Commodore: A Company on the Edge 2nd Edition

by Brian Bagnall (Author)

70 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0973864960

ISBN-10: 0973864966

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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.

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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.

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Product details

Series: Commodore
Hardcover: 548 pages
Publisher: Variant Press; 2nd edition (December 15, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0973864966
ISBN-13: 978-0973864960
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,173,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #377 in Books > Computers & Technology > History & Culture > History
- #2486 in Books > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Profiles
- #14106 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science

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4.3 out of 5 stars

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Top Customer Reviews

Disappointing Telling of a Great Story.

ByNicholas R. Lefevreon May 1, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

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.

44 comments 22 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Very long book covering only the first half of Commodore's activites

ByNémeth Ákoson May 4, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The book is very long but covering only the first half of Commodore's activities (1974-1984). I expected to have some explanation at the end on why the bankruptcy was filed, but that is not covered in the book. I expected more technical details (e.g. why MOS Technology was not able to produce reliable RAM, why some prototypes was hard to build, or even failed). There are also some good stories in the book, but also a lot of not really interesting information the reader has to dig trough to get the key points. Also the number of images are quite low, only a few computer prototypes have photos, so at the end, the reader has to collect information on the internet about the computers built by commodore, the games the book mentions.

0Comment 5 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

The warm glow of a fire does come with some irritating smoke

ByAmazon Customeron April 6, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

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.