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 bought a used (almost new) C64 in 1984, I think. Played MechBrigade, Kampfgruppe, Crusade in Europe, Decision in the Desert to my hearts content. Those were the days. Anyone else remember those great old games?
707!
Hot damn. All those series of POKE and PEEK numbers to key in; I'm sure I got an adolescent gray hair or two trying to zero in on the inevitable typo (which sometimes originated in the magazine) ...
Oh yeah, my borther his freinds and I would spend hours trying to "Debug" them.
Cool!
Simply amazing.
Big announcement on an IRC on amigaworld.com regarding
hopefully final release of AmigaOS4. December 28th be
the date....
Love my Miggys....got a A3000 and A1200...was making
videos on my A3000 in 1992. Had a genlock/chromakey/
framegrabber...that was real big time then....
That was on a 68030 32 bit system at 16MHZ...
Lots of folks got thenew AmigaOne with the 3rd
release of A04...check em out on Amigaworld.com...
Yep, darn right! These young'uns don't know what they missed.
300 Baud seemed like lightning after being accustomed to 60 words-per-minute from my Teletype® machine...
I still have my VIC 20 in a box in the basement. I took it out this summer when I moved and it still works! I taught myself BASIC and learned a lot about processors and programming with it. What an incredible machine for its time. My 20-something year old daughter thinks it's one of the coolest things she's ever seen. She even remembers watching me playing with it when she was oh-so-little. It's like a family heirloom.
I had a Vic20 and a C64.
Still play some games on it via an emulator to the PC.
Fun stuff.
Eventually they started publishing programs in machine language with a sum check for accuracy. I worked for hours on a racing program but it was great. I also put in a database program from one of the mags that was my first experience in db's. I used it to keep track of players, teams and payments etc for the CYC Athletic program at our parrish. Ahh the good old days.
Windows can suck the life out of ANY computer. When 3.10 came out, it took 6 floppys to load it (total of about 8.6 mb) and now XP takes 6 CD's for a total of about 4.5 GB. Over FIVE HUNDRED TIMES larger. Instead of troubleshooting properly, they just write around bad code and leave the crap in there.
Yep, you even had part of your keyboard configured as a number pad. The edge of my C-64 keyboard was worn slick from all the typing action, but it was a lot less frustrating than trying to find the errors in BASIC that had to be copied verbatim.
So help me, when I saw this headline, I thought the Navy was reinstituting the rank of "commodore", instead of using that stupid, "rear admiral, lower half."
Did you know that Eve owned the first Apple and Adam had a Wang?
Hollywood Strip Poker.
Sigh. Memories.
http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/
A good emulator.
Games and software can be downloaded at:
http://www.c64.com/
I'm playing M.U.L.E. best game ever!
I still have M.U.L.E. and my C-64. :-)
Load"*",8,1!
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