New Book: The rise and the fall of Commodore

davidv_ · Post by **davidv_** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 6:18 pm

eslapion wrote:
Well, Rally-X became Radar Rat Race, Galaxian became Star Battle, Space Invaders became Avenger, Night Driver became Road Race, Lunar Lander became Jupiter Lander and Pac-Man became Jelly Monsters...

I know that of course

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 5:46 am

Hello there! Talking about "the spectacular rise and fall of Commodore": now there's a bonus chapter freely downloadable from the official site of the book. It's about TIM and KIM early kits from MOS Technology. I found it interesting and somehow filling a gap in the story.

Go get it and enjoy!

http://www.commodorebook.com/view.php?content=bonus

Centallica · Post by **Centallica** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 9:07 am

orion70 wrote:Hello there! Talking about "the spectacular rise and fall of Commodore": now there's a bonus chapter freely downloadable from the official site of the book. It's about TIM and KIM early kits from MOS Technology. I found it interesting and somehow filling a gap in the story.

Go get it and enjoy!

http://www.commodorebook.com/view.php?content=bonus

Thanks for the heads up!!

Printed her and will read this weekend

Now for some more PET information!
Brian

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 12:54 pm

If HAL Labs had rights to those titles, it must've been only on the Japanese market, or maybe only in one city district of Tokyo or something like that. At least Jelly Monsters is said to have been withdrawn from the market after a while, because it too well resembled Pac-Man. Some would even say it is a better Pac-Man than Atarisoft's own conversion a few years later.

I haven't read the book, but if everything it says is the newly discovered truths without any misunderstandings or forgotten memories from the people interviewed, the book is a total revolution on the Commodore history; it turns many concepts and stories upside-down from what was previously officially documented.

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 12:56 pm

I got this hard-cover book for Christmas and it's been one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time. I have a hard time putting it down. Great information in there about the history of the machines we enjoy playing with and also some insight into what could have been.

I noticed a few factual errors regarding the titles of early VIC-20 cartridges.

Also, as someone mentioned above, the book could have used a better editing job. There are a few typos and grammatical mistakes that squeezed through.

One of my all time pet peeves keeps popping up. Brian Bagnall keeps writing "weary" when he means "wary". "Weary" means "to be tired or fatigued", while "wary" means "to be apprehensive or cautious". As in...

"Ral-Clan had read Eslapion's warning about faulty power supplies. Therefore, he was wary of plugging the old one he had found at the bottom of a well into his VIC-20. However, as he had no choice...."

Sorry, I'm a bit anal when it comes to that one.

Centallica · Post by **Centallica** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 2:09 pm

ral-clan wrote:I got this hard-cover book for Christmas and it's been one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time. I have a hard time putting it down. Great information in there about the history of the machines we enjoy playing with and also some insight into what could have been.

Also, as someone mentioned above, the book could have used a better editing job. There are a few typos and grammatical mistakes from that squeezed through.

That was me last Christmas I got the book as a gift too

What took you so long Ral-can to read it...only took me like a week

I felt there was also a lot left out besides the first 2 chapters that you can download from his website for free. Seemed heavy on C64 stuff but light on PET development of the different models and C16 info was a bit lacking too.

Besides gramatical errors, the professional flow of a editor was missing too...but great read man!

Brian

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 3:58 am

UPS dropped off my copy today, and I've read up to just past the first West Coast Computer Faire (I think he's about to get to PC'76.)

One irritation I have with the book so far is that Bagnall really beats up other authors of early microcomputer industry books for their bias, while having a bias that's at least as bad himself. For example, his presentation of Commodore as the toast of the WCCF is pretty much bunk. I was there. The Commodore PET was interesting, but it was a _long_ way from being the star of the show.

First, nobody had heard of it before. So they didn't know anything about the guts of it, or the folks who were building it. The other machines on display were either known quantities, or from known developers. The Apple guys made a splash because they were known, and in spite of Bagnall's swipes at the quality of the color display, it was darn good. Certainly the -monochrome- PET didn't upstage that.

