeed some suprises when writing assembly code for Pentium II and upwards processors; I never thought that C could be so SLOW.)
I think the Commodore had a better sound.
The Atari had a faster floppy drive.
The Atari 400/800 had FOUR joystick ports.
The Atari 400/800 had StarRaiders!
Eventually had a larger software library and maybe better software library.
I had a C64 and always saw programs for the Atari I wanted. I am sure that Atari users felt the same way about the C-64 if they where honest about it.
I think graphics wise they where very close.
Of course you do have to throw in the 128 which may have been the best 8-Bit computer ever. It didn't really live up to it's potential because very few people wrote for it. It ran all C-64 software so you tended to write for the C-64 since that gave you the largest market.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I cracked Fort Apocalypse and tried my hand at a few others on my Atari, just for the fun of it. Even back then, I was uncomfortable with the idea of software piracy. Which is not to say I didn't have a few things "borrowed" from friends, but I never got into it the way they did. There were a bunch of posers in my high school (early 80's) who thought they were "hackers" because they had somehow gotten a Locksmith parameter list... (Locksmith was a great copying program for the Apple ][).
:-). I know the Commodore's sound was better, but the Atari's was good enough that I didn't miss it. We never did any side-by-side comparisons, but one thing we all agreed on was the general crappiness of apple games :-).
I do remember being totally blown away by the EA logo and music the first time I booted Archon on my 800. How I loved that game...
I think deep down I knew or feared that the C=64 was the better machine. I suspect that my C=64-using friends feared the same about my Atari
Amiga 500 gave me a passion for programming.
:-). I thought I would dedicated the rest of my life to make it intelligent, just like HAL :-).
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
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
My A4000 happily ran Debian m68k-Linux including X11.
I still have my A1200 from college but haven't touched in a couple years. This winter I'll hopefully have time to get it out, up, and running again.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Yeah, Star Raiders was awesome.
I remember playing at least one game with 3 other friends a few times - I think the game was called "Silicon Warrior" by Epyx? I can picture the box, I'm not sure that's the right title.
I agree about the floppy. I remember one of my friends bragging that his floppy drive contained a 6502. I asked how why it was still so slow, and he couldn't answer me... That question is answerd in the book.
Granted that Commodore shot themselves in the foot on marketing, there were other factors involved. IIRC, Consumer Reports featured the Amiga in an issue in 1985, at a time when there was little software, at least compared to the IBM PC (out since 1981), Apple ][ (1977), and Mac 128K (1984). It was derided in the article as "the world's most expensive doorstop." With America's premiere consumer goods hand-holder saying, in essence, "hell, no" to its readership, and by extension, most of the potential market, what chance did Commodore realistically have?
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
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.
What amazed me was that the Amiga scene didn't die with Commodore. Every bullshit story was lapped up by some of the most vocal, vociferous and plain delusional zealots and fanboys that ever existed. I lost count of the number of times that the brand changed hands, or screenshots surfaced that claimed to be of the next Amiga, or the number of times that AmigaOS was going to be revived to move to the PPC etc. I find it pretty sad that anybody invests that much in a platform, console or OS but people still do. I wonder if in ten years there will be some desperate sadsack rabidly defending the Xbox360, PS3 or Wii in much the same way as you can still find the odd person on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy doing.
The marketing campaign for the original IBM PC (in the UK at least) consisted of a magazine page with picture of it and a Charlie Chaplin look-alike, the words "IBM PC", and a little IBM logo (the old one with three letters made out of stripes) at the bottom right-hand corner of the page next to a phone number. It was so bewilderingly meaningless that people ended up turning it around and folding it in strange ways in the hope that there was some hidden message, but AFAIK nobody ever found one.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
They were a fucktarded company and natural selection took its course. It took too long but it did. Everything was proprietary, no expansion, all their shit sucked at games, wasn't powerful enough for anything serious, or too expensive. I had a good ol' Apple IIE as the disk access was much faster.
BTW, if someone bitches about the load times on any of the Playstations, the load time on a Commode 64 so fucking slow a snail would go 1 mile before a simple program was loaded.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
We have 2 original Commodore filing cabinets in our office, with the Commodore logo on it. Is that worth much?
Or been to Gidea? The late Bill Hicks wants answers!
[UID-HeinzIntel]
a little IBM logo (the old one with three letters made out of stripes)
That's still their logo.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
My first computer was a C64, and I still have it.
Then of course we have C64.com for additional links, game info, etc...
John T.
Commedore 64 Advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHAmAxztNk
I fear the Y2038 bug
Hey! That's a Digital quote. Ken Olsen was notorious for hating his marketing department, and they hated him back.
