Commodore - a look back at 30 years

[mjnurney]

All through my childhood and early adult life, the computer of choice was always a Commodore of one type or another. A rumour of new machines or the latest game was always in print each month or the topic of the playground.
Everyone wanted a commodore from the Vic20 to the c64 to the 128 and then the Amiga 1000 that no one could afford and then the mighty A500. Everyone who liked computers bought an A500 or so it seemed.

Now i know the Atari and MSX and even Sinclair machines had there place in the market but lets be honest Commodore was king in Europe by long way. Adverts were everywhere , TV ads in the UK and every major chain was selling them from Boots the chemist to WHSmiths and Argos.

There was an era in the mid 80s when odd names shops appeared and promptly disappeared a year or two later. Catalogue shops and discount resellers appeared over night it seemed and most of these sold Commodore and Sinclair stuff , some Amstrad too.

Even in the early 90s the AGA chipset machines were eagerly anticipated by the press and Amiga users all over the world but as a tester the A500+ and A600 arrived to a stunned audience - whats that we said?

Anyway six months later the A1200 and 4000 arrived and later the CD32, my sega using friends were very jealous of the 1200 and CD32 , RISE of the robots "hey you can see the bolts fall out of the robots when you hit them, its so real" however the game was rubbish in truth.

But by now the adverts had slowed down , C64 were discounted and Amiga was disappearing from the shops. I wonder why ? My friend went to buy a 1200 from Dixons and was told they didn't have any and would not be stocking anymore, even though they still had adverts for them.

Another friend went to American in 1993 and told me he never saw one Amiga in downtown LA at the malls or computer shops - they had 386 PC's and DOS - what ever they are.

By early 1994 i bought a 486 33mhz PC motherboard kit and borrowed a VGA monitor and played Rebel Assault and warcraft and i never looked back , i sold my A500 and CD32 and that was it until the next new Amiga arrived i said.

My Niece was 16 at the time and got a part time job at Deloitte & Touche in 1994 and she came home one day and told that Commodore was bankrupt and was being liquidated, strange i thought - i had not heard of this?
I asked by good friend and Amiga fanatic about it and he said no it can't be true.

but it was and in 1994 the mighty Commodore closed shop forevermore. Commodore UK hung on for little longer as they made a profit on old stock. Escom came and went as the rumbelows shops all changed to Escom and then for sale again.

i still find it hard to believe that Commodore has gone, it was such a large part of my early life and i miss it to be honest.

and then i started a passion for PCs and Windows that only recently waned. i enjoyed the DOS era and the internet bubble on Pcs but now i use other stuff, vista ended my PC adventure.

I bought an Amiga 1200 in 2002 and then sold it but i had the bug again and bought another 1200 in 2008 and joined Amibay...many thousands of pounds later i have almost every Amiga and Commodore machine.

One thing that is rarely mentioned in stories of the era is that the cost of these things was pretty high in the UK, The commodore branded stuff was always more expensive that most of the common machines and the Amiga500 was £399.99 when i got one, thats about £1000 now adjusted for inflation.

So what your Commodore story ?

mike.

 

[roy_bates]

thats interesting stuff mike

because,my first computer was a c64,my cousins had spectrums and a cpc and my school had beebs.
first experience with any computer was at school with a beeb(i have one now,and yet to read the damn manual) and i was totally fascinated by its expansion capability...but i saved and bought a c64 which was cheaper at the time by half and for me was much better hardware wise than the spectrum which was cheaper again in more ways than one lol.
although i thought the c64 was pretty much useless without a cassette deck or disk drive(true for most computers of this era),more saving later i had them.found it to be a very useful system..
later i had amigas in various setups, pc's as i thought them to be 386 at the time never really took my fancy so never got any of those till much later on in the advent of pentium.because they were not really all that special and they were ten a penny.

later and during when i had amigas i also had a few consoles for recreation,along with most people i suppose.

i wasn't really all that surprised when commodore went under,it just wasnt moving anywhere at the end hardware wise all i used to see in the mags at the time was peoples futile dreams of what the next machine would look like along with the walker... or what could be added to the already owned machines,nothing has changed there i think,lol

 

[mjnurney]

Same for me Roy the first computer i ever used was a BBC B at school and the teacher drawing flow charts and explaining that this is how computers work, my mum bought me a Ti99 at about that time (1984 i suppose). The bbc seemed and still seems as quality machine and you can see why the BBC schools program used it and not the sinclair spectrum.

As for Commodore, i lost interest after the 1200 was launched, it seemed cheaply made somehow and the game market for it was still awful platform games with silly characters and i hated that . The magazines seemed to be aimed at children and i was in my early 20s by then. The PC seemed much more grown up, even though i wanted to play star wars games on it and doom later on.

