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.
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."
MMMMM, then you're not using CD, you're using a DVD since CD's max storage is 640MB.
Since we're getting into typos about MB, GB etc.
I think what's so funny about people saying they spent $1,500 on a 10, 20, 40 MB hard drive mis-typing GB is that the technology cam so far, so fast that we can't believe a hard drive was really only 40 MB about 12 years ago.
Hell, we download stuff now that's hundreds of MB and yes, I've even done a couple of GB downloads.
Now, how long would that take on a 300 baud accoustic coupler???
Hey, as long as you can play Loadrunner, Mule, and Archon on it I'm there.
I still have 2 Timex/Sinclairs in my attic somewhere!
VIC-20 was excellent. However, we sold the early Commodore calculator, and 90% of them came back for refund due to crapping out within a week. So, which Commodore is poised for a comeback?
I hope it's the Amiga 3000, I have two in storage.
I hope so, too. That was a beauty.
I had a C64 in the 80's. I built a circuit that lit the lights on my Christmas tree. I taped 8 sets of lights together, 4 sets of color and 4 sets of white. It was fun to program. IIR I had to POKE different numbers into an address which corresponded to the pinouts on the back. I think I did it with triacs and some iso-opto couplers. I could make the lights dim by writing loops in Basic (for then next?). Sending a random number generator to the output was pretty cool too.
I had a RS-232 interface and it was a good day (night usually) when I could get 300!
My first computer!
TRS-80, mod I, Level I, Tiny BASIC!
Spent many hours typing in programms and debugging them. Became a COBOL programmer for about a year. COmputer operator for 3 years before that.
The many late night with that machine....
(Yes, I had girlfriends at the time.)
Umm... Yeah, which is why I specified "uncompressed". The distribution CD has all the source material compressed. Once it's installed--uncompressed--on the HDD, it's larger.
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