My first computer.
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.
My god!
Is that a TRS-80?
I haven't seen one (or even a picture of one) in years!
No discussion of oldies is complete without mention of the TI-994A. 16K Ram, 16K Rom and a 16 bit processor. If you had two Radio Shack tape recorders and TI Extended Basic, you were in nerd heaven.
Typo 300 baud
Amiga OS is still being developed. The notorious unprotected memory scheme of the earlier Amiga is no more. 4.0 should be completed fairly soon.
There was a BB in Columbia, MO. I can't even remember the name of it. May have been through the University of MO.
Even all these years later I still read that as "trash-80" ;)
I noticed a new in the box radio shack 300b modem for 50 cents. It was store priced at $299.00. I heard the guy in charge tell someone that if they didn't want to pay 50 cents, to just give it to them.
We called them "Trash-80's" back in the day.
aka: 30 bytes per second
LOL! Oh the memories. I think I had got more addicted to games on the Commoredore than with this really high tech stuff today.
Sold for $25 when I bought a 386 w/ a 10 gig HD.>>>>>>>
Where did you find a 386 with a 10 gig hard drive?
Commodore? NO WAY!!!! Cool. Going to be able to type in the programs out of the back of PC magazine again like we did with the Vic 20? I remember be so tickled as a kid cause my brother in law had a Commodore 64 and we could play 7 Cities on it. Best part of Christmas staying up 30 hours straight playing on the computer.
It sure could. I could play a 12 bit, 8 channel music module on a 7Mhz Amiga and do disk IO all day without a single hiccup or glitch. My freakin' 1Ghz PowerBook can't even import music from a CD without making iTunes burp and fart all over itself.
I miss my Amiga. It was fun.
Ha-Ha! The memories are flooding in!
You tell them Old School! Anyone else remember the modem that sat on the desk and you had to plug the whole phone hand set into them?
Just last year I finally tossed all the games I had for the C64!
I still have my RS CoCo. Yes, still functional - tape drive and all!
LVM
55378008
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.