The whole Commodore brand suffered from the kids toy image all along , a threw back from the c64 probably i suppose and i think it suffered as a result.

The later Escom stuff never registered in my world , once i stopped buying Amiga format and sold my A500 1.3 that was it for Commodore for me. i didn't keep up with the news or follow the collapse at all.

I was seduced by the blue screen of scan disk , the red sexy glow of MSD and the black mystery of dir/w/p and cd.. or DOS4GW

Its a shame the Amiga didn't hold on for another year or two and make it in to the internet age, The Amiga is such a pain on the internet and so slow but then so was my 486 and dial up modem.

 

[roy_bates]

lol,yep

all i ever seen was games games games from the c64 and amiga(mostly true for alot of computers even today),and not much else.although i have to admit there was some really nice ones i had to have...
the occasional productivity program or paint package took my eye,was fascinated by ray tracing and rendering programs and was the only real reason i bothered to spend a small fortune to make the amiga do it at any sort of speed lol
and,was my main reason for getting the monthly mag to read,for the hardware and software reviews that may turn up.again dominated ten fold by games software reviews on the amiga,wasnt disappointed although i thought for a machine with so much potential it should of had way more serious software than it actually had.after all at the time there was much more third party support for hardware addons compared to software i thought.

early on there was a much more diverse choice in hardware for me were 8 bit machines was concerned,and was the best time for me,when the 16 bit machines was doing the rounds it was atari,amigas, pc clones and macs,later even less choice machine was available for me anyway.

 

[Aysel]

My experience is almost a mirror image of yours Mike!

I started out in 1982 with a VIC, from there went to a C16 and then finally a C64 breadbin a few years later. The C64 saw me through most of my early school years and the only other exposure I had to computers were BBC Micros at school which just felt so primitive by comparison.

Then in 1989 I woke up Christmas day to find a BatPack 500 which my dad had set up. The Amiga really was it for me, I was hooked on the C64 but the Amiga was something else altogether. I had no interest in any other formats, every Saturday morning for a good few years was spent lurking in Gordon Harwood’s in Alfreton with my mates while my mum did the weekly shop and every penny I got was spent in there on accessories and blank disks for swapping demos and disk mags with mail contacts through Amiga Shopper.

My dad ran his own haulage business and in 1992 started looking for a new machine to do accounts and invoicing on. At that time Harwoods were doing a trade in against CDTV’s if you had an old 500 to give up… I didn’t want to hand over my machine so the sales guy offered my dad the same cash discount without trading anything in on an 030 A4000 and threw in a copy of PenPal. Dad went for it in a rare moment of decisive action, I got home with a beaming smile and my mum exploded through the ceiling when she saw the invoice J
Sadly like Mike, I completely lost interest in the Amiga the second I got my first sight of a 486sx running Microsoft flight sim… I have never been into the usual Amiga contingent of platformers and sensible soccer, I was always about simulations, real time strategy, point and clicks and dungeon crawlers and at that time the PC was storming ahead. In 1994 I got my very own PC, a copy of Stunt Island, Alone in The Dark and Doom and after six months or so of gathering dust both the Amiga’s got boxed up…. that was it.

The CD32 just struck me as quite ugly, it seemed dated and pointless before it even hit the shelves. I was working in a computer games shop in Chesterfield at weekends in a shop called Future Zone(Which became Electronics Boutique, now Game) and we were selling the 3D0, massively overpriced but it just made the CD32 look like something from the ark with its straight ports from the floppy based Amiga’s and a splattering of added speech. The A1200 just felt like a toy in a world that now wanted big boxe computers with hard drives and graphics cards, the A600 overpriced old technology and the A4000 I had at home and which less than 18 months ago felt like the future now felt like an antique in the face of DX66 PC’s.

I worked at Electronics Boutique for four years and saw the Amiga section dwindle from half the shop, to a quarter, to one bay, to a single shelf of Championship Manager games lol…. It confirmed that the Amiga days were well and truly over. I remember not really being that bothered at the time, I was more than happy with the relentless upgrading of my PC and the Playstation was teetering on the horizon but looking back now at the demise of Commodore and reading Brian Bagnals book of what led to it leaves me with a heavy heart and thoughts of what could have been if the right people had been in control at the right time rather than short sighted executive money grabbers.

The one thing I am really grateful for is never selling my old machines, my dad boxed things up and put them away as they became redundant and so I have my original breadbin C64 (kindly resurrected by Roy!), A500 and A4000 and having now got back into the Amiga about six years ago it’s been great to have that sentimental attachment with those machines and also get to explore the machines like the A3000 and 128D which I could never afford back in the day.

