The Rise and Fall of Commodore 340
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.
Re:I miss Commodore. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've still got one... sold the other for $15k in 1999.
Hidden ROM message? (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll learn how millions of dollars worth of Amigas were scrapped because of a cheeky message placed in the ROM by a disgruntled employee.
Some Googling brought me back to Slashdot, and a previous story involving the Amiga [slashdot.org]:
Re:Why not buy from the author? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a good read (Score:3, Interesting)
Of the Amiga (Score:4, Interesting)
*sniff* I miss Amigas.
Remember the calculators? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Great story of executive excess (Score:4, Interesting)
I still have mine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ahhh, those were the days... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, I miss those Commodore 64 days, too. I once sat up until 5am trying to block-send an entire disk to a buddy of mine at 300 baud. The very last block failed. Freakin' DRM was alive back then, too.
Re:Ahhh, those were the days... (Score:3, Interesting)
All that hardware - computers, monitors, lots and lots of probably-broken floppy drives - is in the closet of our computer room.
Commmodore's Legacy is LINUX (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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."
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AMIGA FOREVER (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Hidden ROM message? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Amiga - A Great Computer"
When you ejected the disk, the message read:
"Until Commodore Fucked it up."
The A500 thru 3000 had the same message, but the second line, visible after pressing eject, was changed to
"Still A great Computer"
The really cool thing is that this message still works in UAE -- the Universal Amiga Emulator -- Just depends on what ROMs you choose to run.
Re:Ahhh, those were the days... (Score:1, Interesting)
I also reminisce to the various hacking tools on the C64. One of my favorites was a cartridge based tool that would snapshot the system memory and rewrite the software loader, bypassing any copy protection used in the loader. Unfortunately the output wasn't always very fast to load but fortunately the FastLoad cartridge helped overcome that.
Long live sprites, peak/poke, and the cassette storage.
Jim
Re:Why not buy from the author? (Score:2, Interesting)
We have lost something though. The C64 and similar PCs had a few attributes few computers have had since. The most painful loss was all those young minds who will never be influenced to learn BASIC and take up programming. (This BTW is also what origionally got Linus into programming. His Grandfather encouraged him to learn BASIC so he would have an intrest in math. After his grandfather died, Linus kept the Commodore VIC and continued learning to code, though he obviously began to learn more programming languages. Eventually he got tired of the VIC, bought a Timex, and then later down the line an IBM clone. He learned to use Minix on the IBM clone and wanted to improve uppon its terminal emulator. After he did that, he wanted to work on fixing drivers. Gradually, he worked on a kernel and used GNU software to fill in until he had an OS. Then one day, he accedentally told the PC to access his hard disk instead of his modem, and destroyed the Minix partition. He decided to just stick with his Linux instead of reinstalling Minix and to create any features he needed as he went along. He posted Linux online and thus Linux was born.). The C64 booted into BASIC and it's manual showed you how to program. How many PCs today come with a manual telling you how to program them? Hell, most PC manuals these days don't even tell you how to use command prompt in their manual. Todays PC vendors sell PCs like kitchenware vendors sell toasters. They tell you what your PC can do, and thats that. They seem to think all people should do is use their PC to read e-mail, browse the web, write documents, and look at pictures. There is more to a PC than this. The closest thing kids like me (I am 17) have these days is a TI calculator. The TI-83 and TI-84 are of widespread use but students only learn a few things in their form of BASIC, and schools no longer have the "try it in BASIC" exercises. The C64 on the other hand was like "the glory of this is it is not a toaster, it has no predetermined task, your C64 is what you want it to be.". The other thing I miss is the lightweight, easy to store, easy to carry, design of the C64. I realize we have laptops, but to get one that has hardware that is by today's standards "powerful" is expensive. Gamers and the like want desktops. The C64 was a small desktop. All you did was plug into a TV and go. Imagine a modern computer with that mentality. All the PC would be is a keyboard, and you plug into a TV and power up. Think of how easy that would be at a LAN party. If you think about it, the commodore 64 spured the home/office computer revolution. I miss it. I might go on eBay and buy one someday.
Re:How CBM lost me (Score:3, Interesting)
I gladly accept the design flaws in AmigaOS 2.x and 3.x, or even 4.x if it provides me with the flexibility that I need. Perhaps I might even check out MorphOS, or any other of these efforts. Recently, I ran AROS off a live CD on my present main computer, which is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 machine with 2 GB of RAM. Even Amiga Emulators like UAE still provide some advantages over their host OS. And that is something, that only AmigaOS can do.
Amiga Inc. is currently working on AmigaOS 5 (AmigaOS 4 was implemented by Hyperion Entertainment), and AmigaOS 5 will be multiplatform. I don't know how they'll solve the kernel issue, perhaps they'll take a Linux or BSD kernel, or write their own; or run it on top of the other systems, who knows. All I care about is, that *I* as a user, or developer, do not have to care about timing issues. If it works, I'll be all over it.
