Now here’s a piece of news for you old computer geezers out there. A company with the strange name of Yeahronimo (an online entertainment company) has just announced that it has acquired the Commodore brand name for almost US$ 32 Million. It seems they want to ‘do something with it’.

Wow, Commodore! Sure brings back memories. The Commodore 64 introduced million of people to computing in the early 80’s. As a Sinclair Spectrum user, I (and most of my friends) we’re ‘against’ the Commodore 64. But when the Commodore Amiga came out, a number of people in my gang back then switched to it. It was the most amazing computer of its time.

I clearly remember how a friend and I went to this computer store in Amman’s Shmeisani district (it used to be called Mantech, run by Lebanese guy) around 1987 to see the Amiga. When we first saw the moving graphics on its screen we became true believers instantly. I ended up buying the super duper Amiga 2000. That machine enabled my first experimentations with music composition and animation. I Even produced a stupid little animated commercial for biscuits on it that was actually shown on JTV!

Just think about it.. In 1985 Commodore had produced a GUI driven computer with the ability to display 4096 colors and produce high quality 4 channel sound. At the time the Apple Macintosh was barely out (with its little black and white monitor.

Of course, Commodore managed to screw everything up and disappear. A number of revivals were rumored. This is just the latest one. The previous owner of the brand was Tulip Computers, who used to sell some USB accessories under the brand name.

I don’t know how much sense it makes to revive the Commodore brand. Maybe it should just be laid to rest. Let’s see..

From the BBC story on the sale

In the chronology of home computing, Commodore was one of the pioneers. The Commodore 64, launched in 1982, was one of the first affordable home PCs. It was followed a few years later by the Amiga.

The Commodore 64 sold more than any other single computer system, even to this day.

Commodore Computers
1977 Commodore Pet
1981 Vic 20
1982 Commodore 64
1984 Commodore 16
1985 Commodore 128
1984 Commodore Amiga 1000


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Comments

4 responses to “Will Commodore be back?”

  1. Ammar Ibrahim Avatar
    Ammar Ibrahim

    Amiga was the best gaming machine back in the 80’s. I still got Amiga 2000, which was yours before my brother Haitham bough it from you. Too bad it’s not functional anymore.

    What’s really amazing is that even till now, best programmers can’t write a good emulator for Amiga. I heard it’s the hardest emulator ever. They wrote near-perfect emulators for everything else, except Amiga.

  2. Ameen Malhas Avatar
    Ameen Malhas

    Ahhh .. so many memories, my Sakher, my Amiga 500, all replaced by x86 chipsets starting with the 486 DX2 – 66 Mhz, with a 200 MB Hard Drive and 4 megs of RAM.

    I dabbled with Apple PowerBook G4s for a while, but went straight back to a Wintel configuration, I loved Mac OS X, but couldn’t bear seeing a “Our Mac version is being developed” comment in every software FAQ section.

    I don’t know what the point of my comment is, I just felt like maintaining my online presence since my blog is indefinetly dormant (I have writer’s block).

  3. Amr Toukhy Avatar
    Amr Toukhy

    Long live Commodore, if they do it i’ll move right a way !!
    Total loyalty,

    for now,
    http://www.c64.com

  4. Don Cox Avatar
    Don Cox

    The Amiga and the Commodore brand names are owned by different companies.

    A third company (Hyperion) has been writing a major update of the Amiga operating system, which is almost ready for release (after five years of slow work). Hardware for it is a problem right now, but something will probably become available later this year. It will not be as innovative as the original Amiga hardware, but the OS is still very nice to use.

    There is also a clone of the Amiga OS called Morphos, which runs on a readily available PPC motherboard called the Pegasos. This has some happy users. The board also runs all the usual Linux, BSD etc OSes.