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Loading ...Behind the geekery: Canadian celebrates Commodore anniversary
Yesterday in New York a group of IT veterans applauded dead technology with a party for the 25-year-old Commodore 64, a machine that most of us happily traded in for a better-performing IBM PC. ITAC, however, issued a press release on behalf of its member company Liquid Computing that points out a member of its board, Adam Choweniac, was involved in the Commodore’s development when he worked at Bell Northern Research in 1983. What this has to do with Liquid Computing is anyone’s guess, except that maybe it wants to be as successful as Commodore – a company whose product was eclipsed by all competitors, became cost-ineffective to manufacture and led to bankruptcy 12 years ago. Happy birthday!
December 12th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
You need to check your history. Commodore tried to discontinue the C-64 in *1984*, a year that the machine sold 2.5 million units. The thing just kept on selling, up until the company went out of business. It’s stupid to discontinue a product while it’s still selling, as long as you’re able to make at least a modest profit from it.
The 64 had nothing to do with Commodore going under. An entire book has been written about what really went wrong with the company (On the Edge, by Brian Bagnall), but primarily it comes down to not knowing how to properly market the Amiga, and then running out of money, money which was desperately needed to facilitate further R&D. But the corporate suits still managed to find money to spend lavishly while this was going on.
The 64 had its problems–primarily its really slow disk drive–but its graphics and sound capabilities were far ahead of anything a PC could do until about 1989 or so, and it was simple enough that anyone with curiosity could know everything that was going on inside and could really learn how a computer worked. That’s why people still care about it 25 years later, and nobody gives a rip about 8088-based PC clones.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:52 am
Enough with the snark. The C64 is still loved. The IBM PC sucked through the 1980s compared to the C64 for home use.
January 16th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I agree with the previous poster–the IBM PC and its successor the XT were pathetic. Only when the 286 came out did the PC even begin to match the potential of the C64.
The worst decision I ever made was selling my C64. I wish I had kept it as a keepsake. I still have a collection of its software somewhere around.
And BTW, there was a project recently (within the last couple years) where a young geek-girl from Europe replicated the C64 onto an FPGA (one chip). And I believe you can even buy a game-like device that has all the old C64 games loaded into a unit the size of a joystick that you can hook up to your TV (nice nostalgic way to play the games from the good old days before Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation, etc). The C64 still lives and breathes!