Book Review: The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall
“We need an effort like we’ve never seen before… again!”
Like many computer geeks my age, I grew up using the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. But I was far too young to be reading the Wall Street Journal and the Forbes 500 reports to learn how well the company was or wasn’t doing. I was also too young to realize what a technological leap was born at Commodore and at MOS Technology. So this book was perfect for me; it offers a nice balance between the small picture (geeky hardware stuff) and the big picture (the corporate boardroom decisions).
Although Commodore began business in 1954, the book gives only a cursory description of its early days. The evolution of a typewriter then calculator company is glossed over so that we can get to the good stuff: the creation of MOS Technology’s 6502 microprocessor. With the creation of the 6502, the book takes us on the journey from the Commodore PET to the VIC-20 to the Commodore 64. Unsuccessful sequels to that famous computer are detailed. The story of the Commodore 128 is given a lot of time and it’s a fascinating tale in its own right. Parallel to the later events is the development of a family of computers that would eventually become known as the Amiga.
While all this is going on, the book also goes behind the scenes at the management side of the story. Corporate practices and goals are discussed. Insane deadlines are proposed and sometimes met. Massive managerial blunders are shown with the sad benefit that hindsight affords.
It will be no surprise to people in the computer industry, but as interesting and as groundbreaking as the technology itself was, a lot of the drama comes from human personalities and character flaws. I knew nothing about the people behind the computers, so this was all eye-opening stuff for me.
It was fascinating for me to read about company founder Jack Tramiel, a survivor of Auschwitz, who knew relatively little about technology but was fanatical in support of his slogan: “Computers for masses, not the classes.” The book also offers us what appears to be the two extremes one encounters in the computer science field. On one hand we have the professorial Chuck Peddle, designer of the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, who gives sober and reasoned assessments. And at the other end we have the hard-drinking, hard-living Bil Herd — a system designer who during the course of his stint at Commodore punches both a) a hole in an office wall and b) the face of his company president.
The book is written in a very dry style. I didn’t find this distracting in the least because the story being told is interesting enough in its own right. The bulk of the information comes from modern interviews with the main subjects; contemporaneous magazine articles, newspaper clippings and interviews make up the rest. Author and researcher Brian Bagnall does a great job of balancing the more technical details with the business plans.
As informative as this book was (and I learned a heck of a lot) it was also a fantastic exercise in nostalgia for me. It was great to relive many of the memories of those old machines and to finally know the reasons behind several of the systems’ features. I hadn’t thought about some of those games and applications in decades and I’m still struggling to remember if my four-year-old self ever managed to win at Lunar Lander before giving up.
The story of Commodore is the collection of a lot of little intriguing stories that gradually become more frustrating and depressing as the end of Commodore draws near. Still, all of these stories are interesting, and many of them are hilarious. One of my favorites involves Jack Tramiel snookering a young Bill Gates into a deal that would result in Microsoft losing out on literally millions in royalties. The battle over the size and location of the parking lot speed bumps will ring true to anyone familiar with large organizations.
Even if you’re a computer geek who didn’t own or love a Commodore machine, then you should get this purely for learning about how much influence Commodore had and still has in the field today. And if you were, in fact, a Commodore kid like me, then the information and stories in here are invaluable.
This review was originally posted in July 2008.
