Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} On the Edge The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. Between 1976 and 1994, Commodore had astounding success in the nascent personal computer business. Amid the chaos and infighting, Commodore was able to achieve some remarkable industry firsts. They were the first major company to show a personal computer, even before Apple and Radio Shack. They sold a million computers before anyone else. No single computer has sold more than the Commodore 64. The first true multimedia computer, the Amiga, came from Commodore. Yet with all these milestones, Commodore receives almost no credit as a pioneer. Commodore was one of the only companies with the ability to make silicon, and the results were obvious. They had more creativity, more color, and more character than the competition. While Apple and IBM charged exorbitant prices, Commodore was able to reach the masses with affordable computers while remaining profitable. The Commodore 64 cut a path of destruction through the early industry, knocking Tandy, Texas Instruments, Sinclair, and Atari out of the computer business and badly hurting Apple and even IBM. While other companies received more press, Commodore sold more computers. Yet Commodore never reached a comfortable position. They were always on the verge of blinding success or abysmal failure. Commodore’s volatile founder, Jack Tramiel, lived on the edge, and he made sure his employees lived there too. On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore tells the story through over 44 hours of interviews with former engineers and managers: Chuck Peddle, the digital God who created a revolution with the 6502 chip and designed the PET computer. Al Charpentier, the chain smoking architect of Commodore’s revolutionary graphics chips. Bob Yannes, the frustrated musician and synthesizer aficionado who designed the Commodore 64 and the SID sound chip. Bil Herd, the unruly engineer who created the maligned Plus/4 and later sought redemption with the C128. The Amiga engineers, who created the first true multimedia system even before the word multimedia existed. Irving Gould, financier and majority shareholder who rescued Commodore in the sixties, then allowed it to wither. On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall. - The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall. We are all told that it is the winning side that dictates how history is written. Such is the starting point where the author of On The Edge begins when narrating the history of personal computers. Brian Bagnall's thesis is not controversial in itself, but when claiming that it is mostly due to Commodore that computers became part of everyday life, his statement may be. He argues that Commodore's drive of inexpensive computers for the masses broke a new market. Its large counterparts IBM on one side pushed business computers and the other being Apple had a slow start and only rose with their stylish and dearer computers after the market for the consumer microcomputer industry was in place. From being something located in universities and the garages of the très nerdy, personal computers are now a commodity present in most homes. Mr Bagnall has conducted plenty of research, partly through interviewing heaps of Commodore insiders. With his attempt of proving his thesis he is not only telling the story of the ventures behind the PET-, the Commodore- and the Amiga-machines - but he is also describing a completely different age. It is easy to become blind to how much our contemporary society is one occurring in the aftermath a computer revolution. It was the period in time prior to Tron and WarGames and designing the surface of a microprocessor was literally macroscopic artistry. Transistors were in their thousands and not millions and the semiconductor design and fabrication company MOS Technology had their financier Irving Gould; their A-type personality juggernaut Jack Tramiel and their god of technology Chuck Peddle - the three important ingredients needed for a hi-tech company of that era to succeed. Mr Peddle had earlier worked for Motorola with developing their 68000 processor. He now, together with Bill Mensch, became the father of the renowned 6502 processor. It was developed in 1976 and was used in products like the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Apple I and II, the 8-bit computers from Atari, the Commodore PET, VIC-20 and so on. Even the robot in Futurama, Bender, has the 6502 microprocessor as brain. The 6510 processor which has its home in the most sold computer of all time according to Guinness Book of World Records, the Commodore 64, is a slightly modified form of the 6502. It is easy to belittle the legacy. Brian Bagnall's description of how the craftsmanlike design and production of chips at MOS took place is one of breathtaking engineering creativity, and it is indeed an enjoyable read. On The Edge tells of how Commodore cheaply acquired an incredible unending license for Basic from a company named Micro-Soft, run by a young Bill Gates. It contains the story of how Commodore negotiated with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak on purchasing Apple and plays with the thought of how different the world would have been today if the transaction had gone through. In 1977 Star Wars appeared in the cinemas and the public was primed for the PET 2001-machines trickling out of the small Commodore factory. In April 1978 the first machines arrived on British soil and became an immediate success. Douglas Adams writes about his first encounter of it in Salmon of Doubt. In 1980 the VIC-20 was announced and it became the first computer to sell one million units. The triumph can partly be explained by the VIC-20 primarily being sold in retail, such as K-Mart, rather than from authorised dealers and thus competed with the game console market. William Shatner of Star Trek became its spokesman in television advertisements asking "Why just buy a video game?". Jack Tramiel gave his engineers