I almost purchased an AmigaONE with AmigaOS 4, but unfortunately I was unemployed at the time and could not afford it. As it happened, a couple of months later, Eyetech (UK) stopped manufacturing the AmigaONE mainboards, and Hyperion halted development of AmigaOS 4 until a new hardware manufacturer has been found. However, that AmigaONE solution was very expensive; I hope they'll manage to reduce prices. I'm also unsure about the performance implications of AmigaOS 4. I hope it'll be as smooth as the old OSes. And if that shouldn't work out, perhaps AmigaOS 5 will be the cure, who knows.
And other projects like AROS and MorphOS look also promising.
To me, the loss of Amiga stifled my creativity. The Amiga was intended as a computer for creative people, and that's what it was. With its loss, an important tool went out the window.
The current operating systems, like Linux and Windows, can only partially compensate for that. And developers for these platforms have not the slightest clue about what creative people need. C*base for making music? Thanks, but no thanks.
Re:It's the music! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's the music! (Score:1, Interesting)
And this one for the Vic 20: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lql-otlQfNo [youtube.com]
Re:Hidden ROM message? (Score:2, Interesting)
The critique of the OS is unfair. When the Los Gatos guys put it together, it was beyond impressive, irrespective of the Tripos mess. What little C= did with it in the years following was never due to a lack of desire, intelligence, or planning by the technical staff.
C= engineering was beyond "small". The productivity of everyone behind the security doors (and in CATS, and among the QA team, and so on) was among the highest I've ever seen in my years - anywhere. (I've worked at startups that had microscopic charters in comparison, but at least as much staff.) C= engineering pay was petty in comparison to the rest of the industry, resulting in staffers often working at C= far more for idealism than for the paycheck (especially George; I still recall when they found out he hadn't cashed something like 14 months worth and George had just been shoving them in one of his several cubes).
For those other fellow ex-C= employees: You all set a bar in my career that has yet to be met. I thoroughly enjoyed working with all of you.
Re:Remember the calculators? (Score:1, Interesting)
I made a pong game using the C64 basic which utilized peek and poke to read the "ball" position and determine if the player had there paddle in the path.
Another project I did with the C64 was an electronic dart board. It consisted of cut sheets of aluminum foil separated by wax paper placed over a bullseye dart board. I used the wires from the inside of an old Atari 2600 joystick (compatible with the C64) and a bread board with diodes (needed to get all of the separate joystick movements with as few wires as possible) and capacitors (debouncing) to attach to the different foil and wax paper concentric circles in the bulls-eye pattern. When the dart was thrown into the dart board, it electrically shorted the two pieces of foil separated by the wax paper and corresponded to a specific equivalent joystick movement which my software recorded with a score. I then made a program to track the darts thrown and scores for different players. I even saved a persons stats to the 5.25 drive for cumulative totals.
Of course, it took me about three days to get it working haldf decent and my friends and I only used it for a few hours but it was cool to build. I had variations on the same thing using micro switches and pressing the button manually instead of the foil pattern on the board as well. I also had the composite A/V jacks (via the C64 5 pin din jack) of the C64 plugged into a VCR which was then tied into our home cable via a notch filter and a signal combiner. Any TV in the house tuned to channel 4 could watch what the VCR was playing which was either tapes or the C64 (our cable channel 4 was an text based informational channel which was useless anyway so notching it out was not a problem).
I was only 13 or 14 (~1984) at the time and my parents owned an electronics repair business so I had easy access to all kinds of stuff to play with. None of my friends were into electronics or computers though so my interests gravitated away from experimenting as well.
Why Commodore failed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wait! Wait! I know this one! (Score:3, Interesting)
AGA GFX chips were made under contract by HP (the Commodore ex-Mostek fab couldn't handle better than 2 micron). This required forecasting so they'd reserve fab time for us.
Some of us pushed hard for dropping all the non-AGA models and selling the A1200, A2400 (aka A4000), and A3000+ for Christmas.
In summer of '93, when told that (because he'd been unwilling to commit to production of enough AGA chipsets earlier) that Commodore could only make something like ~50K A1200's for Christmas, he basically said "well, we're going to sell our normal 300K units for Christmas, so make as many A1200's as we have chips for, and make the rest A600's". (Seriously paraphrased, with 13 years of mental bitrot, and I'm sure the numbers are off.)
Needless to say, 90% (or whatever) of the now-obsolete A600's didn't sell... And that ate up the rest of Commodore's capital in unsold inventory. The rest was a foregone conclusion.
Re:The failure of the Amiga comes down to one thin (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Marketing, Amiga in Television Broadcasting (Score:3, Interesting)
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.