The Nine Lives of Commodore by Dick Estel You'll find this does not cover all nine of the lives mentioned in the title--because Commodore has not yet reached it's final life. First Commodore was a "low cost" home computer, priced around $600, well below the thousand or more required for a Radio Shack or Apple product about the same time. Next the price dropped substantially, with the bottom retail store price in the neighborhood of $150 to $200 for the C-64. During this incarnation over ten million C-64's were sold worldwide. At the same time the disrespect that Commodore has suffered ever since began, with the epithet of the day being "game machine." Part of this was due to the fact that Commodore was in fact the best game machine around. IBM had crude graphics and no sound other than a pitiful "beep." Then came the decline of Commodore the company, which stayed away from the pattern of innovation, advancement, and obsolescence marking the rest of the PC world. In its final years the company gave birth to another excellent, non-compatible machine, the Amiga. With the demise of the company, Commodore entered the "orphan" phase. But there were plenty of "foster parents" willing to continue to care for their machines. User groups became the primary method of support. Soon Windows arose as the primary force in the PC world (borrowing liberally from Apple who had borrowed from Xerox). At this time Commodore became "obsolete." This seems to have been the status for the last five or six years, even as unsung heros labored to drag the Commodore into the 21st century with RAM expansion, hard drives and processor speed-up hardware like the Super CPU. Now Commodore seems to have entered a new life era. I'm not sure what to call it, but possibilities include "venerated classic," "historic curio," and "tool of unrepentant neanderthals." This phase is marked by a strange interest in these "archaic" machines by the popular mass media. In the summer of 1999 a positive and respectful article appeared in the New York Times. At the 1999 Vintage Computer Show in Santa Clara, our club president, Robert Bernardo, made contact with people from several publications. Out of this came an article in Wired magazine, which usually has its compass pointed unwaveringly to the future. Wired interviewed Robert, programmer Maurice Randall and others, conducted a photo session with Robert in early January. The magazine, Shift, which is kind of a Wireless for the great white north published an article on the Vintage Computer Show and featured Robert's photo in the table of contents as well as the article, along with a half dozen other pictures from the show. I myself received a call from The Fresno Bee (our local newspaper) to ask about "people who use old computers." This culminated in an article in The Bee's "Neighbors" section, which is sort of an attempt to print a folksy small town newspaper for various regions of our metropolis. The article featured a photo of an Amiga (Commodore's "other" brand) and its proud owner, along with comments from Amiga users, a brief nod to Atari, and my own comments on the state of Commodore. Let's see, that's about five lives. So I guess we have at least four more to look forward to as we plunge headlong into a new century. A good time to keep this in mind: If you never change your style, it's bound to come back again. From "The Interface," newsletter of Fresno Commodore User Group