one month to create a production model of the VIC-20 and working under such a tight schedule was more of a rule than exception at Commodore. Bill Seiler, Bob Russell, Robert Yannes, Al Charpentier, Charles Winterble, John Feagans and others toiled hard under codename Vixen. Having had a liaison with the Model T of computers, the Commodore 64, for some twenty years I obviously looked forward to reading about its birth. The VIC-20 had been a gold mine for Commodore and for this reason it served as a stepping stone for the beauty to come. While Al Charpentier worked on the VIC-II graphic video chip, Robert Yannes designed the architecture for a new sound chip. It was a dream he had nurtured for quite some time infatuated by the up and coming sounds of electronic music. Mr Yannes had since high school built analogue synthesizers and initially planned to support an astonishing 32 voices on the SID-chip. The little miniature synthesizer was dubbed one of the top- 20 most important chips by Byte magazine in 1995, and the sounds of the C64 are epic for generations of nerds. As with the VIC-20 the creation of the Commodore 64 was rushed and many hasty solutions characterized its final design. The machine had to get out in time. The tale of how Bob Russell's high-speed lines for a new mark of disk drives were mistakenly removed from the schematics is just one out of many. A consequence of the deletion of a few metal circuit traces has caused millions of wasted hours for C64 owners. However, it is when Mr Bagnall writes about the designing of the Commodore 128 which was to be backward compatible with the C64 that it becomes truly apparent. Achieving such compatibility was a mission as all the glitches in the Commodore 64 had to be reproduced in order to make the software and peripherals work. Programs were dependent on bugs and the monumental software library for the Commodore 64 was part of its success story and a reason why so many millions of computers were sold. The C64 designers were not hardware engineers, but chip designers. They did not know some of the fundamental rules, and it is thanks to such mistakes that the old breadbox is what so many have come to appreciate to this day. Brian Bagnall continues the book by writing about the successful Commodore Amiga computers and the shaky governing of the company which ultimately lead to its demise and death in 1994. On The Edge gives an insight not only of this particular enterprise, but of how such a world works. The saga is written in a language for everyone interested and Mr Bagnall presents necessary evidence for his case, I am however partial and hence unable to play judge. Nevertheless is it sound to say that the rise and decline of Commodore is a story that should be told, and the myth of it will continue to flourish. The C64 scene of today which is continuous since the mid 1980s, as opposed to other contemporary computer scenes, is part of this context. 8bitsunplugged. ON THE EDGE The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore is a must have for any retro-enthusiast's library. This book has become the definitive reference for Commodore 64 lovers seemingly overnight. The author, Brian Bagnall , has done a tremendous amount of research and collected many first hand interviews of the key developers and company officials from the eighties and nineties. While numerous titles over the years have been dedicated to the early history of Apple Computer, Commodore has somehow missed out on the limelight. And this, despite the fact the the C64 remains the most popular personal computer model of all time in terms of total units sold. The heart of the book is the many first hand accounts of the ups and down of the tumultuous C64 era, and the company's inability to successfully move its huge install base to a next generation Commodore product. There is even some new and interesting accounts of early encounters with Bill Gates licensing BASIC for the PET. Reading this 500+ page book was immensely enjoyable and informative. While the post-C64 section focusing on the Amiga years was a little light on substance, I found the first section of the book most informative and enjoyable. This section starts by introducing the reader to the legendary Chuck Peddle, the creator of the 6502 processor which was the basis of many of the early personal computers (Apple 1, Apple II, Atari 400/800, Atari 2600 game console, Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, KIM-1, SYM -1, Rockwell AIM 65, and many others). Peddle's company, MOS Technology, was subsequently purchased by Commodore and became the genesis for most of the computers commodore produced in the early years. In fact, if I took away one thing from reading this book, it was a new found appreciation of just how influential a figure Chuck Peddle was to the birth of the computer revolution. This is a must read for all fans of 8bits! On the Edge : The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. Rob King's review below does a good job outlining the issues in the writing. I thought I was really a poor reader for a while, thinking "Wait, who is this guy now? Did I miss his intro?" but I quickly . Читать весь отзыв. Review: On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. A painstakingly thorough history of Commodore, from its early days as a calculator company all the way through the fumbling marketing of the Amiga computers. The book works better as a business case . Читать весь отзыв. On the Edge : The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. Rob King's review below does a good job outlining the issues in the writing. I thought I was really a poor reader for a while, thinking "Wait, who is this guy now? Did I miss his intro?" but I quickly . Читать весь отзыв. Review: On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. A painstakingly thorough history of Commodore, from its early days as a calculator company all the way through the fumbling marketing of the Amiga computers. The book works better as a business case . Читать весь отзыв.