Posted on 12/16/2005 2:15:21 PM PST by nickcarraway
It may be time for a Commodore comeback.
No, Lionel Ritchie isn't signing up with his old band. We're talking about Commodore, the venerable computer brand.
A Dutch consumer media company is hoping it can tap the power of the VIC 20, the PET and the Commodore 64 to launch a new wave of products, including a home media center device and a portable GPS unit and media player.
Yeahronimo Media Ventures, which has offices in Los Angeles and Baarn, the Netherlands, acquired the rights to the Commodore name late last year in a deal worth just over $32.7 million. Earlier this year, it took on Commodore as its own corporate moniker. The rebranded company already has some products available on its Web site, but hopes to make a bigger splash at the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.
"We are excited to be launching our initial offerings at this year's CES," Commodore CEO Ben van Wijhe said in a statement. He said that the three new products will both advance the well-known brand as well as "uphold the world-class quality of yesteryear's Commodore products."
The company has said it plans to launch three products at the show. The Commodore MediaBox is an all-in-one home entertainment box with an Internet connection, digital TV tuner and hard drive for playing music downloads, games or on-demand video. The Commodore Navigator is a Windows CE-based portable device with a 20GB hard drive for music and video storage as well as built-in GPS and a 3.6-inch touch screen.
"Never before has a brand come out of hibernation and truly reinvented itself to position competitively in an ever-evolving digital media marketplace," van Wijhe said.
This is far from the first attempted comeback in tech, however. The Amiga, Commodore's onetime PC brand, has had its own decades-long history as fans tried to preserve both the computer's operating system and brand despite the lack of strong corporate backing.
Gateway had hopes of reinvigorating the Amiga PC when it bought the name and technology in 1997, but eventually scrapped its plans and sold the brand in 1999. Efforts to keep the computer's OS alive, however, have continued into the current decade.
Another '80s game name, Atari, bounced among several owners before making a comeback earlier this decade. Gamemaker Infogrames acquired Atari's name and game titles in 2001 and began using Atari as its own corporate name in May 2003. Meanwhile, Atari's classic games have also found new life in low-end TV consoles and cell phones.
Napster is perhaps one of the best-known recent transformations, with an authorized music subscription service taking on the brand built as the first of many rebel peer-to-peer file sharing systems.
What the heck are they going to run on their media box, anyway? AmigaOS 4? Windows?
In 1985, the Amiga was the best personal computer on the market. Period. Best graphics, sound, OS, could multi-task. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology. Still amazed that it never really took off.
While the commodore 64 was a great little platform and im sure the Vic 20 is still plenty useful, this sounds like a flop to me
Commodore 64, 2 floppy drives, expansion module, printer = $800 in 1984. 300K connection rates if I was lucky.
Sold for $25 when I bought a 386 w/ a 10 gig HD.
Ahh, the VIC 20, with its trusty "3583 bytes free" greeting at startup. Those were the days ...
Commodore games are available in one of those plug-in-to-your-TV units. Really cool stuff, Paradroid and Impossible Mission 1 and 2 (plus a bunch of other stuff) for 20 bucks. It would be nice to see them comeback, they were the best desktop game environment.
I owned an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 2000. Awesome machines. They were used to create Max Headroom for crying out loud!
We were laffing the other day about the AN/UYK 20 computer (military) with its 64k boards of core memory. It was all very high tech ;)
Second computer I ever owned (first being a Timex Sinclair) and I loved it. You had to make some accomodations but that was part of it's charm.
I was completely amazed at the Amiga's power even up until 1990 or so. It could do more with less CPU horsepower than any other PC before or since. One wonders what their engineers could have done with a 64-bit Opteron, 1 GHz Hypertransport and 16 gigabytes of DDR RAM. :-)~
It just proves again what Microsoft and Intel have continued to prove repeatedly:
Better marketing beats better technology.
And the special effects for Babylon 5.
Anybody interested in an old Kaypro or a Coleco Adam??
Ahhh Kaypro, another world class leader L0L
I remember back in the mid 80's I had a friend who was really in to computers. He had a Commodore 64.
The article's a little unsettling, because whatever else you can say about Commodore, it was never known for its quality control.
I remember the Amiga. Even tried to develop software for it. It was the most crashy computer I've ever seen before or since. Even early Windows looks half-decent by comparison. The screen would slide down and a big red box would appear with a "Guru Meditation" number.
The multitasking worked great, but of course if one application crashed so did the whole environment. That made the multitasking less than useful since you couldn't do anything in the background without having the foreground application crash and kill the machine :-(.
So I can't be too nostalgic for the Amiga, I'm afraid. And I don't see how it would make a Windows CE computer anything other than, well, a Windows CE computer.
D
I had the VIC 20, 64 & 128. Matter of fact, I still have the 128 in its box within the confines of my Fibber McGee closet!
Someday, I will get up the courage to open the closet door...
LOAD"*",8,1
But will it read my old floppies?
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