On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore Hardcover – September 14, 2005

With over 6 million units sold (far surpassing even their closest competition), Commodore set the pace for every computer manufacture there after. Even Apple (who claims to be proprietary/independent) has copied Commodore's technology. And when Jobs and Woz tried to get jobs there (unsuccessfully) I guess they figured stealing was as good as creating?
The writer doesn't do the best job of putting things in sequence like you would normally expect but it is still a very interesting read to see how things came to be today. From Tramiel's refusal to support the Commodore 4000 (which was the predecessor for every PC we have today) to the Jobs/Wozniak incident and the closing of the plant in West Chester, PA where most of the development happened, it actually draws you in to see the greatness. When companies like Sinclair and Tandy and others were falling by the wayside, Commodore was actually succeeding and setting the industry standards for almost 10 years (which is a huge amount of time in the computer industry).
Many of the Apple fanboys would have you to believe that Apple outsold Commodore and came up with much of the innovations we have today. Not true at all. Many of Apples components were actually stolen from Commodore and integrated into their machines, back before Apple became "sue" happy like they are today. And the numbers Apple tries to use are not only disputable but laughable since they have no factual resource to be able to pull from.
This is not about Apple bashing so much as it is dispelling some of the myths that are out there. Read the book and you'll see just how much Commodore contributed to where we are, even today! Also read about the lone company that set a record that will NEVER be beaten in sales!

Brian Bagnall has packed incredible detailed information in this book which spans the history of Commodore from the early days of transitioning from calculators to microcomputers to the glory days of the Commodore 64 and all the way into 1994 when the company went bust. It's almost too much for those of us interested in the early, often forgotten days, before the IBM PC.

Commodore, during the Chuck Peddle era, was a force that brought many people into personal computing. Speaking of Peddle, it's clear that the author got extensive interviews with the man who created the 6502 processor AND created the Commodore PET microcomputer. I found the stories about just how they made those early chips, doing a physical layout of the whole thing, to be fascinating. I had a chance to hear a talk by Chuck Peddle in which he told some of the same stories that are in this book, about how loads of the early chips simply did not work. In 1975, a 30% chip yield (the number that actually worked) was considered good. When Peddle was with MOS Technology, he and his attractive wife Shirley presided over a barrel of chips at the Wescon show in San Francisco (actually in a hotel suite, where people were directed from the show). Having a barrel of chips made it look like they could produce them in quantity. The dirty little secret was that only the ones at the top of the barrel actually worked!

The year 1977 was a turning point for personal computing, with three important microcomputers appearing on the market (Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET), giving computer enthusiasts a choice beside building their own from a kit. This book reveals that John Roach from Radio Shack took a look at a prototype PET and Commodore honchos hoped he might buy it, but the legendary Jack Trameil was obsessed with getting a big order for calculators from Roach, and Radio Shack developed their own product, the TRS-80.

For another look at this period, see my book Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution. Tandy Corporation, parent of Radio Shack, introduced the TRS-80 Model I in August of 1977, just after the PET, and the TRS-80 family of microcomputers had a great run, with follow-on Model III and Model 4, but these, like the Commodore products, faded away into computer history. Radio Shack, of course, did not go out of business, but they did stop making computers when it became apparent that the market had changed. Radio Shack was, to some extent, a victim of its "shlock image" (as the cover of InfoWorld once declared). Once the business world saw the power of small computers, there was a stampede to adopt the technology. But they wanted to do business with a serious partner, not with companies whose main customers had been hobbyists and geeks. Commodore, like Tandy, had an image problem.

The author did a lot of interviews with people who worked at Commodore, but he did not talk to Jack Trameil, who no doubt might see a few things differently. The book was almost too long, with lots of details about projects and products that never saw the light of day. It does not concentrate on any one person or era, but takes you through the whole history. I'm not sure I can agree with the book's subtitle, "The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore." The early years of microcomputing saw many companies rise and fall. There's no doubt that Commodore was an important player, but their importance declined along with their most impressive product, the Commodore 64. The fact that they went out of business is not remarkable; once the IBM PC and its clones took over the marketplace, there wasn't much future for any company that did not follow their lead.

I enjoyed the stories about Jack Tramiel and his "Jack Attacks" and the incredible tale of the "PET Jet," the executive airplane so beloved of favored employees until one day when it went down in flames, with those aboard barely escaping with their lives. These kind of interesting stories about the people, their habits of sleeping at the office and lack of hygiene, and the their single-minded dedication to their work are what make this book good reading.

