Commodore Tackles Asus Eee Keyboard with Invictus

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and yet the writer is calling this the clone? seems to me commodore was the orginal
 

ta152h

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[citation][nom]bodybag[/nom]and yet the writer is calling this the clone? seems to me commodore was the orginal[/citation]

Commodore has cloned before. They created a PC compatible.

I know it's blasphemous to give kudos to Apple, but seeing Commodore's name reminds me of just what a unique company Apple really is.

All the others are dead or have left the business. The pioneers, like Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack, IBM, Compaq have all either died, been consumed or left the business. Of the early player, only Apple remains. And not only do they remain, but they are flourishing the same as they did before - with overpriced products.

Thumb me down all you want, but Apple deserves credit for being the last man standing, and by doing it their own way.

I'm just hoping one of these decades they make a product I'll actually want.
 

ryano

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Well wasn't the Amiga 1000 the first consumer computer that had true multitasking, a mouse-driven GUI, and a mouse ? Not to mention 16-bit color, 4-channel sound, full-screen video, well before Apple produced a comparable machine. It was actually Commodore and Atari who were the innovators..with Apple playing copycat.
 

ryano

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Sorry TA152H - I posted before I really "read" your post. Seeing the comments under this article caused me to flashback to my teenage days when computers were mystical devices.. at least my Amiga 500 was..when my friends were beating down our door to play its games and watch the latest cracktros from the pirated software I downloaded from the local BBS.. as all they had at home was an IBM PC with CGA or 16-color EGA if they were lucky.. and forget about bitplanes and color-cycling and sprites.

It's sad that now the Commodore name has been bought and sold so many times over the last two decades, and now their name is associated with selling peripherals.

The mid 80's to mid 90's were the quantum leap periods of computer multimedia evolution and will always be fondest in my memory I now have a Core i7 with an ATI5870... what kind of evolutionary leap can I possibly expect in the next 5 years ? The difference between 16xAAA and 16xMSAA isn't all that noticeable to me.
 

ianpac

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Apple Mac was launched 18 months before the Amiga 1000. Its only advantage was it was cheaper than Apple but then there is nothing new in that - everyone is cheaper than Apple.

@TA152H - Apple would have died too if Bill Gates had not stepped in to save them in the late 1990s. Microsoft is the one true survivor because they monopolized the operating system all the hardware suppliers built around.
 

ta152h

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[citation][nom]ryano[/nom]Well wasn't the Amiga 1000 the first consumer computer that had true multitasking, a mouse-driven GUI, and a mouse ? Not to mention 16-bit color, 4-channel sound, full-screen video, well before Apple produced a comparable machine. It was actually Commodore and Atari who were the innovators..with Apple playing copycat.[/citation]

Actually, the Tandy Color Computer was the first microcomputer to multi-task, running an operating system called OS-9.

Apple took the mouse and GUI were the first to put it on a microcomputer.

Commodore bought the Amiga, and it was a headache they couldn't figure out how to solve until it was irrelevant. The Amiga had a lot of customer designed chips that were supposed to help out the 68K, which was kind of dated by the time the Amiga came out.

I remember seeing the Amiga and couldn't understand how anyone could even look at it. The screens flickered so badly you'd get a migraine the interlacing was so bad. Eventually, the ironed out the problems, but, by then it was competing with PS/2s running OS/2, and they never really had much of a chance to be anything mroe than a niche product.

The Amiga was a failure, plain and simple. Commodore did have some successes though, like the Commodore 64 and Vic-20. The Commodore 64 redefined computers for a while, with such a low price and so much memory. It also added sprites, which made for better games.
 

ta152h

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[citation][nom]ianpac[/nom]Apple Mac was launched 18 months before the Amiga 1000. Its only advantage was it was cheaper than Apple but then there is nothing new in that - everyone is cheaper than Apple.@TA152H - Apple would have died too if Bill Gates had not stepped in to save them in the late 1990s. Microsoft is the one true survivor because they monopolized the operating system all the hardware suppliers built around.[/citation]

It's scary that people pass on misinformation like this. Microsoft bought $150 Million worth of shares of Apple stock in 1997, which was a drop in the bucket, and in no way was why Apple survived. In 1998, Apple made $308 Million in profits. The reason Apple survived was Steve Jobs refocusing the company, paring it down, and then rebuilding it with products like the iMac.

