Remember Q-Link "Quantum Link"... When I called to cancel they tried to get me to sign up for their new product...America Online.
Posted on 12/16/2005 2:15:21 PM PST by nickcarraway
It may be time for a Commodore comeback.
No, Lionel Ritchie isn't signing up with his old band. We're talking about Commodore, the venerable computer brand.
A Dutch consumer media company is hoping it can tap the power of the VIC 20, the PET and the Commodore 64 to launch a new wave of products, including a home media center device and a portable GPS unit and media player.
Yeahronimo Media Ventures, which has offices in Los Angeles and Baarn, the Netherlands, acquired the rights to the Commodore name late last year in a deal worth just over $32.7 million. Earlier this year, it took on Commodore as its own corporate moniker. The rebranded company already has some products available on its Web site, but hopes to make a bigger splash at the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.
"We are excited to be launching our initial offerings at this year's CES," Commodore CEO Ben van Wijhe said in a statement. He said that the three new products will both advance the well-known brand as well as "uphold the world-class quality of yesteryear's Commodore products."
The company has said it plans to launch three products at the show. The Commodore MediaBox is an all-in-one home entertainment box with an Internet connection, digital TV tuner and hard drive for playing music downloads, games or on-demand video. The Commodore Navigator is a Windows CE-based portable device with a 20GB hard drive for music and video storage as well as built-in GPS and a 3.6-inch touch screen.
"Never before has a brand come out of hibernation and truly reinvented itself to position competitively in an ever-evolving digital media marketplace," van Wijhe said.
This is far from the first attempted comeback in tech, however. The Amiga, Commodore's onetime PC brand, has had its own decades-long history as fans tried to preserve both the computer's operating system and brand despite the lack of strong corporate backing.
Gateway had hopes of reinvigorating the Amiga PC when it bought the name and technology in 1997, but eventually scrapped its plans and sold the brand in 1999. Efforts to keep the computer's OS alive, however, have continued into the current decade.
Another '80s game name, Atari, bounced among several owners before making a comeback earlier this decade. Gamemaker Infogrames acquired Atari's name and game titles in 2001 and began using Atari as its own corporate name in May 2003. Meanwhile, Atari's classic games have also found new life in low-end TV consoles and cell phones.
Napster is perhaps one of the best-known recent transformations, with an authorized music subscription service taking on the brand built as the first of many rebel peer-to-peer file sharing systems.
I'm forgetting how old I am. :)
I heard a story, don't know how true it is.
A fellows father had died. The guy goes to his dads house, and finds in the garage, two brand new, sealed in the box Trash-80
s.
The dude unloaded them both on E-bay for like 10K apiece.
Breaking News: General Motors has bought the rights to the name Conestoga Wagon, and will go into production in 2007.
My VIC20 still works, but I only have about 20 game cartridges for it. It was pretty good for the time.
I remember the earliest games Robots and a Star Trek role playing game. We thought those were the coolest things going, until Pong came along. lol
1973 was when I first saw a TI calculator like in the picture. I couldn't actually own one because $150.00 was hard to come by for a 16 year old. By 1980 they had become commonplace - quite a fast transition.
In fact, I remember the novelty of the digital watch running its course then. From the impractical red led ones that cost $60.00 to the calculator watches that ran around $150.00, and you had to carry a pen around to use them. Anyone who had an extra hundred fifty dollars was determined to impress everyone with his ability to calculate the tip at dinner. :-)
And then in 1986 everyone with an extra $50.00 had those credit card sized 2k electronic address books. I was smart - I waited until they came down to $30.00! Never used the damn thing. LOL!
But how much of that is graphics and CD-quality music in an average 2005-era game? Actually, I guess the question is better the other way around: What size is the actual underlying game engine in an average game of today?
I'll wait until they get down to $20.00, then buy one to use as a paperweight for all my sticky notes.
The IBM 5120 used the big floopys that help about on college term paper worth of info.
Ah - modding an xbox is easy (although I had mine done by people who are better with a soldering iron than me).
I understand there are now even solderless mod-chips (http://www.xbox-modchips.com/tutorials.html)
Once the xbox is modded, there are a squillion open-source programs that open the xbox to fulfill its potential.
Mine, for example, is plugged into my home network router.
That means I can use X-Box-Media-Centre (a software addon) to play any media (audio, video, images, etc) that is on any of the hard drives on any of the PCs in the house.
As an example, I often download TV shows that won't air here for months (if ever) to my PC - and then play them on the big-screen TV in the family room via the xbox using XBMC
I can also make safety back-ups of Xbox games to my HDD, play movie trailers on the TV set in the family room (because the X-box is also connected to the 'net via the router) and even listen to shoutcast stations.
Other software that's easily available includes emulators and even an RSS-feed reader, so I can get news crawls from a variety of sources.
Of course, if you don't have an X-Box, there are emulators available for the PC - turning your super-fast hyperthreading dual-core beast into an Atari of C64 :-)
Just do a search for MAME, or m.a.m.e ... Multi-Arcade-Machine-Emulator.
Regards
Sadim
Now why doesn't that surprise me?
Every one of the dozens of Windows XP installations I have ever performed, including Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition, has come on a single CD-ROM. The initial install is about 1.5 GB, uncompressed.
That said, I agree with your statement about Windows sucking the life out of a computer. "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away." :-/
Check again. I believe that it is a DVD, not a CD, but I could be wrong. Anyway, the HP machine had the HD sectioned with XP copied to the "D" drive. It allowed one copy of the D drive as a backup. It required one DVD or 6 CD's.
I'm thinking there must be more than just Windows XP on that D: drive copy. For example, did they include Microsoft Office in the package as well?
System requirements for Windows XP operating systems
The minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Home Edition are:
- Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)
- At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
- At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
- CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
- Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device
- Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600)or higher resolution
- Sound card
- Speakers or headphones
Playstation 3 Launch Titles Officially Announced
And BBC says it's online network will have a customized Opera browser.....
How close are we getting to some of these old classics like the Amigo?
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