He also described the "lowly Altair" as having a video display with the Dazzler board. Well, the Dazzler was an S-100 board from Cromemco, not MITS. Sure, you could drop it into a "lowly Altair." (Lowly? They were only the market's most recognizable and most sought system at the time.) But you could just as well drop it into any decent S-100 system.

He gives a hand-wave at other exhibitors and acts like the show was all about Commodore, Apple, and non-exhibitor Radio Shack (commonly known as Chicken Shack and Radio Shaft at the time, and -not- taken seriously by the computer community even after the TRS-80 came out.)

Why people liked the PET:
It was an all-in-one, and still gave you good access to the board.

They were promising a system with a built-in terminal for about the price of the CPU box of other systems.

It had a built-in cassette drive, very handy and promised to avoid the problems of bringing up a Tarbell-type interface on a system, as well as meaning that the system had a default method of software distribution (as opposed to other systems, where you had to determine whether the tape you were going to get was magnetic or paper.)

The price, assuming it actually went on sale at the stated price (which many doubted.)

Why people didn't like the PET:
Oddball expansion connector. Folks wanted edge card connectors, not some protocol-based bus that locked them out from connecting evening projects.

Limited memory. Sure, the Apple only came with 4K, too, but you could raise it to 16K as soon as you could afford the chips. And there weren't any slots for more memory boards in the PET.

No slots. See above. This was a particular disappointment after the KIM"s friendly edge connectors. Early rumors had the PET as being a KIM expanded to 4K with a video interface and ASCII keyboard. People who showed up with that expectation were disappointed at what was actually being shown.

No software. At least with a 6800 or an eighter you'd have a ton of software right away. Heck, even the 1802 had more software at that time. And everything about this machine said "I'm an oddball, expect to spend many frustrating nights porting software from other systems."

No ML monitor. Say what? You're going to sell someone a computer then lock them out of it? BASIC's nice, but get real. Bagnall rags on Apple for booting the II into a monitor, then requiring keystrokes to start BASIC. That was what the market wanted. Some would want to have a switch to boot into monitor or BASIC, but Apple was on the right track at least.

Peripherals. It was roundly presumed that the machine was intended to be a loss-leader, and you'd get gouged on the peripherals. It was admitted that the system was a nice package, but the question "where do you go from here" always arises. Every other major system on the market had an open bus. Buying hobbyist HP-IB/GP-IB parts from HP at HP prices was -not- an option. Your employer might pay for HP, but a person buying a $600 computer wouldn't. Heck, if you had that kinda dough and wanted BASIC and a tape drive, you'd buy a Series 80 right from HP.

Keyboard. The keyboard was pretty awful when a good full-travel parallel keyboard (fully assembled and tested) cost about $12-15. You could get encoded keyboards for about $25-30.

No history. Nobody knew who these people were, what sort of quality they had in their machine, whether they would be there for the users like some other companies where the engineers answered the phone. Sure, I had two Commodore calculators, but I don't call a calculator company for tech support (hey, I'm trying to hook your calculator up to an ADM-3A and it looks like the data rate is shifting all over the place. Can you give me a hand with this?) . And who knew whether Commodore's deep pockets and all were really behind these guys?

One thing to keep in mind was that by the time of the show everyone's uP chip prices had come down to the 6502 price point, more or less. You could get an 8080 for $30, and an 8080A for $40. I bought 1802s by the stick at $18 a chip.

So the number of boards on the market was exploding, pre-assembled boards were becoming common (this was one of the ways the manufacturers kept a margin on the products) as well as things like the Processor Technology Semi-Kit (board assembled and tested, but without the chips in the sockets. Plug in chips and go for far less than full A&T prices.)

So what was big at the show?

The Z-80. Everyone was all over it. We'd been excited by the 8085, but then came the Z-80. We were still in a fizz over it, and drooled over the boards from TDL, The Digital Group, and Cromemco. It ran all our software (this said from someone who was not in the eighter or sixer camp at the time, fact is, the eighters really did have 99 and 9/10s percent of all the software) and was fast, did context-switching well, and had built in DRAM refresh so we could cut the cost of our memory in half for home-built systems.

Altair 8800b and 680. Two much nicer computers than the original 8800. As I say, Altair was still the one to beat.

