Commodore
by Brian Bagnall · first published 2019
70% recommend30% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Detailed history of Commodore's rise and fall, covering the 6502 and MOS origins, how the PET, VIC-20 and C64 came to be, and the rocky management; suits retro-computing fans and tech business history readers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
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…by Matt Zandstra Some Classic Computing Non-Fiction (circa 80s and earlier): * Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder * Fire in the Valley - Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine * Hackers - Steve Levy * Commodore: A Company on the Edge - Brian Bagnall (get the second edition) * The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald M. Weinberg - for being written in 1971 (with an updated edition in 98) it is very interesting…
on “Ask HN: My Birthday's Tomorrow, I Need Book Recommendations” ↗Almost 38 years, even... If you're interested in the story around MOS and the 6502, the early parts of "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall covers it quite a bit including parts about the manual layout work that Bill Mensch did. Here's an article about it too: http://research.swtch.com/6502 Not only…
on “The 6502 CPU's overflow flag explained at the silicon level” ↗"On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" by Brian Bagnall covers quite a bit of the Amiga development. http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodore/d... However, the rewritten / "second edition", "Commodore: A Company on the…
on “Google employee ports Amiga emulator to Chrome” ↗If you love Commodore computers, then Brian Bagnall wrote a really good book on the history of Commodore's 8-bit machines. http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/d...
on “A History of Commodore’s 8-bit Computers” ↗Have you read "Commodore: a company on the edge"? https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/... It's not critical of Woz but it does re-seat him as a peripheral figure. I was surprised given the other things…
on “Steve Wozniak Was My Computer Teacher in 1995” ↗If you want more context to the story I recommend the following, fascinating book. https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/...
on “The Story of the Team Behind the 6502” ↗A good book that has quite a bit of CSG and chuck peddle commentary on the 6502 and commodore more specifically is Commodore: A Company on the Edge http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/d... It goes into how Chuck was at times doing a roadshow with the 6502 educating and…
on “Excavating the microprocessor responsible for the home computing revolution” ↗+1. Interested readers should check out the very good book "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall for this and other fascinating stories from how the PET, VIC-20, and C64 came to be. (And parallels to Internet-age companies are a fun exercise for the reader)
on “A Minimal C64 Datasette Program Loader” ↗Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall is highly recommended.
on “The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan” ↗Brian Bagnall’s “Commodore: A Company On the Edge” covers the history of the PET, VIC-20, and C64. There was no master plan that anyone could stick to for more than six months (the management stories are horrifying) and the C64…
on “C64 Keyboard Prototype” ↗…actually recommend. There are a lot of newer books, but they seem to approach video games from a more sensationalized space. One exception I would make are the works of Brian Bagnall, who writes about Commodore/Amiga. I haven't read his books but I hear they are amazing. For documentaries, not exactly the same, but I enjoy the Bedrooms to Billions series (feature films, 2 are out) and to a slightly lesser extant…
on “The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry (2013)” ↗If you really want to read about all things Commodore, pick up Brian Bagnall's books [1]. They're not really for those with a casual interest (though you have the option of the 500+ page single volume first version or the second version which ballooned to…
on “How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s” ↗Most of what I know about that comes from Brian Bagnall's books (e.g. Commodore: A company on the edge). It's covered in the first chapter. I don't know of any preserved documents - if they exist they'd belong to Motorola, and I'd expect the leavers would have preferred to ditch…
on “6502 “Illegal” Opcodes Demystified” ↗For those interested, On The Edge by Brian Bagnall (http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/...) does a good job recounting the life and death of Commodore. The management of that company was definitively rocky.
on “The shocking toll of hardware and software fragmentation on Android development” ↗This. Also "Spinoff" by Charlie Sporck - early Silicon Valley history on Semi companies "Commodore - a company on the edge" by Brian Bagnall "Only the paranoid survive" by Andy Grove - Intels switch to Microprocessors. (Interestingly you can see in the book that he realized the power of the internet,…
on “Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?” ↗