Microsoft saving Apple? Good grief, now I've heard everything. I never thought it was possible for someone to think that, but, humans never fail to believe what they want so it is comfortable for them.

By the way, that investment paid off pretty well for Microsoft.

It's amazing just how biased people are.
 

chickenhoagie

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[citation][nom]TA152H[/nom]It's scary that people pass on misinformation like this. Microsoft bought $150 Million worth of shares of Apple stock in 1997, which was a drop in the bucket, and in no way was why Apple survived. In 1998, Apple made $308 Million in profits. The reason Apple survived was Steve Jobs refocusing the company, paring it down, and then rebuilding it with products like the iMac. Microsoft saving Apple? Good grief, now I've heard everything. I never thought it was possible for someone to think that, but, humans never fail to believe what they want so it is comfortable for them. By the way, that investment paid off pretty well for Microsoft. It's amazing just how biased people are.[/citation]
Sorry, but because microsoft was prosecuted as being a monopoly they were forced to give up money to other companys. apple was dead in the water and got a lucky chance to live another day. they used it to their advantage of course, by using very sly and stylish marketing/design. But we all know of course that Apple just makes underpowered, shiny looking eye candy for the dull minded. (sadly, many of us are dull minded). Gotta love it.
 

ryano

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TA152H - I don't see how the Amiga was a failure.. it brought the concept of multimedia authoring to the computer hobbyist (Amigavision). Many of today's software houses cut their teeth coding Amiga games (Psygnosis, Macromedia, Lightwave, ) hell ! What about the Video Toaster ? Granted it wasn't an Amiga but it sure required an Amiga to run it.. the toasters changed the face of Cable TV overnight.

The Amiga launched entire industries while the Apple and PC were fighting over who had the best word processor.
 

Blessedman

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Yes ryano, thank you! While Mac ruled the desktop publishing arena, it was Amiga [Commodore] and NewTek who actually revolutionized video editing and broadcasting. They brought a system that cost roughly $3-5k that did the job as good and sometimes better than systems that cost $20-100k. That is a very large leap for a pretty small company. I know professional suites that used the Toaster (and the Amiga) into the late 90's for all their editing needs. It is a shame that the Amiga [Commodore] had such sketchy operators in control of the ship. Jay Miner was a true pioneer of the industry and his chip-set honestly blew the competition off the map even being a few years late.
 
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Ah, people are talking about cloning and copying... Any company that creates a "computer" are hence copying the very first. Which was, what, made in the 1940's?

Everyone are copying everyone. Just pick what you like best...
 

g00ey

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@TA152H: I can't really see how the Amiga was a failure really. I think it was very successful and way over its competitors in terms of performance when it came and were hot.

When the Amiga 1000 came out with 4096 colors (in HAM mode) and 4 8-bit audio channels the Macintosh was black and white with a small 7" CRT screen.

Sure the interlace mode was flickering but that is the best you can do if you want to get a higher video resolution on a simple NTSC/PAL/SECAM TV. There were scan doublers and flicker fixers that could get rid of the flickering on a capable monitor, and graphic cards such as Merlin and CyberGFX that were capable of showing 16.8 million colors at a time period where PCs had MSDOS with and Windows 3.11 with 16 colors. There were tons of addons and upgrades that could make an Amiga beat the crap out of any contemporary Mac or PC.

But the Amiga as it were didn't survive plain and simple and it wasn't because the hardware was anywhere inferior to the hardware of its competitors just as little as Betamax and Video2000 were inferior to VHS.
 

mlopinto2k1

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This is such a slap in the face for Commodore fans. Commodore was such an innovative company. This copycat bullshit makes me want to puke. With my Amiga 500 I was the coolest kid on the block. No one had a gaming machine like that. The Amiga 2000 with it's accelerator boards and video toaster cards... ugh. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS CRAP THEY ARE SELLING!!?? You could do more with an Amiga 2000!!! Seriously!
 

g00ey

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@mlopinto2k1 Do not despair there is still some innovation going on with the Amiga although one could wish there was more.

I understand there is not much to expect from Commodore which has been bought and sold between companies several times. A lot of articles cover this in Ars Technica.

But I still think the Aros project and Amiga OS4 are interesting though, and it is said that you can run MorphOS on a PPC based Mac Mini.

And last but not least a new Amiga model is actually due this summer called AmigaOne X1000. You could read about it here (www.a-eon.com). I don't know how revolutionary it will be but I'm very curious about what this can accomplish since it is a very unique setup.
 

stromm

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TA152h is obviously an Apply Fanboy, blindly seeing only what supports his fantasy that Apple is the only successful computer/software company in the world.