But not a frust(r)um! Never that! Only the truly black-hearted minions of Nyarlathotep keep that filthy meme alive! Each utterance is an incantation that tears the dimensions asunder, forms claws of the very fabric of space and time and rips away an irreplaceable part of the memetic victim's mental integrity, delivering the scrap of soul to the master of insanity for his delectation and digestion.
Or something... It's just bad and wrong, mmm'kay?
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Here is an interesting site detailing the various Commodore prototypes created as attempts to sustain the business.
C64 - Too hard
C128 - Learned simple BASIC
Mac 512 - Look, it's a mouse!
Mac Plus - plugged into a 220 volt socket and died.
Mac Classic II - Screen caught fire
Pentium I 133 with Win98 Gift in Summer 1999 "Shawn Fanning!"
Two old Thinkpads - "LapTops are Fragile"
Win2000 600Mhz fading workhorse.
Random Laptop with a bad OS
1.7 Ghz Win2000 "XP SP2? Eew."
2.4 Ghz XP SP2 OEM "Vista will never get here"
Win2000 machine comped from work.
Coming Soon:
XP on Kentsfield "Let's wait for BlackComb"
My First Linux "Please, make it easy on the poor Newbikin"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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 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
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
"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."
The same could be said for calculators, and some consoles (DS).
I thought I'd share my favorite all-time poke statement.
.yek pots/nur eht selbasid tI
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:
Of course it was 25 years ago, so I may have the wrong numbers.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
This is one of the most clueless posts I have ever read in Slashdot. A complete troll.
... closest competitor 32... Atari ... no competition at all. ... not the CPU) ... no competition at all.
.. but no...
.. 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.
The Amiga was light years ahead of everything else:
4096 colors
True Multitasking
A proper channel processor (i.e. channel commands were handled by one of the three chips Gary, Agnes, or Denise
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)
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.
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.
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?
How can I recommend a book that misspells the name of one of the founders of Hi Toro (Amiga, Inc.).
(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.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Actually the problem was that Commodore decide. They decided that it was a "Serious" computer and not a "Toy" ... They had the largest dealer network in the planet... The 64 and 128 were sold in every toy store in the world that was big enough to matter, but Commodore decided that would make them look like a "toy" so they refused to let their own dealer network sell the Amiga, and then they insisted on their demo units to the PC shops. The shops have a picture of an Amiga and take orders if you insisted, but they would steer you away if they could. The net result was that was then seeling the Amiga.
... no I don't need one... My "Game Machine" does everything I need. We're just going to buy the next generation "Amiga Game Machine" with the CD32 CD Drive and that new Office software.
If Commodore had just let Toys "R" Us sell the damn things, people would have never bought PCs because they would have said
Commodore got stuck in sementics and blew their golden opportunity.
Curse Atari for droppin the 4 controller ports. It took Nintendo to bring that back as the standard.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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".
Anyone see this:
p hp?products_id=60&osCsid=21c9eec794b2dae91138606e6 adefa6d
http://c64.mustangindex.com/catalog/product_info.
It replaces your C64 internals and converts it into a USB keyboard. Combine this with one of the emulators out for the C64 (like CCS64) and can run your old games off of the emulator while using the original keyboard. Sweet!
Heh, I did some summer work on an Amiga 1000 in the UK, including writing a near-real time Fourier Analysis of audio data from a Sophos (?) audio digitizer in 68000 assembler (sweet), and also integrating the Digiview source code (which we got under a NDA) into the same program. ;-)
It was cool, and a very real advance, since the Amiga could do image capture and false color without having a big separate hardware frame buffer.
The thing that real killed the A1000 was the crappy flickery hi-res display. Compared to a PC with a Hercules card and a decent green or amber monitor, is looked like ass, and no self-respecting business person would touch it, no matter how many huge pre-rendered bouncing globes you could show them... hmmm, that sounds kinda shady
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
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..
* you saw it pushed more... I don't think the Ataris could have done "Skate or Die", say... * on some EA games (back wheen they used that clever ECA logo and even more clever copy protection) ported between the two, IMO the 8bit games feel a little slower and more plodding.
