Nostalgia

Read­ing Time: < 1 minute

So, nos­tal­gia about com­put­ers and the “good ole’ days” gets strong with me when­ev­er I turn on my old Apple II, or pull out any old mag­a­zines from the ear­ly 80’s or 90’s. My wife laughs at me because I still get goose­bumps and a light in my eye describ­ing how I felt when I first saw the Apple IIgs or the Ami­ga 1000, and how bad I want­ed them. It takes me back to when com­put­ers were fun, mag­i­cal, and rep­re­sent­ed a brave new world to my young mind (with apolo­gies to Aldous Hux­ley).

So it is with great excite­ment that I now have in my pos­ses­sion a book on that ear­ly time, writ­ten about one of the pio­neer­ing com­pa­nies sub­ject to more his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism than most peo­ple real­ize.

“Com­modore, a com­pa­ny on the edge” by Bri­an Bag­nall is an in-depth, inter­est­ing, and more his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate por­tray­al of the ear­ly his­to­ry of micro­com­put­ers in gen­er­al, but Com­modore in par­tic­u­lar, than many I’ve read. Most ear­ly his­to­ries are writ­ten by revi­sion­ist authors like Robert Cringe­ly and tend to dra­mat­i­cal­ly over­state Apple and IBM’s con­tri­bu­tions at the expense of Com­modore and Atari, among oth­ers.

I’ll post a com­plete review when I’m done with the book, but just what I’ve read so far has me pin­ing for sim­pler times. Before I knew acronyms like CCIE, OSPF, NX-OS and had a glob­al enter­prise net­work to tame, I had my Apple II, the Com­modore 64, the Ami­ga 1000 and the Atari ST. They say you can’t go back again, but I’m try­ing.