Commodore: A Company on the Edge


  • Author: Brian Bagnall
  • Page count: 577
  • Started on: 2025/01/14
  • Finished on: 2025/01/26
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • ★★★★☆



Book cover for "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall. The design features a blurred image of a vintage computer keyboard in the foreground with abstract, colorful overlays and the Commodore logo subtly integrated in the background. The title is prominently displayed in bold text on a black bar across the center.

Being a computer geek I love reading about computer history. And going through my teens in Europe in the 80s, means that I grew up in the heyday of Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and MSX. My first owned home computer was an Atari 600-XL, but I played with the C64 plenty too - but at friend’s houses and at the department store in our local mall.

This book captures the history from Commodore’s first forray into building their own chips (after acquiring MOS Technologies, and building the 6502), and co-creating the market of (what are now called) home computers with their low-cost computers, which only Sinclair seemed to be able to match.

The story is told through interviews with the key players of the era, and the author does a good job of gluing all their stories together. There is almost no narrator perspective here, which can either be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you like to hear about history. It does lead to things being a bit more verbose a times, and the book feeling like one very long string of quotes.

Still: a piece of background on a period in computer history that I lived through, but hadn’t read through as much yet - so I very much enjoyed it. There’s a follow up book about the Amiga era, but I’ll probably skip that. But if anyone knows of a similar book to this about Atari, Sinclair, or one of the other large players of that era: please hit me up on the links at the top!

Magic pixel View count: