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Commodore: A Company on the Edge, by Brian Bagnall
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Filled with first-hand accounts of ambition, greed, and inspired engineering, this history of the personal computer revolution takes readers inside the cutthroat world of Commodore. Before Apple, IBM, or Dell, Commodore was the first computer manufacturer to market its machines to the public, selling an estimated 22 million Commodore 64s. Those halcyon days were tumultuous, however, owing to the expectations and unsparing tactics of founder Jack Tramiel. Engineers and managers with the company between 1976 and 1994 share their memories of the groundbreaking moments, soaring business highs, and stunning employee turnover that came with being on top in the early days of the microcomputer industry. This updated second edition includes additional interviews and first-hand material from major Commodore figures like marketing guru Kit Spencer, chip designer Bill Mensch, and Commodore co-founder Manfred Kapp.
- Sales Rank: #285334 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-02-01
- Released on: 2012-02-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
About the Author
Brian Bagnall is the author of numerous computer titles, including Core LEGO Mindstorms, On the Edge, and Maximum LEGO NXT. He is also a frequent contributor to Old-Computers.com, an online museum dedicated to recording and preserving computer history. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing Telling of a Great Story.
By Nicholas R. Lefevre
In the interest of full disclosure I write this review as an insider at Commodore from just after the launch of the C64 through the purchase of Amiga, after which I rejoined Jack Tramiel ("Jack") and other Commodore veterans at Atari Corp. Needless to say I bought this book with great anticipation. It is a disappointment.
The book should have been titled "A Biography of Chuck Peddle and Stuff" but I suspect that would not have sold well. Commodore was Jack. Further, for American audiences Commodore was the C64 and, to a lesser extent, the VIC20. Despite this fact, the vast majority of the book's focus is on Chuck Peddle and the PET. Even though the second edition of this book was published in 2010 and Jack did not die until 2012, the author appears to have never interviewed him.
The core problem appears to have been that Bagnall actually interviewed only a handful or two of the players. Thus we get huge amounts of detail from the perspectives of relatively few players (some admittedly central to the Commodore story) but most no longer active at Commodore during the VIC20/C64 years, the years of greatest interest to the audience for a book on pre-Amiga Commodore.
Examples of the scattershot approach of failing to interview more broadly are legion but I will give an illustrative example. Bagnell clearly interviewed the engineer, Bill Herd, extensively and dedicates pages to him. However, Bill joined Commodore in 1983, well after the VIC20 and C64. His work was on projects that barely saw the light of day (how many had a Plus/4?) and that were supplanted by the real Commodore successor to the C64, the Amiga. It was designed by the engineers at Amiga. At the same time, the author never even interviewed Shiraz Shivji, who, with his team, was the first to propose to Jack that Commodore make a personal computer and who headed the systems engineering team for the C64.
In it's favor is a wealth of detail on the engineering history and certain of the players, particularly for the PET years.
The saddest part is that the book fails to bring Commodore to life. Here was a company defined by a bigger-than-life Jack Tramiel and surrounded by a fascinating cast of characters yet the book fails to convey the color and feel of being a part of it. So many hilarious and fascinating anecdotes are left out that could have given a sense of the place.
A far better telling of the crucial period at Commodore can be found in Mike Tomcyzk's "The Home Computer Wars" which, though perhaps too narrow, properly focuses the attention on Jack Tramiel and is filled with revealing anecdotes. The truly great history of Commodore remains to be written.
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
A terrific read: educational, fascinating and frequently hilarious
By GoonMoon
Let me state plainly up front that I was a Commodore Kid: a happy owner of both a 64 and an Amiga. So there is a certain nostalgia kick I might have received while reading this book that other people might not get to the same degree. But I actually don't think it's particularly important to have been familiar with Commodore's products to appreciate this book. The first half of it serves more as a highly illuminating journey into those crazily fast-moving times in the second half of the 1970s, when the industry went from being a few companies selling mail-order, solder-it-yourself boards with a CPU and eight LEDs to a brave new world of self-contained home computers no more than five years later. No industry has ever become so important so quickly, and Chuck Peddle, MOS and Commodore were at the very heart of it.
Peddle is the figure who appears most frequently in the text, and the book at times takes on some of his irritation at the rewriting of history by Apple at the expense of Commodore. The chippiness is amusing at times, but, in truth, it's justified. I was there, even if as a kid, and I remember how hugely important Commodore were in those days. Apple were a relatively minor player with their expensive machines. The Macintosh was the first thing of any real significance they did, building on the Xerox PARC ideas and seeing (correctly) that GUIs were the way forward. But it was Commodore who brought home computing to the masses (along with Sinclair in the UK, a company whose significance I was happy to see this book acknowledge).
This is really terrific stuff if you want to get a good idea of how we got from there to here. Even the very Commodore-centric stuff speaks volumes about the way the commercial landscape was changing constantly in a general sense, and how a project that could seem a good idea when initiated could end up as a dud because the market had moved on in the meantime. There are some mindblowing "What if...?" moments where one can see how a chance moment or a seemingly-random decision can have an enormous knock-on effect when viewed in retrospect. (Particularly fascinating is the story of how VisiCalc became an Apple rather than a PET product by pure chance, and the ghastly moment where Bob Russell realizes that a tiny engineering blunder is going to ruin his disk drive plans and result in loading times 30 times longer than designed, and that nothing can be done about it.)
There are fascinating and enthralling vignettes as well: the story of William Shatner's association with Commodore (and how Commodore computers ended up with cameos in many of his movies), and a truly terrifying tangential recollection of the disastrous airplane flight that nearly killed several of Commodore's top people including founder Jack Tramiel.
There are a few criticisms I could make - in places the book feels like the editing was rushed and could do with a second pass - but it would be churlish to dwell on them. Giving the book five stars is a no-brainer for me, because I enjoyed every minute of it. And it felt really *important* to me that this story was being told. Although author Brian Bagnall must at some level be doing this for financial recompense, I sense that more than anything else this was a real labor of love for him. And it is one that I appreciate greatly: I'd like to say "thank you" for putting all the work in to tell such a rich and interesting story about some genuinely important but undersung heroes of the home computer revolution.
Oh, and I *really* want to read Volume 2 about the Amiga now...
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great Read For Fans of Vintage Computing
By Emmi Kurosawa
Whether you ever owned a Commodore computer or not, this book is must read for any fan of vintage personal computing. The personalities involved and the trials they face are colorful and fascinating and the text itself is well written and engaging to read. I haven't finished it yet, but am really enjoying this alternate perspective on the dawn of the personal computer. A Very in depth look at the birth of the 6502 with frequent walk-ins featuring Gates, Jobs and all the big names from that time. If you lived through those times, this will be a welcome trip down memory lane and will fill in more details that you never even knew you didn't know. If you didn't, sit back and enjoy. Either way, you'll never see those old machines the same way again!
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