Rumors in the Processor Technology booth of an upcoming system. They already had all the boards to do it by that time. They were known for solid, well designed stuff. (The Sol-20 was out less than a year later.)

And who was the real star of the show?

Hands down, it was the IMSAI 8080. It was the wet dream of everyone at the show. IMSAI now had a dual disk drive unit to go with the computer, and it was working pretty well by the time of the WCCF. Nobody would actually pay the price of the IMSAI terminal, but dang it sure looked good sitting next to the rest of the IMSAI stuff.

But, since IMSAI isn't one of the companies that became a household word in the 80s, it gets even shorter shrift (like PT, TDL, TDG, Cromemco, NorthStar, etc.) than even the poor treatment Bagnall claims Commodore gets. The IMSAI was the computerists' computer for many years--only the Compupro unseated it long afterward, and that was another S-100 system.

I'm not trying to bash the PET. It's just that Bagnall presenting it as the hit of the WCCF is _extremely_ misleading.

One of the reasons people stayed close to the Commodore booth at the show was the known connection with MOS. MOS's antics at WESCONs had become legendary and a thing of mythic proportions over the prior year.
It led us to expect more of the same at WCCF, like computer systems at some ridiculously low price (an upgraded KIM-type board with more memory, a keyboard, and a video interface for under $100 if you've got the cash on you, tomorrow they go for $300), an announcement of a breakthrough in RAM production (and free chips to prove it--4Kx8 statics given away in 8-packs) or something similar (KIMs blown out for $75, or free 6500 IC family packs, or, heck, how about a free calculator?)

On the positive side, the book's already given me some great insight into Leonard Tramiel. My own interactions with him in the past had me convinced he was a "brick"--not all that bright. He always seemed to have to deliberate a lot internally when speaking, seemed extremely unclear on any details--even on products he was presenting--and generally seemed to be "terminally distracted." Based on what I've already seen in the book, it looks like he's probably actually a bright guy, he just wasn't entirely on home turf when it comes to computers, and particularly when talking to guys like me (back then I was the sort of guy who'd walk straight up to the booth, ask the most acrane question you could think of, and expect an instant answer. He probably thought I was a jerk, certainly a fair few other people that I've gotten to know better since thought I was--with good reason.)

There was an episode of Computer Currents with Leonard Tramiel on it, presenting the C-64 as I recall. Take a look at it--it's downloadable from archive.org--you'll see what I mean. The way he appears to be on this show is about the same way he seemed on the occasions I spoke to him. Even accounting for "booth duty burnout", he seemed kinda out of it. I'm certainly willing to think much better of him now.

Overall I've been enjoying the book quite a bit. If I'd known that buying a 6502 at WESCON could have got me a visit from Chuck Peddle to help me bring up a system, I would have jumped at it! I was far closer to Grass Valley than Steve and Steve, Chuck could have made it to my place easily.

-Mark

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 7:17 am

The fact that we have members of DENIAL who were both "there" when all the pioneering stuff was going on and those who weren't even born when the VIC was being sold commercially makes this site great!

Alan · Post by **Alan** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:35 am

Thanks for that post, saundby. Very, very interesting.

Your comments on the IMSAI made me do a little web searching and it looks like these things are still being produced! Amazing! CHECK IT OUT

PaulQ · Post by **PaulQ** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 9:23 am

Although I find your insight facinating, I must respectfully disagree with one of your points:

saundby wrote: Why people didn't like the PET:
Oddball expansion connector.

Limited memory.

No slots. See above.

No software.

No ML monitor. Say what? You're going to sell someone a computer then lock them out of it? BASIC's nice, but get real. Bagnall rags on Apple for booting the II into a monitor, then requiring keystrokes to start BASIC. That was what the market wanted. Some would want to have a switch to boot into monitor or BASIC, but Apple was on the right track at least.

Clearly, you are citing these opinions from the POV of someone who is highly technically inclined. What Commodore did with the PET was to bring computing down to the level of a more average person. There are many people out there who can't wrap their head around machine language, nor would they care about internal expansion and memory limitations. However, these same people are still bright enough to learn a higher language like BASIC and just wanted something with which to write programs with. People turned on the PET and it was READY to go. It even said so. With a few simple keystrokes, you could have it printing your name all over the screen. Immediately, you could write a program in a relatively simple to understand language to accomplish all manner of wonderful tasks; from playing games to balancing your chequebook, and even to drill children on math and spelling.

