By Jo Best, 5 January 2005 14:30
NEWS Commodore - one of staples of the early 80s and much beloved of those around at the start of the PC revolution - may be about to get a second lease of life. The Commodore brand name has been bought by a digital music company.
Commodore's parent company, Tulip, has sold the brand for 24m to the US firm Yeahronimo.
Yeahronimo, which sells online music as well as running a media distribution arm, says it intends to develop a worldwide entertainment concept around the brand that spawned the Commodore 64. It will also help the company to "speed up" the production of its own tablet PC line.
The deal also gives Yeahronimo the ability to sell Commodore hardware - digital music players and the like - through the commodoreworld.com portal. Yeahronimo is also planning to use the portal to distribute digital movies in the future.
To mark the phoenix-like rebirth of the Commodore, silicon.com will be re-running its "Technologies Time Forgot" series, taking a look back at the machines that started off the 80s home computing boom.
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1. anonymous
This is way outa here!
2. H C Grant
It would seem to me that the Amiga would be a better base than the 64. The Amiga had a GUI way before Windows, it multi-tasked and had inbuilt co-processors. I could wordprocess, listen to music and have a graphic spinning in the background all working concurrently from the Workbench. Ah well ....
3. IVIIVI4ck3y27
The Amiga though is still floating around. What will come of it nobody knows, and it's not so much about "the computer" anymore as most of the new Amiga's efforts seem hinged on Linux or MorphOS-based systems. After all, the benefits of chip-based technologies driving the computer en masse has largely been replaced by cheap RAM and drive storage. Where once booting a system from a LD floppy in full-color was an amazing feat and quite respected/vaunted compared to the competition... today we've got monolithic kernals and systems that take up Gigabytes of hard drives that near closer to Terabyte status. In today's world... the Amiga is even hard-pressed to find a true purpose, other than to compete with embedded OS's.
As far as Commodore, I didn't know there was any real equity left in the name, and rather than a rebirth it's almost like a reincarnation as something entirely different. ::chuckling:: The C64 tickles the cockles of some, but good lord man that was eons ago! There are people that have been born and moved out of H.S. who have likely never seen a C64/128 in action nor have a clue as to what Commodore was/is as a brand.
Shall be interesting to see though. Maybe they'll push out a PowerPC based system using a MorphOS-based Amiga system and have a Commodore Amiga to gleen upon the World. Scarier things have happened. ::chuckling::
Video Toaster, here weeeeee come! :D