I'll grant the Commodore got more titles first and the bulk of publishing house effort. I'll furthermore grant (mostly) better sprite hardware and the SID chip. The main cause of the "plodding" you decry is shoddy straight line ports from the Apple and Commodores. The A8 had a graphics chipset that was very powerful and could do no end of nifty tricks but it had to be explicitly programmed for. Many ports of games that started on the C64 or Apple simply did not properly exploit this hardware. Rather, the ports used it as lower-res version of the static framebuffers on the other two platforms. Games that DID properly use it include:
BallBlazer (This one in particular would have been difficult to do on a C-64. The screenshots DON'T do it justice. You have to see this one MOVE.) Rescue on Fractulus
Koronis Rift
The Eidolon
(damn but Lucasfilm games rocked)
Alternate Reality: The City
Zybex
Bill Kendrick's Gem Drop
European demo coders also did and do astounding things with it:
Numen (this one actually uses a variant of the Build engine used in Duke3d, Redneck Rampage, and so forth. No shit.), Joyride, Drunken Chessboard and many others do incredible things.
www.atarimania.com has all of these except maybe Gem Drop.
I wasn't kidding about the video chipset. ANTIC and GTIA were designed by a team led by Jay Miner. Most of the A8 chipset engineers later went on to design the Amiga's chipset; and the A8 does have some Amiga-like characteristics. The A8 video chipset did not have a fixed framebuffer. Through DMA, almost any part of the A8 memory map could be mapped to the screen and this mapping as well as many other characteristics of the display could be changed by interrupts keyed to horizontal and vertical blank interrupts. Page-flip animations were ridiculously easy on this machine. It had a 256 color indexed palette ("trickery" can raise this); which could also be futzed around with in a very plastic way (including the granddaddy of Amiga "Copper" effects: different and shifting pallettes on zones of the screen). And yes, it is possible to put all 256 of them on the screen at once. It could mix different video modes on the same screen and this mixture could be changed at will. Different modes can be switched out on alternating frames to create even more "modes".
I had an ST after having an A8 but if I knew as a kid what I came to know later, I'd have gotten an Amiga instead. The Amiga had way more "Atari-feel". Trivia note: Miner's company offered Atari a license to the technology in the '83 timeframe. Atari didn't bite and Commodore did. The rest is history.
My induction into geekdom started when I got a C=64 and tape drive for Christmas. I was 11 years old so that was 1983. Sadly my parents gave me a black and white TV to us it on, so for a long time I never saw a C=64 used in it's 16 color glory. I eventually upgraded to a color monitor somewhere around 1986. I have so many fond memories of that machine (heh and the early days of copying programs/games on a dual tape deck). I also got my modeming start on the C=64 at a whopping 300baud!
I eventually bought an Amiga 500 after drooling over them at the mall. I had modem buddy who worked at Electronics Boutique (I think it was) who would let me sit in the store and play on it for hours whilst I saved my money from working a job after school. I kept my C=64 after I bought my Amiga it just got stuck in a closet. I started hanging out with more modem buddies who were amiga nuts and before long we starting having some friendly competitions to see who could have the best Amiga 500. By the time I sold my amiga to a used computer shop (Around 1993) I had the following: An Amiga 500 with the upgraded chipset (I could run PAL or NTSC!), 8 megs of RAM (which at the time was huge) and a 120GB SCSI hard drive. The guy who owned the shop set up a spot especially for the computer for it figuring it would sell quick. (He gave me good money for it). It sold right away. Like while I was standing in the room waiting for them to finish buying it from me. I also sold him my C=64 setup as well (for a couple bucks.. wasn't considered to be worth much by then).
A sad footnote: A year later I got a job at that store and worked there from 1994 until 2000. In 1999 the store moved locations and I was charged with cleaning out the massive warehouse where we had all kinds of old computers and parts. Most of the stuff was basically junk due to age and obsolescence. While going through a pile of boxes I opened one up and LO and Behold there lay my C=64! I know it was mine for the following reasons : When my father had originally purchased a C=64 we lived in Germany and this one had german text on the bottom. When we moved back to to the states I had to buy a new after market power supply for it and there the same one was still attached. And finally.. I had a penchant for candy bars as a kid and had stained the case near the power button with chocolate. There my C=64 lay from 1983!! I immediately hooked it up and it worked! The floppy drive still worked. And there were a bunch of the floppies I had provided with it in a large case. I went to ask the owner if I could have it (since we were throwing it out anyways and I'm an honest sort of guy...) He had left for the day. So I packed everything back into the box and set it aside for the next day so I could ask him for it. The next morning before came in for work, Goodwill arrived and removed everything from the warehouse including my C=64. Needless to say calls to Goodwill were worthless because it was recieved as a semitruck's worth of junk and they couldn't even tell me where the semi ended up going. I almost had my original computer... (sighs)
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.
How do you then explain how the Apple II sold well despite almost non-existent marketing?
Table-ized A.I.
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.