As it turned out, Commodore delivered what the "Rest of us" really wanted, and in the process, really did create the "Home computer" industry as we came to know it. No software? We could write your own. No slots? What use did we have of slots? Limited memory? We'll write our programs more effiiently. All we need is a tape deck to save our programs, and a printer to print stuff out. The PET may not have made that big of an impression at WCCF, but it certainly made an impression where it counted: In schools and educational institutes everywhere. They got many kids interested in computing. They gave us something we could more easily understand. Kids then begged their parents to get them a Commodore machine for Xmas; the Vic 20. They could connect the tape drive from the PET to the Vic. Programs they wrote in school on the PET would work on their Vic. Then came the C-64. They kept everything compatible all the way back, more or less. Those same programs still worked. I'm not talking about programs that poke and peek memory locations; rather, I'm talking about the kind that kids usually write, like adventure games. We didn't know the first thing about interrupts, but we knew how to generate random numbers and program fun to play games in BASIC. If my computer had a machine language monitor back then, it would have gone unused.

Where Commodore made their bad turn was when they started to drop compatibility. They brought out the Commodore 16 to replace the Vic 20, but people bought the Vic 20 because they could use the Datasette from the PET and joysticks from their Atari. The 16 wasn't compatible with anything, and it died. Same deal with the Plus/4. You'd think that Commodore would have learned from this mistake, but they did not. Next up was the Amiga. Now, I can understand why the original A1000 wouldn't be Commodore-compatible; it was developed by a completely different company bought by Commodore. However, their number one priority should have been to incorporate at least a Commodore-compatible serial port in the A500, along with a connector to use it with a 1702/1902 style monitor. I should have been able to use my old 1541 disk drive and 1902 monitor with the Amiga 500. Instead, the Amiga was every bit as incompatible with the rest of Commodore as the PC was.

Of course, this is all hindsight, and as we all know, hindsight is 20/20.

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 9:29 am

I think there was a Commodore 64 emulator produced by Commodore for the Amiga 1000. I can't remember the name. It was horrible and only provided the most basic functionality. I mean REALLY basic. I've only ever heard of it though, never used it.

PaulQ · Post by **PaulQ** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 11:46 am

ral-clan wrote:I think there was a Commodore 64 emulator produced by Commodore for the Amiga 1000. I can't remember the name. It was horrible and only provided the most basic functionality. I mean REALLY basic. I've only ever heard of it though, never used it.

The thing is, they didn't even need to provide emulation; only compatibility was necessary. The Amiga shipped with a version of BASIC, so why not something to import files from GEOS from a 1541 connected directly to the A500? People who moved up from the Vic to the 64 didn't need emulation; they could simply swap the keyboard. The 128 didn't need GO64 for the same reason; it only added to the cost and complexity of a computer that should have cost less than it did. People will cope with software upgrade issues by keeping their old keyboard/computer combo to run the old software until they could afford the new software; I certainly remember swapping between the Vic and 64 until I finally sold the Vic. Buying the Amiga was a really tough decision, but I gave in to my vanity while others either stuck with the 64, upgraded to a 128, or jumped ship and moved to the only other platform that offered complete backwards hardware compatibility all the way back to the start.

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 3:54 pm

DigitalQuirk wrote:Although I find your insight facinating, I must respectfully disagree with one of your points:

saundby wrote: Why people didn't like the PET:
Oddball expansion connector.

Limited memory.

No slots. See above.

No software.

No ML monitor. Say what? You're going to sell someone a computer then lock them out of it? BASIC's nice, but get real. Bagnall rags on Apple for booting the II into a monitor, then requiring keystrokes to start BASIC. That was what the market wanted. Some would want to have a switch to boot into monitor or BASIC, but Apple was on the right track at least.
Clearly, you are citing these opinions from the POV of someone who is highly technically inclined.

