Commodore: A Company on the Edge 2nd Edition

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of detail from the perspectives of relatively few players (some admittedly central to the Commodore story) but most no longer active at Commodore during the VIC20/C64 years, the years of greatest interest to the audience for a book on pre-Amiga Commodore.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.

I've given it 4 Stars as a Commodore 64 fan boy, but if I wasn't I might have given 3. My kindle version of the book around page 76 inexplicably has the same paragraph repeated 6 times in a row which being in an e-book is so easy to have corrected as to be inexcusable. It definitely has an engineering lean to it and tells very little from the marketing point of view and I concur with other reviews that it talks about Chuck Peddle a lot. That doesn't make it less interesting for me but did give me the impression the book had a lean to one side. It also seems to recurse on itself quite a bit, explaining something in one paragraph then soon after revisiting the subject perhaps in different words but basically saying the same thing. At 547 pages I feel that the amount of recursion made it unnecessarily long. In some instances things that people probably wouldn't know about are mentioned without explanation of what they were of their merits (I had to look up N-Channel and P-Channel). The pace is a bit mixed, slow to build up then suddenly over and because it didn't end with he end of Commodore, didn't have a denouement (resolution). The above things bothered me but the general irritation didn't ruin it for me either. The language style is quite easy and conversational, so it wasn't difficult to read and I didn't have to get distracted by florid or overly technical language (If you ever read Wuthering Heights where some dialogue is phonetically spelled from and the Gardener's uneducated and yokel perspective and syntax you'd appreciate that) . It gives a few insights as to how Wild West and hurried and how slapped together the VIC-20 and C64 (ass well as the other machines) were. I always thought for its time it was a feat of technical brilliance, now I look at the one I own knowing how half baked some of the features were. It didn't kill my enthusiasm for my C64 but I did feel the same as I did when I found out that our 15 year old cat was a boy when we all thought previously it was a girl. So in that respect challenging my preconceptions was good. I found reading it I really couldn't put it down and consumed it over the course of a few short days. Having waded through everything about calculators and early machines it would have been nice to ride it out through the Amiga, the crash and the deathbed vigil as well as more insight into Irving Gould and the apparent Star Chamber of the board but all in all I enjoyed it, learned a bit that isn't normally covered in the usual internet histories. At around $10 for the e-book I found it pretty good value and would encourage more than discourage you to give it a chance and a read. I think if you found your way to this book and took time to read the reviews then you ARE interested enough to get value out of it. I can connect with some of the bad reviews but I definitely think there is a baby in this bathwater.