They adore their 64s

Ahh they're silly. It's the DEC Rainbow that really rocks!

I absolutely loved my Radio Shack Color Computer. I had all the accessories. Word Star was a killer app and the CompuServe Forums were better than any of todays blogs. I wrote some pretty good spread sheet programs on Visicalc.

Ahhh the good olde daze.

Bob

Yeah, and that WordStar (designed for IBM key entry employees) killer killed lotsa users. It deserved to be killed off, first by Wang, then Multimate, and then (all of those) by WordPerfect, the wordprocessor par-excellence, without peer then or since. The ultimate wordprocessor, WordPerfect did not deserve to be copied and then strongarm supplanted by MS with Word...any more that it would be good to go back to WordStar today. (It all goes to show: make the best possible mousetrap; the world will beat a path to knock off an inferior substitute and run away with your profits.) Ahh, the good ol' technocracy.

Oooh. I sense a little hostility.

WordPrefect did itself in by being late with wysiwyg and then making up its own rather clumsy interface rather than using the basic windows one.

But, WordPerfect still lives, and is generally the platform of choice for lawyers, so it's not like you can't get it if you want it.

lets not forget the Timex sinclare 1000 or even the TI99. Remember even the movie wargames (WAPER) used the TS1000.

Speaking of early computer games. I don't know if it was available for Commodores, etc. but I had a game on my first (1989) PC-AT called 'Beast'. It was a simple screen filled with ASCII border symbols chasing your cursor around the screen. Some of the 'blocks' were immovable, some could be moved, some of the 'beasts' could push blocks, but they could all be squashed if you got them first. I have not been able to find this game anywhere. Does anyone know where a sim for it might exist or be available for download. Gracias! Danke! Arigata Domo!

Ah, my brother's 64 at family gatherings in the mid 80's. We played a game called Olympic Games or something like that. Simple repetitive keystrokes produced by fast wrist twitches were required to win the sprints. I remember chuckling when my sister wondered out loud "Why is it that guys are always better at this?"

Maybe they "adore" their 64s, but the REAL accomplishment of Commodore was introducing the world to the AMIGA.

I was at USAFA when the US government decided to use us as the test-bed in 1985 for a competitive contract to decide whether the military would go with Macintosh, IBM/Intel, or the Amiga, and all were tested in a networking scenario.

The Mac networked easy for those days, but lost big points from being a proprietary hardware/software model (no 3rd party competition).

The Zenith (remember them?) PC won by promoting a generic anybody-can-sell-pieces-for-them design called the Z-200, using a new bus called the IDE and having lots of room in this huge case and running a choice of DR-DOS, IBM-DOS, or MS-DOS, and over 4000 cadets where "issued" one the following year for the planets largest-ever "Local Area Network." Cadets were eventually able to log into the library's DARPA-net to use Gopher programs for research, receiving a summary of matching responses and able to request the full document to be sent.

The AMIGA, on the other hand, blew away everybody with what it could do. Period. 4096 colors! Intel machines had 32, and Macs looked like a black&white 50's Philco TV. But the Amiga just didn't "network" yet without an add-on box; since unfortunately, the A1000 had taken the small-platform route and could not accept full-size third-party boards. Also, Commodore had all the best-and-brightest but had not yet decided the Amiga should bet on the business/spreadsheet crowd, and had first developed it as a bleeding-edge gaming, graphics, and consumer machine (it even had component video-out signal for any TV set, and STEREO sound!). Nearly all the CompSci guys bought one within the year. I eventually sold my A1000 to buy the new A2000 and ran circles around my MS/tel PC buddies for almost a decade, till the shear bulk size of that market brought brute-force computing within range of the better-performing Motorola designs.

Just imagine what could have happened to poor little Commodore, had they immediately tackled the business & networking side and gone with the bigger case and IDE support, or put that Network Interface Card into each of their machines for that first government test run. Little Microsoft, by the way, hedged their own bets by getting the contract to write not only the MS-DOS used for the Intel 8086 machines, but also MS reportedly wrote the AMIGA-DOS code for the Motorola - we could have had PowerPC performance in 1986!

In fact, although there are undoubtedly a few 64 and 128 fans still running around... www.amiga.com lists currently STILL ACTIVE user groups supporting those still getting WORK (and play;) done with their Amigas - and remember, network TV graphics on a PC started with the Video Toaster (Amiga) and even Lightwave and 3D graphics and rendering were not MAC breakthroughs, they were Amiga's!

Too bad it was the only line that was making money and keeping the whole massive, bloated, worldwide Commodore company floating...and too bad they didn't just spin-off the operation earlier as a stand-alone company we could have invested in!