You're right, I am. I'm doing it from the perspective of the average attendee of the WCCF, who were a technical lot. As to the rest of your statements, I agree completely. But my comments were limited to a criticism about a bias I feel is in Bagnall's description of the WCCF. That's all. No PET bashing intended (as I said.) Bagnall asserts that the PET was the big deal of the show. It wasn't, for the reasons I stated. I have spent a lot of time in my life standing around booths listening to what people are saying (especially my own booths.) I was at WCCF for all of Friday (I cut out of school after German to get there) and the first half of Saturday (I minded a friend's booth for the morning, intending to spend the rest of the day at the show, but it got too crazy for me, so I decided to get out shortly after my time in the booth was over.)

As to compatability, I don't feel Commodore ever really had it. The C-16/Plus/4 were particularly egregious because of the C-64's position in the market, but Commodore's upgrade path has always been "throw out the old one, buy the new one."

Compare this with Apple's and Atari's compatibility among 8-bit machines (and 16-bit, when you consider Apple's Apple II card for Macs.) Compatibility was not Commodore's strong point for any of their machines until the Amiga.

Again, I was commenting on the WCCF perspective with respect to Bagnall's presentation. The PET was there. It was interesting (a _lot_ of interesting stuff was there.) But it wasn't the hit of the show, far from it. The PET's success came from another kind of user than those who attended WCCF. My experience was that mainframe and timeshare types who weren't really microcomputer enthusiasts loved the system. Most microcomputer types wanted a system that they could get their hands dirty with, feeling that anything that didn't support them doing that wasn't a full-featured machine.

The most popular hack for the PET for those who did do any hardware work on it was a keyboard replacement. It wasn't long before kits were available for the less technically inclined, too.

-Mark G.

PaulQ · Post by **PaulQ** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:55 pm

saundby wrote: You're right, I am. I'm doing it from the perspective of the average attendee of the WCCF, who were a technical lot. As to the rest of your statements, I agree completely. But my comments were limited to a criticism about a bias I feel is in Bagnall's description of the WCCF. That's all. No PET bashing intended (as I said.) Bagnall asserts that the PET was the big deal of the show. It wasn't, for the reasons I stated.

I wouldn't be surprised if, after being to many computer shows with the PET in the late 1970's where it very well may have been the "Star attraction," his memories have all run together. He probably remembers that WCCF was the first one, but draws on the memories of all the shows and events he was at. That would be my completely uneducated guess that I just pulled right out of my ass.

saundby wrote:As to compatability, I don't feel Commodore ever really had it. The C-16/Plus/4 were particularly egregious because of the C-64's position in the market, but Commodore's upgrade path has always been "throw out the old one, buy the new one."

While their compatibility certainly left a lot to be desired, many of the "Peripherals that mattered" at critical times were. If the Vic couldn't use the PET's datasette drive (the peripheral that mattered for the Vic), I doubt if the sales would have been as good. Then, if you couldn't use that datasette on the C64, I'm not sure if that computer would have done as well as it did. Recall that the datasette was still around $60 even in 1983; which, in those days, was considered a good bit of money. The disk drives and printers were terribly expensive for Commodores, but you knew that they would work on the Vic and 64, so there was the impression that, even as computer technology advanced, you could still retain your "Investment" in the more expensive peripherals.

saundby wrote:Compare this with Apple's and Atari's compatibility among 8-bit machines (and 16-bit, when you consider Apple's Apple II card for Macs.) Compatibility was not Commodore's strong point for any of their machines until the Amiga.

I recall differently. Basic programs wouldn't even run on Workbench 2.0 or later. Hard drives and memory expansion for the A500 wouldn't work in the A600 or A1200; many of the cards for the A2000 wouldn't fit in the A3000. Granted, you could reuse disk drives and printers, but by the time new Amigas came out, these weren't the big ticket items they used to be.

saundby wrote: The most popular hack for the PET for those who did do any hardware work on it was a keyboard replacement. It wasn't long before kits were available for the less technically inclined, too.

Yes, well, the keyboard did suck; though not as badly as some other keyboards of the era.

