Prose Poetry Code has been running for over a decade. I’ve written 806 posts, only one of which was never uploaded. (As it turns out, things changed, and I no longer needed to say what was said.) All of those posts were written on the same computer, a home-built PC running Debian, in the same place: my bedroom in the converted attic of the house belonging to my mom and stepdad.
This one’s different in both ways. One, I’m writing for the first time on my laptop. I’ve been using it for most tasks for the past couple of years, as my desktop gets more and more outdated, less and less able to handle the rigors of the modern web. It’s a transition. But I write apps and servers and cloud deployment scripts on here, so why not my "shout into the void" blog posts?
Second, and much bigger, is that I’m writing from somewhere new. Specifically, that’s the apartment I mentioned the other day. It’s not mine. It’s ours. Alas, Leslie can’t be here tonight—she stayed with her mom, at what is now her old home, so she could pick up her wedding dress—which means that I’m truly alone for a night for the first time in my life. A perfect time to do some reading and writing, isn’t it? So that’s why I finished another book for the Summer Reading List.
History
Title: Commodore: The Final Years
Author: Brian Bagnall
Genre: History/Business
Year: 2019
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I was born in 1983. Even if I haven’t said it directly (I honestly can’t remember), you can do the math from my birthday posts. I needed about 8 years to get acquainted enough with computers to become fascinated by them, beginning the obsession that has now stretched to almost three and a half decades. Being fairly poor, I didn’t have a computer at home at the time, so my initial learning came in the form of the salvaged computers in the gifted class at school: an Apple IIe, TRS-80, TI-99, and so on.
In 1993, things started to change. My mom picked up a VTech Laser 128 from a yard sale. Already years old and very obsolete, it still allowed me to learn a bit of programming (Basic and assembly), as well as learn about hardware incompatibility. I played with that for a few months before my uncle, who was moving away for college and needed to offload some things, gave me a Commodore 64. It wasn’t any newer, but it had more games, most of which I couldn’t figure out. Funny how I’m making my own text adventures now.
The Commodore did fascinate me. It had color graphics, a rudimentary GUI, and a friendly feel to it. It was…approachable. For the eight or so months that it was my primary computer, I enjoyed it. I remember tracing out sprites on graph paper and converting them to DATA statements, or reading manuals while trying to fall asleep during a sleepover. I didn’t think anything of Commodore the company at the time; I was just too young for corporate affairs to interest me. For a time, I did wonder why I never saw anything else about them in video game magazines or in stores. I knew my computer was old, but figured there was something else of theirs out there.
Once I grew up, I understood better. Once I found Brian Bagnall’s series about Commodore, I realized how a whole computing revolution really did take place before I was even born. I’m sad that I missed it.
Commodore: The Final Years is the conclusion of the sordid tale of Commodore. It covers the last five years of the company’s existence, picking up where the two previous entries left off. By now, this isn’t the same company that released my beloved C64. It’s not even the one that put out the Amiga, a cult classic I didn’t even know existed until I started running into fans on Slashdot in the early 2000s! No, by 1989, Commodore’s best years are behind it. It’s a corporation run by corporate types, mismanaged at every turn. It’s a sad story, to be honest.
Bagnall is able to capture much of this in his book. It’s a very long, often deep account of each step Commodore took in its path off the edge, and you can get a sense of the characters on the stage. Irving Gould, a multimillionaire business tycoon who ran a computer company despite not knowing how to run a computer. Mehdi Ali, a financier whose ruthlessness in cutting costs was matched only by his ruthlessness in weeding out any critics. Bill Sydnes, a ringer from IBM who couldn’t see past the PC. All the engineers, hardware and software, who built the company but never really got to reap the rewards.
That’s not to say Commodore didn’t try. In its last years, while the C64 was fading to its penultimate fate of a preteen’s hand-me-down computer, Commodore released a number of products that I never saw as a kid. The various Amiga models with their confusing numbers, for example. They were mostly absent from America, and I certainly don’t recall ever spotting one in Radio Shack. The CDTV, their attempt at sneaking a computer into the living room. The CD32, a console that EGM and Gamepro completely ignored. (Let me go back to my mom’s and pull out my magazine collection to check. I still have it somewhere!) Commodore tried, but failed. The reasons are many, as Bagnall is able to illustrate.
Where this book shines is in its attention to detail. It doesn’t shy away from much at all. The author lets the engineers and those higher-ups who were still alive in 2019 to tell the stories, and most of them aren’t afraid to air the dirty laundry. Sometimes, you get the feeling that they’ve waited for the chance. It’s refreshing, especially when you compare it to so many narratives of recent history that are filled with redactions to protect the guilty. (Commodore: The Final Years does do this on one occasion, refusing to name a single programmer, which makes me wonder what sort of threats "Ray" sent the publisher.)
If the book has any flaws, they all stem from the writing style. Bagnall has definitely improved over the course of the Commodore series, but he still writes as if he’s writing the script for a documentary. He offers very little narrative focus or structure, and has the annoying habit of saying something in his terse narration, only to follow it up immediately with a quote from an interested party saying exactly the same thing. Word for word. Take out all instances of this, and the book would be about 100 pages lighter. It would probably flow better, too.
In the end, it doesn’t detract from the story too much. It makes it repetitive and a slog at times, but it’s still a worthy read, if only to see how the mighty can fall. Even today, Commodore serves as a cautionary tale. Any company could meet the same fate. Maybe that’s even more likely now, since so many corporations are run by incompetent managers whose sole purpose is collecting a golden parachute. Or they’re DEI hires who only received their C-suite positions because of their race or sex. Whatever the case, as we race towards another computing bubble, anyone in the business world would do well to read this book. This whole series, in fact. Commodore was once the giant of the home computing revolution. Now it’s nothing more than a name passed around from one shell company to the next to cash in on nostalgia. The same as its bitter rival, Atari.
While that end might not come for Nvidia or Anthropic, the market forces at work remain the same as they were in 1994. A couple of missed quarters, a botched product launch, and the wrong people in the hot seat, and we might be reading AI: The Final Years in 2050.
