Back in the 1980s, there was a lot of heavy competition taking place between computer manufacturers. Companies were coming out with faster, more powerful systems. They’d play up the cutting edge graphics of the day and advertise a lot of the “eye candy” features.
The Commodore 64 was one computer that really highlighted its graphics and gaming capabilities.
Well, nostalgia fans, The Commodore 64 is back! True, it won’t have the same hardware under the hood, but you can have the same look and feel of the one you may have owned when you were a kid.
Their web site states:
“Commodore USA, LLC, recently secured licensing rights to both the Commodore and AMIGA brands and will be releasing a series of all-in-one computers, desktops, notebooks and tablets in the coming years and months. We believe these much loved icons of the golden age of computing continue to have value and we will endeavor to produce competitive and innovative products in a manner befitting their heritage. We are excited to bring back the Commodore 64 (the greatest selling computer model of all time) as a modern keyboard computer suitable for every day usage. It also gives us great pleasure to reboot the famous AMIGA line of computers with the cutting edge technology you would expect in today’s personal computers.”
I remember when the Commodore 64 was all the rage back in the 80s and part of the 90s. but it was the next generation of Commodore computer, The Amiga, that really caught my attention. that’s the one system I always wanted. Check out the above videos to see what the Amiga computer was doing back in the early 1990s! Really amazing stuff!
Allow me to relate a personal story. It’ll give you an idea of how sophisticated the Amiga was back then.
Back in 1999 or 2000, as Chairman of the NCS Great Lakes Chapter, I set up a tour of Character Builders, an Ohio based animation studio.
Since the late 1980’s they had been doing a lot of hand drawn animation for Disney and other animation studios. Disney and others would farm out sequences to smaller studios in order to meet production deadlines.
Character Builders worked on the animated films Space Jam, Rover Dangerfield, Bebe’s Kids, and a bunch of others. They’d animate ten minutes of Space Jam or five minutes of Rover Dangerfield, 8 minutes of Bebe’s Kids, etc.
But, as time went on, they got more and more involved with bigger projects.
Jim Kammerud, CB’s founder, even directed the Disney direct to video Dalmations sequel, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure. Jim is an extremely talented guy! And a really nice, approachable person, to boot.
Anyhow, here’s the point, during the tour, I asked Jim about computer technology and what they were using to help and streamline production. They specialized in hand drawn animation, but I figured they must have been digitizing their pencils to check accuracy, etc.
Sure enough, they were using computers to do their pencil tests and other tasks.
As I recall, Jim said they had used the Commodore Amiga. It was fast, lightweight, and just brilliant (for the 1990s). Jim commented back then that files were high rez and small in size. Very easy to transfer from station to station.
But, at the time of the tour, Commodore had gone out of business. CBs could no longer find hardware to keep the systems running, so had to move to other computer systems.
I recently contacted Jim and he confirmed, “Mark, we used to use Amiga machines.” he went on to say that, “…that stuff is so crazy old and out of date it would be ludicrous to use it, even for nostalgia’s sake. A super cheap 5 year old Mac bought on ebay is still about 3 million times more useful.”
Very true. Computers today are light years ahead of what was being used back in the late 1990s. But, as stated earlier, the newer Commodore computers will rely on today’s hardware.
And, the new commodore will be running Linux!
“Our new Commodore operating system, will be a unique Commodore and AMIGA centric Linux distribution, that will grow over time into something far greater. Commodore OS will not be your run of the mill Linux distribution. Every consideration will be given to retaining the look and feel of the classic Workbench environment, however there are limits to what is possible at this time, and we do not seek to re-invent the wheel. Our sights are set on creating an operating system environment competitive with the likes of those offered by Microsoft and Apple. An operating system that is inviting and accessible to new and old Commodore owners featuring modern day paradigms. With the inclusion of a plethora of the best open source games and applications, we intend to champion the open source movement and show the world what open source is capable of.”
Well, there you have it. The new Commodore. New hardware, running a Linux distribution, and cashing in on the nostalgia craze.
Oh, and there are folks out there who’ve kept their Amiga computers running.
