On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

...fascinating and improbably hilarious...Bagnall keeps the book from becoming circuit porn for Byte! buffs by focusing on characters. -- Philadelphia City Paper, November 17-23, 2005

Review

"[F]ascinating and improbably hilarious."  —J. Edward Keyes, Philadelphia City Paper

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 548 pages
• Publisher: Variant Press; illustrated edition edition (September 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0973864907
• ISBN-13: 978-0973864908
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #58,199 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Untold Story, Told Grandly, February 28, 2006

By	D. Hodgson (Cupertino, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm almost in tears reading this book in all its 561 pages of Commodore-Amiga glory. Now if only there was another one like it covering Radio Shack, all would be well! It's truly stunning the way the paths of Amiga, Apple, Atari, Commodore, IBM, Digital Research, Microsoft, MOS Technology, Motorola and yes, Radio Shack, intertwined in this rich stew of opportunism, arrogance, incompetence and employee stealing. Go ahead, read this one along with Andy Hertzfeld's "Revolution in The Valley" and reflect for a moment on the amount of revisionist mythmaking machinery that has grown up around the House that Cringely Built. Unlike many other books, Bagnall doesn't skimp on the technical details here either - the story of MOS Technology and the 6502 is almost deserving of its own book!

-Dallas Hodgson, Deluxe Paint (AGA series) co-developer

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding!, January 26, 2006

By	Lantana Al (Lantana, TX USA) - See all my reviews

I can't believe how much I enjoyed this book and I don't usually like to read. I grew up on Commodore, had a VIC-20, C64, C128, and a couple of Amigas. It was really hard to put this book down. Great information. It brought back a lot of memories. I forgot about the Commodore 16 and even Amiga 600 and 1200!

Also, read this book to know why the 1541 drive was so slow or why your VIC-20 may have been purposely made defective. And why did they have to stop selling Amigas for months because an engineer put a message in the ROM.

This is also a great business book and would make a good study in a college business class. There's a lot of wisdom in the book when it comes to decisions made right and decisions screwed up. Commodore management could have made some much better decisions, instead there seems to have been a lot of incompetence. They lost a lot of good engineers because of it.

My only criticism is that I wish there were more photos of the people, hardware, and places talked about - especially at the beginning of the book. The end of the book has more photos.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read This Book, NOW!, May 4, 2007

By	David B. Haynie (Monroeville, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Although I was personally involved (and mentioned in the book), even as insider I didn't know the whole story of Commodore. I think Brian did a fantastic job of telling this story, so often left out of the personal computer histories that are, as one might imagine, only told by the winners. It's easy to get the story of Steve Wozniak building the Apple I in a garage, and he did some brilliant things.. but consider, when Chuck Peddle started building a computer, he didn't start with chips, he started with "sand".

Brian's coverage of my era at Commodore (the last 11.5 years) was spot on, and he did a good job of tracking down the people involved. And illustrating that things like this, Engineering, are creative endeavors; as such, the specific people involve matter, and matter big.

While clearly of interest to Commodore and Amiga fans, I think this is essential reading for anyone interested in the whole story of the dawn of the personal computer revolution.

The final few pages get a little poetic; the real end was a rather protracted mess. The "logical" end was essentially when Brian describes it, the layoffs shortly before the "after hours" bankruptcy declaration on April 30, 1994... I made a video about that (Google "Deathbed Vigil", tragically not available through Amazon) which was my attempt to tell the story of why it ended, and maybe who we were in Engineering in those days. 13 years later, I'm glad that's out there, but I think the story of our successes are the ones I'd like to remember... the best reason to look back is to help you look forward with a better eye.