Chapter 1
The history of the personal computer
The real story
For those of you who don't know who the man is the guy who smoked all of those cigarettes in the x files. See Noam Chomsky for footnotes on the subject. The first thing the man realized in the early eighties was there are too many PC developers this is bad for monopolies and dominance.
Some of the developers are well known to you and excuse me if I miss any. I remember the Timex Sinclair it was the closest thing to what we call a Blackberry today in terms of size and efficiency. Maybe it's just a coincidence that both the Blackberry and the Commodore are Canadian developed, and they actually worked. It ran slowly and had a cassette drive as a storage and playing unit. However it was tiny and extremely efficient quite remarkable.
Then shortly after there was the commodore PET and VIC then the 64 all by Commodore.
The Commodore sold 800,000 VIC-20s world-wide in 1982, reached the 1 million mark early it 1983, and they are now being shipped at the rate of 100,000 units per month. The 64 had already passed the Apple II in monthly unit sales. And by March, 1983 the 64 was being shipped at the rate of 25,000 machines a month. (http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/torpet_c_25years/torpet_c_25years.htm) The 64 was the first true multimedia PC and this was1983 it had sound graphics and colour. This was 1983 not 2003 as the above pic shows that is a laptop PC yes a laptop and yes its 1983.
Another recent step has been the development of a sophisticated new voice synthesizer for the Commodore 64. The Commodore speech module plugs directly into the Commodore 64, and at present has a vocabulary of 235 words. This is the first voice I/O product to be developed at the company's Speech Technology Division in Dallas, Texas.
Again its 1983 and Commodore is number one in PC sales with well over 300 million dollars in sales.
The whole commodore story can be found and is quoted here from http://www.commodore.ca/history/
The 64 is smaller than your PC today and this is 1983 and this was only a trace of what the new Commodore Amiga could do. The Amiga 500 all the way up to the Amiga 4000 were true multimedia video production PCs used by everyone in the movie industry and millions worldwide this was 1987. These computers were not only working but you literally could not crash them, I know I tried daily for 5 years.
Multitasking was common you could be editing a video, playing chess and printing a document simultaneously. This computer was also compatible with IBM, Macintosh and UNIX. No this computer didn't have gigabytes of hard drive space or ram .No this computer had a 50 mhz cpu and 1mb of ram with a floppy drive.
And I can hear you asking, "and this computer had live video and did non linear editing for movies like Star trek or star wars?" Yes it did. I know because I was doing it too. And it worked all the time? Yes I can show you the articles and letters to the magazines and user groups that we sent in where we recorded what efforts we made daily to crash this computer, 99 per cent were unsuccessful and the ones that did usually did something electronically dangerous to do so.. I did however blow up a monitor or two.
The Commodore CDTV32 was the first multimedia set top box. It had all of the Amiga elements and could play real live video for gaming. Games with actual video and sound not pixels or graphics. What year was this 2006 no it was 1989 sixteen years ago. All of the Amiga's were multi Cpu yes they all had 3 Cpu's . Today you cant find a PC even simulating a dual processor never mind a triple cpu or compatible with multiple operating systems. Look at the fervor that is created today over the fact that the Mac can now use Intel and IBM software too.
What happened and why?