My first computer was a Commodore 64, bought ca. 1981 for (if I remember correctly) $895 Canadian, plus $595 for the 1541 floppy disk drive. (It came with a plastic Apple core on a string to wear around your neck, the Apple II being the main competitor for the C64 when it launched.) I used it (the computer, not the plastic apple core, which I somehow never found a good reason to wear) for several years, replaced it with another, and then bought a Commodore 128 which served me until I bought my first Intel PC (a 386) when I became a full-time freelancer in 1993. My Dad continued to use my old Commodore 64 for a while after that.
If I remember correctly, both Soulworm and The Dark Unicorn (and possibly Spirit Singer, too) were originally written on my Commodore 64, using the marvellous little word processor known as PaperClip. (My chapters always used to be 10 to 12 pages in manuscript format, because that was the maximum length of a single PaperClip file.) Somehwere in storage still lurks the Commodore daisy-wheel printer I used to print them out, sitting beside it and winding in the paper (and carbon paper–a daisy wheel can print carbons, too!) one sheet at a time…
So it was with great pleasure that I read this story, which says Commodore (well, the current owner of the brand-name, anyway) is returning to making computers:
Commodore Gaming, a distant inheritor of an illustrious name in computing history, has announced that it will launch its gaming PCs at the forthcoming CeBit show in Hannover, Germany.
Cool.
Not that I’ll buy one, you understand. But…cool.
