Commodore History

I picked up this book about the history of Commodore, the computer company that made the Commodore 64, VIC 20, etc. The VIC 20 was the first computer my father got me and my brother. We were you and primarily used it for computer games.

When we got a little older, Dad got us a Commodore 64, the 1541 floppy disk drive, and a MPS 801 dot-matrix printer. I know -- I'm going off into geek speak here, but I remember using that setup for a long time. I had a word processor and my brother and I did a lot of our school work on this system. We learned a little BASIC, and played quite a few games on the C64.

While my brother and I hacked on the C64 in the house, my dad took the VIC-20 to his ham shack and interfaced it to his radio. I remember running radio teletype (RTTY) on the VIC-20. Follow the link and you'll hear what I spent many hours doing in my dad's ham shack.

The book is an interesting read so far. Commodore was way ahead of Apple and other companies at the beginning of the personal computer industry. It would have been interesting to see what could have happened if they had better funding and better management.

-- Chris