geoffm3
Veteran Member
This kind of reminds me of my rant: Why do we always think of Silicon Valley when we think of computers? I mean, just a quick list of influential early machines:
Altair - Albuquerque, NM
IMSAI - San Leandro, CA
Compaq - TX
IBM PC - Boca Raton, FL
Microsoft - Bellingham, WA
Commodore - West Chester, PA
Dell - Austin, TX
Coleco - Connecticut
Atari - Sunnyvale, CA
Apple - Cupertino, CA
Sun Microsystems - Stanford University, CA
DEC - Maynard, MA
Tandy - Ft. Worth, TX
Texas Instruments - TX
Osborne - CA
Kaypro - San Diego, CA
Wang - Cambridge, MA
Univac - CT/NY
Intergraph - Huntsville, AL (had to put that one on there. )
Granted, there's quite a few California based outfits there, but the crucible of many early computing systems was outside of The Valley as well.
Anyways, back to Commodore. Certainly the Commodore 64 was an influential machine, and I believe still holds record of being the single highest volume seller of any one model computer, and I think even accounting for that sold more units than the entire Apple II line (someone would have to check me on that though). Unlike Jobs, I think Tramiel and others in charge of Commodore really didn't understand that you needed a cohesive platform to build upon. This is evidenced by their almost complete lack of focus and software interoperability between any of the machines in the 8-bit line (64 and 128 notwithstanding). They tried to build a different machine for every potential market it seemed, instead of building on the successes that they had.
I don't think a lot of people really appreciate the contributions to computing technology that many of the engineers that started at Commodore have given to the industry, particularly in the area of sound and graphics capabilities.
Altair - Albuquerque, NM
IMSAI - San Leandro, CA
Compaq - TX
IBM PC - Boca Raton, FL
Microsoft - Bellingham, WA
Commodore - West Chester, PA
Dell - Austin, TX
Coleco - Connecticut
Atari - Sunnyvale, CA
Apple - Cupertino, CA
Sun Microsystems - Stanford University, CA
DEC - Maynard, MA
Tandy - Ft. Worth, TX
Texas Instruments - TX
Osborne - CA
Kaypro - San Diego, CA
Wang - Cambridge, MA
Univac - CT/NY
Intergraph - Huntsville, AL (had to put that one on there. )
Granted, there's quite a few California based outfits there, but the crucible of many early computing systems was outside of The Valley as well.
Anyways, back to Commodore. Certainly the Commodore 64 was an influential machine, and I believe still holds record of being the single highest volume seller of any one model computer, and I think even accounting for that sold more units than the entire Apple II line (someone would have to check me on that though). Unlike Jobs, I think Tramiel and others in charge of Commodore really didn't understand that you needed a cohesive platform to build upon. This is evidenced by their almost complete lack of focus and software interoperability between any of the machines in the 8-bit line (64 and 128 notwithstanding). They tried to build a different machine for every potential market it seemed, instead of building on the successes that they had.
I don't think a lot of people really appreciate the contributions to computing technology that many of the engineers that started at Commodore have given to the industry, particularly in the area of sound and graphics capabilities.