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.
First of all, it took a long time for the Amiga to get a useful but affordable hard drive, and even longer for it to get a useful operating system. Having one shared memory pool for all applications with no means of reclaiming memory when a program quits is incredibly bad design. Further, the Amiga's video memory bandwidth took way too long to grow beyond 3.58 megawords/second. This was adequate for 320x200 graphics, but limited the usability of 640x200 graphics.
"And the special effects for Babylon 5."
But only for the first season or two.
JMS eventually moved to a Silicon Graphics system ... but I am still impressed at the early Amiga stuff - most notably, the Vorlon ships.
(Crusade's just been released here on DVD - $50 for the entire run. Hmmm. Might have to buy myself a set, while waiting for Serenity - which is not available here until a week AFTER my birthday in February :-( )
Why do you have to flame like that for no good reason? He never said it was THE first computer porn, it was the first HE had seen.
Good point. Sorry wormwood.
LOAD "*",8,1
You are going to kill me.
I bought an original Odyssey I game system at a rummage sale, the game that you had to put plastic sheets on the TV for the graphics.
The first system ever.
I got rid of it after a while, thing is worth many hundreds now.
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We got a C64 when I was in elementary school. I rescued it from the garage a few years ago. Even though it endured a few Texas summers, it booted up with no problem. I had a lot of fun with that machine. I remember messing with BASIC, in addition to playing commercial games. I was surprised that the hundred some kb 5.25" dual-sided disk drive was still functional, too. It now sits in a box in climate controlled comfort.
I'll never forget the day when I upgraded to the lightning speed of 1200 baud!
Yep, and modems ( modulator & demodulator were where I first encountered UARTs ( Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter ).
I can't remember exactly, but there was some damn chip- a 16640?- you could replace with a faster chip in hopes of goosing the transfer rate, back in the days of DTST software for DOS.
Agree.....
I'm full of typos today. 10MB
Bad case of the typos
I can't get the emulators to see my F keys on my keyboard!
Can't play.
Damn. Its a multimedia keyboard.
My college graduation present was an HP25. I wrote my first "software" on that calculator to replace some of the genetics crossover frequency tables from the Schaum's study guide. I passed that code along to one of my professors who needed finer granularity than the published tables offered. That was about 10 million lines of code ago. Time flies.
I think its my non standard keyboard.
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