There's a great irony here, too. Consider VIC-20's amazing marketing, all the way down to the packaging: "VIC-20! The FRIENDLY computer! With COLOR and MUSIC!" Worked amazingly.
Now, consider that Texas Instruments, a company which had two years earlier in 1979 released a 16-bit computer with sprite graphics, twice the color palette, 1/3rd more resolution in each dimension, three voice one noise sound, and more than twice the RAM of the VIC-20.
And when the VIC-20 was released, the TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A were going head to head in a price war against the VIC-20, less than half the machine that the TI-99/4A was. Commodore had a chip fab (MOS Techologies) to make custom ICs to cut costs. TI... well, TI literally invented the integrated circuit, arguably invented the microprocessor and microcomputer (though this is generally credited to Intel's 4004, TI had a calculator chip which predated it), and made more chips than Frito-Lay. Custom ICs weren't a problem for TI.
The TI-99/4A's box, sitting on the shelf at K-Mart beside the VIC-20, simply said "Texas Instruments Home Computer". No flashy claims. Hell, nowhere on the package does it even indicate that it's got a 16 bit processor! (I have a TI-99/4A box in front of me right now.) TI is/was used to marketing to engineers and other knowledgeable people who will research a purchase, rather than simply walking into K-Mart and impulse buying. And TI never bothered to integrate all the glue logic on the board with a custom IC the way Commodore did. TI never stooped to using cardboard RF shields to save a few cents, as was done with some VIC-20s and C-64s. Hell, TI never even bothered to stop using raised foil PC board interconnects and other expensive stuff that raised reliability. They sold a better designed, better built, and higher technology product... and expected consumers would be smart enough to spend the extra $20 (which was the difference when I got my first computer in 1983).
The VIC-20 outsold it 2:1.
Extremely ironic that between the VIC-20 and the Amiga (which I loved, by the way), Commodore forgot how to market their stuff to the unwashed masses.
Probably had something to do with Tramiel's departure (NB, haven't read the book yet).
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You really can't market the Amiga 500, with a picture on the box of a kid in open mouth glee playing games, along with the Amiga 2000, with business/multimedia production, at the same time successfully.
Was that the issue, though? I don't think so; it makes perfect sense to view one has a compatible "home" version of your office computer.
I worked in television broadcasting, and as late as the mid 1990s, it was Amiga 2000 in the office and Amiga 500 at home. That was me, that was co-workers, etc. A few were lucky and had the A4000 on their desk at work and the A3000 at home, you know. But bread and butter machines were the 500/2000 combination. I started out with an A1000 at home and an A2000 at work, eventually made the lateral move to the easier to expand A500. I still have every Amiga (and everything from its predecessor in my life, the TI-99/4A).
Now, TV was unique. We used them as character generators, using Broadcast Titler and other programs, along with a cheap genlock board: there's the little graphic on the corner of the screen beside the news anchor; there's the sports reporter's name at the bottom of the screen. The Video Toaster hardware/software for the Amiga was a boon, because when you connected it to a good VTR (a serious timecoded Betacam or 3/4" machine which could record one frame after a 7 second pre-roll), the Toaster Amiga would output this amazing frame of a 3D graphic, rewind the VTR, sync, record one frame in succession, and work on rendering the next one.
For people who grew up in the digital age, you just don't get how amazing it was that a small local station could make their own bumpers and 3D graphics. Just a few years before this, I was lugging a 3/4" portable VTR and a separate camera (before the Betacam camcorder!), bag of batteries, bag of BIG 3/4" cassettes, a Sun Gun, a mixer, and a mic boom. A one-person shoot was basically impossible, you needed a camera man and an audio/VTR operator, and you'd be running through a scrum with a bunch of cables attaching the cameraman to the VTR guy and then to the reporter. No wireless microphone, no VTR conveniently built into the back of the camera, no cute and tiny little Beta cassettes.
Fast forward to a camcorder: That's what the Amiga was like to broadcasters.
But that was for one little niche market. Offices in general? The Amiga lacked the software library, but it was pretty competent - I remember file compatibility with PC users wasn't an issue, as we had WordPerfect and Microsoft Multiplan and all that other stuff - hell, by virtue of the graphics capability, WYSIWYG word processing was restricted to Mac and Amiga until about 1990. I could read/write PC 3.5" diskettes, and I think I could read/write Mac disks. Never mind that with 1985 software and hardware, I could have WordPerfect and Multiplan open side by side, a huge 500k file being downloaded from a BBS at a whopping 1200 baud in the background, and cut and paste between them. Workbench 1.x was all point-and-click (in many respects blowing Windows out of the water for a full decade until Windows 95 came out), though there was powerful scripting provided. Workbench 2.x and 3.x were cleaner, slicker, more powerful. Reliability was still more than I've ever experienced on any DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 combination, about the same as Windows 95A, but not quite as crash-proof as Windows 95B.