 

[roy_bates]

i never understood commodores choice to go console i really dont,cdtv i do understand to certain point as that was and still is a nice machine and was very capable of becoming a full on computer...but,the cd32?
anyone remember the console based on the c64...horrible.

ok,i know commodore did make lots strange decisions over the years trying to peddle the same hardware in different flavours in different cases.
i had mixed feelings abut the 600,now though,it grows on me as basic machine.
but,i still prefer the 500+ over it.

as i think back to all the machines that entered the market back then even before the amiga,im sure alot made a few strange decisions looking at the computers that arrived from a few of the other companys.

 

[Vyncynt]

In the early 1980's, I mowed neighbor's lawns until I saved up enough money to purchase a VIC-20, some cartridges, and then a tape drive. After seeing a friend's Atari 800, I continued to mow lawns until I purchased an Atari 800XL and a tape drive from a pawn shop. I thought I was really rocking when I got my first 1050 disk drive, learned how to use hole puncher to use both sides of a floppy disk. Ultima IV was released and I loved it. I saw Amiga and Atari ST systems in magazines, but they were lightyears out of my budget. In 1989, I saw my first Amiga 500 at friend's house. After I graduated high school and joined the military, I bought my first Amiga 500. Later I learned that I was allergic to grasses and pollen, so that must tell you how miserable I was pushing that lawn mower.

 

[Buzzfuzz]

For me it started in 1986 when a friend showed me his C64.
Lucky for me it was a 50 meter walk, so I could play a lot on that thing.
When he moved to an Amiga 500 I was really hooked, I played more on it than he or his older brother.

That went on for years until 1990 when my aunt sold her Amiga 500 to me for a bargain.
I still have that A500, Rev 6 which still is my favorite.

Joined various clubs here in the Netherlands and met some awesome people including lots of people in demoscene.
But we all know that Commodore went down a few years later and by 1996 I started my IT college and I needed a PC, which surprise surprise was an Escom P75.
By that time I also had given up on Amiga, they were stored away, 2 A500's by that time.

The Escom P75 was updated to P133 and ATX case, the first time people saw that it could turn it self off, they had to get one too
Met a lot of new friends and had a lot of fun at LAN parties and meetings.

But in the late 90's we had a lot of deaths in the family and even the mother and sister of my best friend and they were like a mom and sis to me too, so that really took a toll on me and also reflected on my IT college.
Add to that we never had chemistry on high school and no advanced math and physics and you have a success formula for disaster.
Failing to even get halfway trough it, I quit when I reached semester 4 out of 8 and that was halfway 1999.
Finding a job wasn't easy just after the Millennium, but eventually in 2001 I got my first job, and straight away one you will like on a resume, because it was Xerox.

The sky wasn't even the limit, I could buy lots of stuff and still had money a plenty, the good thing was that I could buy from a friend who bought the most high end pc he could get and every time he upgraded, I could buy that for like next to nothing

As I went to the Pentium 2 and 3 I reached the first Pentium 4 2,5GHz halfway 2005, still hadn't done nothing with Amiga.
Early 2009 I got myself a complete new core I7 975 extreme, which is still the system I have to date.

Late 2009 the Amiga came back again into my life.
I was on Google searching for a Sandisk CF card, my eyes went to a link when I saw the word Amiga, and I was like, ok what is this ?
It was an A1200 using a Sandisk with CF adapter, and searched some more and found Amigascene.nl, Amibay, Amiga.org and EAB.
And then it went with lightning speed :-D

I bought an A1200 locally from MadCat Jr, go figure
Got a Blizzard 1230 IV for it too shortly after that and then came 2010.
Well my albums will tell the story to that, but basically I was able to get the entire Amiga line just short of the A4000T which came in 2011.
Everything was going so fast and I kept going for accelerators, graphic cards, side cars and just about anything I could get my hands on.

Though it was nice to tinker with them and play games, by 2012 it went down again, still collected some nice things, but in 2013, 14 and to present day I haven't really done much with them, other than taking one to our clubdays every 2 months.
I'm now even selling things off, I will keep a few Amiga's with a 060 card, but at some point I had 7 060 cards which seems pointless for just 060 demos or other things you can do with it, but you basic game runs fine on a 030 with more than 4MB of memory.
Even that amount is over the top, rough count is 27!

I still enjoy Amiga, but not as much as in 2010, the boyhood dream of owning all Amiga's is done, so been there, done that, time to move on.
Will also keep going to meetings and parties, but only the good ones as I will also reduce the amount of Amiga's over time, still will keep the entire line, but not all add ons and every revision of the A2000, which are 16 A2000's.

I want to go back to be able to play a few games from time to time and have every Amiga setup and finished rather than stored in racks.
That also means I am spending less time on Amiga forums and more focus on the things I love and I'm going back to the PC world of games, once I can buy a new high end system.

 

[mjnurney]

really great stories guys, keep em coming