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Wed Jan 31, 2007 3:19 am

DigitalQuirk wrote:
saundby wrote: You're right, I am. I'm doing it from the perspective of the average attendee of the WCCF, who were a technical lot. As to the rest of your statements, I agree completely. But my comments were limited to a criticism about a bias I feel is in Bagnall's description of the WCCF. That's all. No PET bashing intended (as I said.) Bagnall asserts that the PET was the big deal of the show. It wasn't, for the reasons I stated.
I wouldn't be surprised if, after being to many computer shows with the PET in the late 1970's where it very well may have been the "Star attraction," his memories have all run together. He probably remembers that WCCF was the first one, but draws on the memories of all the shows and events he was at. That would be my completely uneducated guess that I just pulled right out of my ass.

*shrug* Maybe. Another thing is that there are a lot of pressures on a writer in how they present things and how they fit them into their narrative. I'm enjoying Bagnall's book, there's no doubt about that. But there are things that are in it that immediately trigger my BS sensors, too. A lot of his window-dressing prose--where he's trying to convey a setting or feel--hits me just wrong.

There _were_ places where the PET _was_ a big deal. There were certainly some great things about the machine. The WCCF audience was the wrong group for it, in general. As it was, the original PET only did moderately well. The later PETs were the really solid machines. At the time of the first WCCF, 4K was pretty much standard for a system, but 8K was becoming common. By the end of the year 16K was either in reach or in the next year's plans for most people, particularly since BASIC could occupy so much space so quickly (compared to ML code, though the release of better assemblers was changing that, too.) A 4K machine with no RAM expansion provision would be a tough machine to buy as a desktop. A controller, sure, but the thing had a CRT built it--not exactly a controller configuration. Most people wanted a machine that could be expanded to 32K or 48K of RAM with the expectation that they'd probably have that much within two or three years, sooner if they made some money on their computer habit like a lot of people were doing. Even though a lot of system sold at that time never made it past 16K, the resistance level drops to zero at a capacity of about 48K at that time.

One of the reasons the WCCF was the wrong place for the PET was the fact that it was very much a marketplace, rather than a lookie-loo show. The price to get in was astronomical, and nobody went unless they knew they could pretty well expect to save the cost of entry through show floor discounts on things they knew they were going to buy. They made the entry price high so they they could fund the event off the consumers, rather than the exhibitors. This allowed a lot of exhibitors in that were normally cut out of the show floors, like user groups and companies that were starting on a shoestring. The base entry cost was the cost of about ten six-packs of domestic back then, or eight import six-packs. Or seventy-five loaves of bread. About two cartons of cigarettes, or about twenty McDonald's meals. The same price as a very nice dinner for two, wine included. It wasn't even close to cheap enough for folks who just wanted to come and look (though some did.)

When I originally heard the price of the show, I wasn't going to go. Then I found out it was a "Faire" in the medieval sense--a sort of bazaar or free-for-all marketplace. Since I had some hardware I wanted to buy and some I wanted to sell I put some boards in a backpack, pulled cash from the bank, and went. I sold several RAM boards I had built up from pulls on Godbout EconoRAM PCBs, that recovered my cost of entry about three times over all by itself. Then I went shopping and went home with an apple box full of PCBs and displays (I still have some of the VFDs I bought) while riding BART and buses on the way home. One friend saw me coming out of Brooks Hall with the produce box under my arm and wondered if Steve and Steve were delivering the IIs in them as some sort of gimmick.

So, it was very much a hard-edged cash and carry environment, not well suited for showing off a machine that wasn't on sale. If they'd had PETs to sell, however, I bet they would have sold as many as they could bring. There were enough people with $600 to drop on something just for the heck of it among the several thousand who came. Even in the days of stagflation there were some people who had disposable income and DP/MIS types were often among them--a prime market for the PET.

And some people would see it as buying a monitor and getting a small computer system for free, maybe it'd make a decent intelligent monitor, even if it was limited as a computer (this was among the ideas I heard thrown around that day.) Certainly on Saturday the place turned into a sort of feeding frenzy, I could see a _lot_ of hardware moving, and PETs would have moved, too. Too bad all they had was a prototype.

Anyway, I'm off to read more of the book now. I expect there'll be more comments once I've read that.

-Mark