I think that by 1985, the PC was pretty well entrenched, clones were already out, and "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Besides, "who needs graphics for an office computer anyway?". Amiga offered far more bang for the buck, but I think purchasers were also skittish about the recent end of the Beta-vs-VHS wars, and IBM was already a known quantity.
But it was when Commodore got distracted by PC clones - I remember their very unremarkable offerings - that things really went downhill.
OMG, those things were mundane. They made Packard Bells look exciting.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The Amiga first mass market computer
1. with multi-tasking.
I'm an Amiga fan, but gotta disagree. Lisa, 1983. Macintosh, 1984.
2. with stereo sound.
Yup.
3. that supported sampled sound.
1979 TI-99/4 with optional Speech Synthesizer (1981)... though TI didn't release codec information until sometime about 1985, so it was only in-house samples.
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.
1981 TI-99/4A with fully autonomous sprite graphics implemented in the TMS9918A VDP, same as Coleco Adam (1982) and MSX (1982) machines using the same Texas Instruments VDP chip. Advanced TI programmers even sometimes offloaded 2D vector calculations to the VDP chip using tricks like invisible sprites and the VDP's built-in hardware collision detection.
5. The ability to sync the computers video with an external video source
1982 or so MSX computers using the TMS9918A VDP; TI-99/4 (1979) and Coleco Adam could have, had either bothered to spring for an extra connector and about three more parts on the board.
Amiga was notable for taking all of these ideas, running with them, and packaging them into a single machine. The custom chipset worked together to massively offload CPU responsibilities. The graphics were astounding and unrivaled until Super VGA, although early SVGA could have never had the CPU-VDP bandwidth. The genlocking, implemented through a simple peripheral, allowed incredible versatility in media production. Every feature of the machine is now considered essential to even the cheapest stripped-out office PC.
And some which are just wacky (two resolutions on screen at the same time) would be very handy. A paw print on the inside of the case. The heartbeat tic-tic-tic of the diskette drive as Workbench checks to see if it needs to automount a diskette. A keyboard garage. Tying with the TI-99/4A as having the biggest damned DIP integrated circuit known to mankind sitting on the motherboard.
Just about every innovation in personal computers was first seen on the Mac or the Amiga.
Or, first seen in a practical and useful form on the Mac or Amiga.
The PC didn't catch up the to the 1985 Commodore Amiga until around 1995 with the release of Windows 95.
Amen. Windows 95 caught up with the Amiga, Windows NT4 was the first with meaningful improvements (system stability) over everything Amiga owners had a decade to enjoy. Well, except NT4 lacked plug-and-play hardware detection (TI-99/4, 1979; Macintosh, 1984; Amiga, 1985).
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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.
Heheh... and then when they were watching the news, they were watching an Amiga again. I can't tell you how many TV stations used them as character generators for local newscasts until well into the late 1990s. The swooping opening graphics? Amiga with Video Toaster. The name superimposed over the videotape of the local politician? Amiga running Broadcast Titler.
I think it was about 1997 that I last saw one crash on the air. Local news in Toronto, Amiga crashed on the air: "Guru Meditation Error" and a core dump superimposed over a weatherman (who was, in turn, superimposed by chroma key over a map). It was only on the screen for about two seconds before the switcher realized the CG (character generator, aka. Amiga 2000 with Broadcast Titler and a genlock) had crashed and hit the fader to pull what was supposed to be the weatherman's name off the screen, but it gave me such a warm fuzzy.
I remember one director, 'round about 1992, who had a rule that the CG operator was always to have a diskette in the Amiga's drive no matter what. The Amiga was mounted in a small rack beside the switcher, and the director used to sit behind the switcher, almost in a direct line-of-site with the Amiga's drive. And as anyone who knows directors will attest, they're prone to peculiar obsessions. And as anyone who knows Amigas will attest, they tic when there's no diskette in the drive. The director couldn't tolerate this tic-tic-tic - how he was aware of it over the clicks and clacks of VTRs and the sounds of the audio guy recueing carts is beyond me. In a really cruel twist of fate, the station got some promotional pens, and there were thousands of them around the offices... and these particular retractable ballpoints made exactly the same noise. The director would go absolutely apeshit anytime someone opened or closed one of these pens in the control room.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"Once you learned all those magic PEEK and POKE numbers you could play God"
:)
hehe remember using a paperclip to "reset" the C64, 'n couple of peeks and pokes later you had unlimited lives
...along with my COMPUNET modem & other games & stuff. Twas indeed an awesome computer. Many a night was spent lost in some dungeon playing THE HOBBIT text adventure game. Love it.
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Lisa and Macintosh didn't have preemptive multitasking. MacOS didn't have preemptive multitasking until OS X. AmigaOS was the first personal computer operating system to have preemptive multitasking. As for GUI systems, before Lisa, there were a number of projects developed at the Xerox research center at Palo Alto. The first (largely text-based) GUI system with mouse was developed in the early 1960ies (!!) (Google for it, there are some interesting videos; however, I can't recall the name of the project right now.) The Atari ST was the first GUI system that was available to the masses, followed by the Amiga 1000. Macintoshs were more than twice as expensive, and unaffordable to average households! Later it was claimed that the Amiga GUI was a Mac rip-off, but that's not true: The Amiga team started out in 1979, which was the year when the XC68000 processor came to market. And the Atari ST was a project started by Jack Tramiel to quickly bring an Amiga-like computer to the market before Commodore did. I recall that in 1983 and 1984, there were already rumors about a super-PC coming to market, made by Commodore, although the rumors were highly exaggerated. A friend in school told me about this, and said it would have 8-channel sound, millions of colors, etc. ;-) -- so the Amiga wasn't a surprise to me when it finally came.
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.
TheTiminator
Ppl interested in this topic should also consider getting "The Deathbed Vigil" DVD from Dave Haynie.
Our computers nowadays are hardly the dump, deaf and blind PCs of the 80s. A modern GPU can render millions of polygons in absurd resolutions, our sound cards have 128 channels of hardware sound, we have thousands of GBs of storage, modern games are like virtual realities...The Amiga was a good computer, but it is dead.
Well according to wikipedia and the book, the two aren't related at all, the 6501 (predecessor to the 6502) was pin compatible with the 6800, but used a different instruction set, etc. Since MOS Technology got sued for using the same pin layout the 6502 is the (almost) the same as a 6501 but it wasn't pin compatible to avoid another lawsuit from Motorola.
-oohal
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...
OTOH, a mere mortal could quickly memorise the entire 6502 instruction set. Also, the real "registers" on the 6502 were the bottom 256 bytes of RAM, which had optimised access (with 1 byte addresses) and were the basis of most indirect addressing modes.
Actually - the 6502 vs Z80/8080 wars were an awful lot like the later RISC vs CISC argument: the Z80/8080s had programmer friendly instruction sets with looping, multiplication etc; the 6502 had a tiny instruction set and dit twice as much work per clock cycle. ISTR that the 6502 smoked the Z80 in anything that didn't involve floating point.
PS: The ARM was originally designed by 6502 uberhackers at Acorn for use in the successor to the BBC Micro. You can see why 6502 lovers would go for a RISC design...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Check for yourself:
http://mark0.net/var/154I.jpg
http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/1541.JPG
Bye!
SeqBox
Tripos... Some aspects of Tripos were good. The big problem was mostly BCPL, and how it interacted with the rest of the system. Two generations before C, it had some problematic issues, like the global vector. "global vector" was a kindof-replacement for libraries, or if you prefer a equivalent to the standard C library, but as a shared lib. Pointers not being native pointers (pointer to an integer was a machine pointer shifted-right two) was a real thorn too.
BCPL on a 68000 had real issues, in that they set the stack up "upside-down" by normal 68000 standards. This caused all sorts of problems integrating it with system libraries, and for user code trying to call it (dos.library calls all had to go through a translation layer). It also had real issues with strings, due to not liking pointers to bytes much. If Tripos hadn't been in BCPL, it would have not been a huge issue.
More documentation wouldn't have solved these problems really (and even Commodore had essentially NO documentation other than the mostly uncommented code). I had fought these as a developer trying to write a replacement shell before joining Commodore. And in reality it was still Tripos, just ported to C and with a big "translation" layer in ASM so that existing BCPL code could run (i.e. BCPL now went through translation functions, and C/ASM/etc went direct). Plus a bunch of additional interfaces for things like replacing the shell, etc. Look at the docs on the dos.library interface differences between 1.3 and 2.0 for an example.
The ramdisk, for example, was dramatically easier to work on and extend (and speed up) after I rewrote it. The ramdisk got quite fast. FFS already existed in ASM (and also handled OFS), and in reality didn't lose any real-world safety (disks already had per-block checksums, adding another layer of them to the FS just slows things down (hugely)). Many calls it didn't matter for, but for some the speedup was dramatic. But most of the speedups were from redesign of bigger, complex pieces. The biggest BCPL->C/ASM speedups were in really simple calls that didn't do a lot, but in BCPL invoked some heavy translation layers.
MEMF_PUBLIC - of little use unless something was checking that from the start. And it would only have allowed protection, not per-process address spaces. VM would have been useful; people did work on trying to implement VM without per-process address spaces or inter-process protection. It kinda-sorta worked, but not really. If you wanted VM and process protection in an exec-like message-passing microkernel, QNX was a lot closer to what you'd have designed (it was later, too).
As for the need for VM - I did all my development on Amigas; when I finally had a machine with 16MB of ram (which wasn't until a while after I had an A3000T), I can't remember getting below 4MB free, and rarely below 8MB free (until I started running an early version of NCSA Mosaic to browse the web in '93-94). That's not to say people couldn't have used it, but it wasn't as critical as it is today, when my WinXP machine is using 600MB (out of 1GB), and 275MB of that is a browser (which a huge number of tabs open, and which has been running for a month), and my Linux box is using around 1GB of 1.5GB (again, a big browser running for weeks and X are the hogs). Note, however, that neither machine is paging, and things slow down a lot when you do. But it is useful at times, and the #1 use of paging:
When an Amiga ran out of memory, it remained almost totally stable, because we (and many of our developers) were pedantic about checking returns and handling error paths, and we had LOTS of tools to make it easy to stress-test programs and the OS for this. An awfully high percentage of programs now simply call exit() if they run out of memory... assuming they notice at all.Pff! What do they teach kids in school these days, eh? It's a frustum of a cone, aka a conical frustum, or just a frustum.
No idea what they teach these days... I'm 20 years out of high school, so any geometric omissions should be attributed not to lack of education, but to insufficient jellyware data storage.
(I wish I had known/remembered term, though, because it would have fit the joke perfectly! "... wax-lined cardboard inverted conical frustum of water, carbon dioxide...")
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Remember Giana Sisters, Commando and Bubble Bobble? They're all playable on http://c64s.com/toplist/
I waste a couple of working hours each week on playing those classics!
As others have pointed out, the 6502 definitely was not the best processor of its day. However, given its dominance in the home computer market at the time, for an entire generation of future IT people, 6502 "machine language" was their first exposure to low-level programming. I was certainly one of them: I taught myself 6502 assembly language at the age of 14 on my C64.
As processors go, the 6502 was certainly an "economy model": with only three registers and a very limited set of instructions and addressing modes, it has been called the first RISC processor. In fact, the 6502 had no instructions for division or multiplication - you had to code them yourself using bit shifts. As an undergrad, I remember that assembly programming for processors with larger instruction sets (such as the elegant 68000 series or even the quirky 80x86) felt downright luxurious compared to the 6502 (Division and multiplication instructions? What a concept!).
Despite its shortcomings, I have fond memories of the 6502 - definitely the "little CPU that could".
The first macs where NOT MULTI TASKING. :) Well at least not in 1985.
:)
They had desk accessories which where sort of like the TSRs of DOS.
After the Amiga came out Apple came out with switcher which would suspend one task and let you switch to another. Only later did the Mac get cooperative multitasking and finally with OS/X true preemptive multitasking.
No mac could download play a game and have the bong ball going and download a file at the same time
The Lisa doesn't count as a mass market computer with a price tag of 10k. Yes that is what they cost brand new.
You could add sampled sound to just about any computer. The Amiga came with it stock.
The thing is the Amiga had it all and at a price people could afford. It was the ground breaking computer.
I remember once I was at a computer users group meeting and some guy with a pc tried to tell me he had no use for multi tasking.
I asked him to format a floppy for me on he super expensive 386. I then asked if he could look up an address for me
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They locked out 3rd party developers. You had to go through TI to sell your software unless it was in Basic or you required them the have a PCard or Assem Cart.
That was the really killer. No software.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There's quite a few Charlie Chaplin adverts:
Introduction
Tall desk chair made from office documents
New home computer
Even a postcard.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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*
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Whilst it did have a minimal instruction set, it didn't have other features associated with RISC. Its RISCyness seems to have been more omission than streamlining.
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.
In those days, I worked at the local K-Mart. At one point, possibly after the TI machine was discontinued, we had a sale on them - they would cost $95. On top of that, there was a $100 rebate.
We only had about a dozen of the machines iin stock, and when they opened the doors that Sunday morning, it was a mob scene as people sprinted to the back of the store to be essentially paid $5 for a free computer.
It's a measure of my computer bigotry at the time that I didn't pick one up for mself. I kick myself now.
