QUOTE
Commodore International is close to folding. The Dutch company that owns the brand was declared bankrupt this week, but a spokesman said it will appeal the court order.
The original Commodore International, an American company best known for the legendary Commodore 64 computer in the 1980s, declared bankruptcy in 1994. However, the brand refused to die.[/quote]
Back in 1981 I accepted a redundancy offer from my job in Auckland, and came back to Christchurch to live. I was determined not to get a job until I'd spent my redundancy, so that was a pretty good year. I wasn't as geeky back then as I am now, but I did subscribe to a science magazine -- don't remember which one --and I remember a full-page ad on the back for the Commodore VIC-20. The ad starred Captain Kirk, but I wasn't impressed by that (much). But it did show a computer with a colour display, and I was pretty impressed by that.
There was a guy selling computers in a tiny upstairs shop in town, so I went in a few times to take a look. He sold things like the Sinclair ZX, but I couldn't see the point of most of them -- strange, mushy keyboards and fuzzy text -- but the VIC20 was amazing. I think I paid about $1,200 for it.
These computers were pretty much the equivalent of the Playstation. Well, actually the VIC20 was more like the Xbox -- a US rip-off of a 'foreign' computer beating them to the market, in this case the British Sinclair.
Games were pretty rare in the early days. They came on cassette tape, and I suppose they were very basic, but they were a good excuse to have a get-together, and the games got pretty thrashed day and night.
You really need to get your head around how basic the specs were. This was an 8-bit 1Mhz machine, and today you might have a dual-core 3000 Mhz 32 or 64-bit PC, which is probably capable of about 10,000 times the speed of the VIC. The memory was 3.5Kb. If I save the HTML code for this forum page, I end up with 76Kb, so you would've been able to fit a 20th of this page in memory.
I gave up the VIC20 when I got married -- when my first kid was born, we gave up the TV, and our house was pretty-much no-tech for 10 years. Since then, I've owned the next Commodore, the C64, but the VIC20 was the best thing ever.
I'm actually surprised that Commodore still survived in any form, they made a lot of bad choices. And I'm not a bit sad that they are going under yet again, but it did make me think.
The original Commodore International, an American company best known for the legendary Commodore 64 computer in the 1980s, declared bankruptcy in 1994. However, the brand refused to die.[/quote]
Back in 1981 I accepted a redundancy offer from my job in Auckland, and came back to Christchurch to live. I was determined not to get a job until I'd spent my redundancy, so that was a pretty good year. I wasn't as geeky back then as I am now, but I did subscribe to a science magazine -- don't remember which one --and I remember a full-page ad on the back for the Commodore VIC-20. The ad starred Captain Kirk, but I wasn't impressed by that (much). But it did show a computer with a colour display, and I was pretty impressed by that.
There was a guy selling computers in a tiny upstairs shop in town, so I went in a few times to take a look. He sold things like the Sinclair ZX, but I couldn't see the point of most of them -- strange, mushy keyboards and fuzzy text -- but the VIC20 was amazing. I think I paid about $1,200 for it.
These computers were pretty much the equivalent of the Playstation. Well, actually the VIC20 was more like the Xbox -- a US rip-off of a 'foreign' computer beating them to the market, in this case the British Sinclair.
Games were pretty rare in the early days. They came on cassette tape, and I suppose they were very basic, but they were a good excuse to have a get-together, and the games got pretty thrashed day and night.
You really need to get your head around how basic the specs were. This was an 8-bit 1Mhz machine, and today you might have a dual-core 3000 Mhz 32 or 64-bit PC, which is probably capable of about 10,000 times the speed of the VIC. The memory was 3.5Kb. If I save the HTML code for this forum page, I end up with 76Kb, so you would've been able to fit a 20th of this page in memory.
I gave up the VIC20 when I got married -- when my first kid was born, we gave up the TV, and our house was pretty-much no-tech for 10 years. Since then, I've owned the next Commodore, the C64, but the VIC20 was the best thing ever.
I'm actually surprised that Commodore still survived in any form, they made a lot of bad choices. And I'm not a bit sad that they are going under yet again, but it did make me think.
, but then come the whoopin contest between Commodore and Atari , Dammm brilliant man and with all the 3.5 floppy disks ..... This is so HI-TEC .... B17 Flying fortress was the game ... years went by so satisfied or not arrrr those days of 
Commodores
That combat sim .. the old WW1 sim .. Woooooo so real 
But it was a great machine, and my love of flightsims was born. F15 Strike Eagle 2, Combat Air Patrol (rocked!), Birds of Prey, Gunship etc.
