I was disappointed that they ignored Commodore, which was in there with the PET before the Apple II. They even made the 6502 chip, which Apple, Atari and Nintendo among others used.
Plus, the C64 absolutely demolished Apple in sales, and the Amiga was far more revolutionary than the poorly selling Macintosh.
This whole story can be found in the book "On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" located at www.commodorebook.com
Way to promote your book, Brian!
By the way, it worked; I just ordered a copy. A signed copy, no less. Now I must eat brains... ;)
-Bill
Heh, yeah pretty shameless but I really want more people to see the other side of the story. So many key figures are ignored in the "Apple-centric" telling of the story by Cringely, who happened to be an Apple empoyee and hence exaggerates their impact on the industry.
shareIt's not "Apple-centric".
Bob was a very early Apple employee when he was younger and never made a career out of it.
Plenty of time spent on the Altair 8800, Xerox PARK, IBM, Microsoft, The Homebrew Computer Club, Intel, Visicalc & Lotus 123,
OS/2, MS DOS, and Larry Ellison.
The big subject is the GUI and how it was created and why it was so important. Commodore GEOS, how many people really used it?
Besides Commodore Amiga fans have that 2 hr dvd:
The Deathbed Vigil - The last days of Commodore
QUOTE:
Besides Commodore Amiga fans have that 2 hr dvd:
The Deathbed Vigil - The last days of Commodore
It is better to read Fire In The Valley to know more about Commodore's impact.
shareThe Amiga was more revolutionary than the Macintosh? That's odd, seems like everyone uses a GUI-based computer these days.
shareThe Amiga was revolutionary for its time being the first truly multi-tasking computer for the desktop. It also had by far the best graphics and audio and a sophisticated OS, far surpassing Apple, IBM and the rest. This was a really groundbreaking computer yet Commodore squandered its advantage away in a couple of years.
shareIndeed, the Amiga combined the best of the Mac with the best of the PC world, plus some goodies of its own. I consider it the equivalent of Windows 98SE, except back in the 80s. (Actually, you could even emulate a Mac on the Amiga if you wanted, at pretty much the same speed, as they shared the same CPU)
It had a great GUI. Most interestingly, you could have multiple "screens" in different resolutions stacked one behind the other, so you could quickly change between the desktop, and a variety of application screens, just by pulling them down. This was in addition to having the usual windows as well, but why have a bunch of windows on a desktop when each can have its own screen? I'm sure a PC could do this today, but I've still never seen it.
It also had a great CLI, using AmigaDOS. Drives could have custom names, not just code letters. Even the letters were more understandable (DF0 and DF1 for the two floppy drives, and DH0, DH1, etc for the hard drives). Files had appropriate extensions, such as ".device" for device drivers, ".filetype" for file types, and ".library" for what PCs would call DLLs.
What was really cool was the use of the ARexx language for custom interprocess communication, allowing users to write scripts to coordinate how any combination of applications should operate together while they were running (yay multitasking!).
And of course the integrated audio and video were superior to anything else I saw on the market, until Commodore fell asleep at the switch.
I shouldn't fail to mention the Amiga's use as the initial platform for the Video Toaster. The Amiga's clock was synced to NTSC or PAL television timings, so anyone interested in television output was naturally interested in the Amiga rather than Mac or PC.
Most interestingly, there was no shutdown. You could pull the plug, and it would start again the next time just fine (but not a good idea to try this during a disk write, of course).
Frankly, the people who let this beautiful machine die should be publicly shamed and mocked.
For years Bob Cringley kept at his website of a log of user comments people had left about Triumph of the Nerds when it was first broadcast. Seemed like about 90% of the comments were "Hey how come you didn't mention ________ ?!?!?" To which Bob basically said "Look... I had three hours to tell over 20 years of history. I couldn't mention every single thing. So thank you, and @#$% off."
share[deleted]
I agree. I posted elsewhere about the Amiga, but as great as it was, mismanagement killed it and it's a footnote now. But the real pieces missing from the documentary were the PET, Vic20, and C64. These were ubiquitous. They were in schools, and just flooded into homes (particularly the C64).
Wikipedia says: "During the C64's lifetime, sales totalled between 12.5 and 17 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time."
Looking at the citations, it seems Commodore did sell at least 12.5 million units. I'm not sure if this makes it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time, but I remember this claim from a decade ago. It seems likely, given that it was cheap and uniform, rather than expensive or open architecture.
In any case, the rise and eventual fall of Commodore deserved at least 15 minutes.