As the CPU, and the 6502 in the 1581 (disk drive).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6510
C64 forever!
Hmm, is there any truly comphehensive guide about the capabilities of the sound chip (Pokey) online? I got sufficiently curious to do a bit of googling about it, but didn't really find any really comphehensive feature / register descriptions or such. I did find comments about some interesting tricks, such as possibility of combining channels to produce more than 8 bits of resolution, though. (Filtering capabilities seem to have been restricted to high-pass filtering though, whereas SID filtering provided low/band/high-pass filtering options, or combinations of them.)
:)
The pre-ST Atari machines were fairly rare around where I live, so I didn't ever really see or hear them in action. Perhaps I should give the SAP player a try and check out some Atari tunes; if somebody has cared enough to build an archive of them, they can't be truly bad
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
The used the pins for the extra memory in 1200XL
They where used for bank switching. Not a good plan if you asked me.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
> If Commodore owned KFC they would have marketed it as "a greasy warm dead bird in a cardboard bucket".
I used to believe this. But having been close to the action for the final few years, then later involved with Commodore spin-off companies, and finally learning more history through Bagnall's book, I have a new conclusion. Companies succeed, I mean REALLY succeed, because of a few brilliant key people working at the peek of their game. Of course with Apple, it's Steve Jobs. But Commodore had three: Jack Tramiel, Chuck Peddle and Jay Miner. Any one of them could have driven Commodore to phenomenal success, but once Jack, Chuck and Jay were out of the picture, there was no chance. No brilliant amount of marketing could have reversed the spiraling decline characterized by thousands of mediocre people collaboratively piloting a rudderless ship.
The best concept from Bagnalls book I thought was that while Woz built the original Apple from standard off-the-shelf parts, Chuck Peddle and his team built theirs from sand.
Honestly, I only remember it because I thought what an odd word when I first read it.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Ah..That famous tic tic :-). The thing I really miss too when I switched to PCs was the quality of the Amiga mouse...So smooth.
Amiga had the best engineers and the worst management.
If you look carefully, you'll notice he didn't explain the joke. He only pointed out that it *is* a joke, so he's not seen as totally non sequitur.
OMG, I forgot about that too! What was WRONG with those people??!!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Not to bash MS but they wrote it. I think it sucked too. In the day I converted my PET programs to the C64 then some to the Amiga. Kingdom was cool as was Stock Broker. Man! The hours I wasted on Stock Broker and burning my friends in stock deals. ;)
Oh, and Rat Run. That was another great time waster. IIRC it was a bit rough on the PET to C64 conversion due to lining up the walls. Not sure if I did an Amiga version. I think so but that was soooo long ago.
It was a tough conversion to the Amiga due to it being label based instead of line based. The Pet to C64 was easy. Just remove a line or two from the beginning.
But it was fun in those days.
qz
Probably the most innovative thing in the C64 world was you could turn off major parts, or all, of the OS and use the underlying RAM if you needed it. You are doing assembly only? Turn off the BASIC and use the underlying memory. Writing a game? Turn off the entire OS and with your own boot loader you had access to all 64k.
I used to poke a few locations and watch the memory bits change.
Very cool.
qz
Not to bash MS but they wrote it. I think it sucked too.
Possibly the basic itself wasn't too bad... it was just that there weren't built-in BASIC commands for the graphics or music. (And it was maybe better than the Atari BASIC that used the syntax that other languages used for arrays for basic String manipulation.)
It was a tough conversion to the Amiga due to it being label based instead of line based. The Pet to C64 was easy. Just remove a line or two from the beginning.
Depending on the BASIC implementation, it can be trivial to go from line based to label based: just treat every line number as a label.
But I remember the first time I saw a program listing without line numbers, I think it was for a type-in "Star Trek" game for Amiga...what an eye-opener, I was just scratching my head, wondering "HOw can it work without line numbers?"
Dijkstra not withstanding, I think I got over my early exposure to BASIC, and can now do Java and Perl pretty damn well.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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.
Libertas in infinitum
Dear Mr. Randall, as being a direct witness your testimony is precious.
Contact the author and tell him your story.
If he want, then it could be included in a second edition of the book... Why not?
And for a matter of information... What was your job at Commodore?
Do you still like Amiga, what it was, and what its represnts (ease of using a computer, and the fact it was (is) the user as being THE MASTER, and not the OS being the master... as it happens nowadays in Windows)?
For example you could still be useful in projects like AROS, the Open Source Amiga OS for X86 machines (and PPC and PAlmoS, etc):
http://www.aros.org/
Ciao,
Raffaele