I don’t know how I got to thinking about Commodores lately. It was most likely tied to recently finding a program that let me play old C64 games on my phone. Maybe I’m just getting bored of OSX.
Still, I can’t get those old boxes out of my head.
Sometimes they enter my dreams. During kindergarten, my class took naptime in the school’s computer room. I still get flashes of that tiny screened, but deeply frightening (to 5-year-old me) PET staring at us as we covertly played with Hot Wheels instead of dozing.
Eventually I got a proper C64 – a hand-me-down from a family friend.
Contrary to what Shatner would have you believe, It was basically a gaming box. To penniless kids trading those 5 ¼ disks was a daily activity. My final count was well into the hundreds.
What I didn’t know at the time, that I know now is Jack Tramiel started Commodore in Toronto before moving to the States, while Wikipedia has the rest, does anyone know where their offices were?
I did discover Toronto still has a PET club that has a reasonably up to date site offering archives and parts, although I’m a bit bummed about missing World of Commodore 2008, which was held here in December.
While Commodore as we know it is dead, defeated by cheap PCs and even those pricey Apples they sought to crush, their name lives on in several forms (and forums). The games, as mentioned earlier, survived and the name can also be found attached to run-of-the-mill netbooks, sacrilegiously running on Windows. [rssbreak]
