#934 in Business & money books
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Reddit mentions of The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge
Sentiment score: 3
Reddit mentions: 5
We found 5 Reddit mentions of The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge. Here are the top ones.
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- Used Book in Good Condition
Features:
Specs:
| Height | 9 Inches |
| Length | 6 Inches |
| Number of items | 1 |
| Release date | September 2005 |
| Weight | 2 Pounds |
| Width | 1.37 Inches |
Jack was a cutthroat business man. He went on rants and threaten not to pay suppliers for any reason. He knew how to get shit done.
Read: One The Edge: The Rise and Fall of Commodore.
http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/0973864907
Its a good book.
> capable of displaying 4096 colors
Well, they certainly were, but the iconic Tutenkhamun demo image only used 32 of them at once out of the 12-bit palette - See this shot. Hold-and-Modify (HAM) mode allowed use of all 4096 at once, though with odd color fringe artifacts and performance limitations. Still, it meant Amigas could display digitised photos and videos in shockingly high quality for the era. Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry demoing the Amiga
Of course, what's most amazing was how CBM squandered the immense technical lead and then imploded. There's literally a book about it.
As mentioned, this is mostly drama. It does not consider other players at the time. If you are interested in another perspective, I recommend reading On The Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. Talks mainly about Commodore - of course - but the state of competition really shines through. Apple is mentioned and discussed in detail, as the author seem to think they stole Commodore's thunder :) It's some years since I read it, I should really do it again.
Okay, bullshit might be a slight exaggeration but it does give a fairly single sided view of the early period of home computing. From a dramatic point of view it makes sense to focus on Microsoft and Apple, but during that period they were both fairly small players.
To complete the view on the period I'd suggest reading Priming the Pump and On the Edge. Both of these are also probably very biased and at least the latter is hilariously anti-Apple at parts, so apply the usual amounts of grain-of-salt.
For a British perspective The Micromen. I'm not aware of any good documentaries on the Japanese side of things or the Atari line of computers but I guess there exists some.
The early Byte magazines are also a good source.
I'm looking over On the Edge and it seems really fascinating but might be more about the computer business than the actual engineering behind the companies products.
Can you tell me more about it?