This book is a geat contribution to computer history, and there's a need for more books about the early era of microcomputing, which many people today know nothing about. Did IBM invent personal computing? Of course not! You have to look to the roots in the Altair, in the Homebrew Computer Club and in the Radio Shack stores back in 1977, where people who knew nothing about computers could walk into the store and see a real computer on a table and could type a few lines of BASIC and fill the screen with their name. Sounds corny, but lots of people got hooked, paid $600 and took home a TRS-80 and learned to program (including my husband David Welsh, who authored the Lazy Writer word processor which we sold worldwide back in the late 70s and early 80s). The same tale can be told about buying a VIC-20 or an Apple or a Commodore 64 and finding a whole new world of computing. That's the story David and I tell in our book; see more stories at microcomputerpioneers.com. I challenge anyone with ties to that era to preserve their stories and write their own book.

"We need an effort like we've never seen before... again!"

Like many computer geeks my age, I grew up using the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. But I was far too young to be reading the Wall Street Journal and the Forbes 500 reports to learn how the well the company was or wasn't doing. I was also too young to realize what a technological leap was born at Commodore and at MOS Technology. So this book was perfect for me; it offers a nice balance between the small picture (geeky hardware stuff) and the big picture (the corporate boardroom decisions).

Although Commodore began business in 1954, the book gives only a cursory description of its early days. The evolution of a typewriter then calculator company is glossed over so that we can get to the good stuff: the creation of MOS Technology's 6502 microprocessor. With the creation of the 6502, the book takes us on the journey from the Commodore PET to the VIC-20 to the Commodore 64. Unsuccessful sequels to that famous computer are detailed. The story of the Commodore 128 is given a lot of time and it's a fascinating tale in its own right. Parallel to the later events is the development of a family of computers that would eventually become known as the Amiga.

While all this is going on, the book also goes behind the scenes at the management side of the story. Corporate practices and goals are discussed. Insane deadlines are proposed and sometimes met. Massive managerial blunders are shown with the sad benefit that hindsight affords.

It will be no surprise to people in the computer industry, but as interesting and as groundbreaking as the technology itself was, a lot of the drama comes from human personalities and character flaws. I knew nothing about the people behind the computers, so this was all eye-opening stuff for me.

It was fascinating for me to read about company founder Jack Tramiel, a survivor of Auschwitz, who knew relatively little about technology but was fanatical in support of his slogan: "Computers for masses, not the classes." The book also offers us what appears to be the two extremes one encounters in the computer science field. On one hand we have the professorial Chuck Peddle, designer of the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, who gives sober and reasoned assessments. And at the other end we have the hard-drinking, hard-living Bil Herd - a system designer who during the course of his stint at Commodore punches both a) a hole in an office wall and b) the face of his company president.

The book is written in a very dry style. I didn't find this distracting in the least because the story being told is interesting enough in its own right. The bulk of the information comes from modern interviews with the main subjects; contemporaneous magazine articles, newspaper clippings and interviews make up the rest. Author and researcher Brian Bagnall does a great job of balancing the more technical details with the business plans.

As informative as this book was (and I learned a heck of a lot) it was also a fantastic exercise in nostalgia for me. It was great to relive many of the memories of those old machines and to finally know the reasons behind several of the systems' features. I hadn't thought about some of those games and applications in decades and I'm still struggling to remember if my four-year-old self ever managed to win at Lunar Lander before giving up.

The only thing this book lacks appears to be something that will appear in the upcoming (October 2008) "second edition". As I was reading this, I thought to myself that it would have been great to see some of the type of in-depth interviews with someone like Jack Tramiel (who comes across as a fascinating, but enigmatic figure) that we do with Chuck Peddle. It turns out that the second edition will do just that and is advertised as having interviews with founder Jack Tramiel, marketer Kit Spencer and some more engineers. That should prove very interesting.

The story of Commodore is the collection of a lot of little intriguing stories that gradually become more frustrating and depressing as the end of Commodore draws near. Still, all of these stories are interesting, and many of them are hilarious. One of my favorites involves Jack Tramiel snookering a young Bill Gates into a deal that would result in Microsoft losing out on literally millions in royalties. The battle over the size and location of the parking lot speed bumps will ring true to anyone familiar with large organizations.

Even if you're a computer geek who didn't own or love a Commodore machine, then you should get this purely for learning about how much influence Commodore had and still has in the field today. And if you were, in fact, a Commodore kid like me, then the information and stories in here are invaluable.