FACT: IBM STILL EXISTS and is a very stable business. It's in it for the long haul and doesn't mind that it's short-term profits aren't huge. Not only does it have a thriving hardware business (both enterprise and commercial level) but it is also one of the world leaders is support services providing engineers to major corporations.

FACT: Microsoft was forced by the US to bailout Apple twice. To the tune of more than 400 million dollars, which is how Apple was able to afford the hostile take over of a business who designed a hard drive based portable MP3 player. Apple did not create the iPod. They bought the company that did and then forced the owners and engineers out.

FACT: Apple and Jobs have admitted on record that if it wasn't for their acquisitions of what has become the iPod and Itunes, they would have gone out of business years ago.
 

g00ey

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I just want to add that the philosophy of extra co-processors that were used in the Amiga which made it quite unique and that TA152H is criticizing as being dated is actually what is implemented in the computers today.

For example, the graphics chipset in the Amiga had sprites and other features to take off load from the CPU in a very similar manner as the GPUs are in charge of the 3D functions (as opposed to software rendering). Some network cards and hard disk controllers (esp RAID controllers) etc have built in processors to reduce CPU load. Other implementations are also found in mainframes as a way to enhance the throughput (IOPS etc).
 

cobot

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[citation][nom]stromm[/nom]TA152h is obviously an Apply Fanboy, blindly seeing only what supports his fantasy that Apple is the only successful computer/software company in the world.FACT: IBM STILL EXISTS and is a very stable business. It's in it for the long haul and doesn't mind that it's short-term profits aren't huge. Not only does it have a thriving hardware business (both enterprise and commercial level) but it is also one of the world leaders is support services providing engineers to major corporations.FACT: Microsoft was forced by the US to bailout Apple twice. To the tune of more than 400 million dollars, which is how Apple was able to afford the hostile take over of a business who designed a hard drive based portable MP3 player. Apple did not create the iPod. They bought the company that did and then forced the owners and engineers out.FACT: Apple and Jobs have admitted on record that if it wasn't for their acquisitions of what has become the iPod and Itunes, they would have gone out of business years ago.[/citation]

IBM has not made any personal computers since they sold their thinkpad brand and the factories to Lenovo.

The second and third statement are new to me. Intersting claims, though. I'd like to see some realiable links for that.

 

ta152h

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[citation][nom]chickenhoagie[/nom]Sorry, but because microsoft was prosecuted as being a monopoly they were forced to give up money to other companys. apple was dead in the water and got a lucky chance to live another day. they used it to their advantage of course, by using very sly and stylish marketing/design. But we all know of course that Apple just makes underpowered, shiny looking eye candy for the dull minded. (sadly, many of us are dull minded). Gotta love it.[/citation]

Well, let's keep it in perspective. Apple did it because it was good for them, and Microsoft did it because it was good for them, and I think it was more about getting IE to be the standard then anything else. They were really gunning for Netscape, and this gave them instant bang for a small amount of bucks.

My point is, Apple would have survived either way. Heck, they spent over twice that buying Next a few months earlier. Apple wasn't bankrupt, and about to go out of business, and 150 Million wasn't going to save them if they were.

I agree with you about their products. I honestly can say I've never seen an Apple product that I like. But, nonetheless, I respect what they have done. They don't have to make products I like, they just have to make products enough people like. They've done that.
 

ta152h

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[citation][nom]ryano[/nom]TA152H - I don't see how the Amiga was a failure.. it brought the concept of multimedia authoring to the computer hobbyist (Amigavision). Many of today's software houses cut their teeth coding Amiga games (Psygnosis, Macromedia, Lightwave, ) hell ! What about the Video Toaster ? Granted it wasn't an Amiga but it sure required an Amiga to run it.. the toasters changed the face of Cable TV overnight.The Amiga launched entire industries while the Apple and PC were fighting over who had the best word processor.[/citation]

OK, one simple question - why did Commodore die? If the Amiga was a success, how did this happen? It was a complete failure and killed the company.

The IBM market had a lot more games than Amiga, and had a lot more games than any market at that time. It had much more advanced hardware with the PS/2 lines, and had advanced operating systems when OS/2 and Windows NT came out.

That's why Amiga became extinct. By the time they got rid of the problems, it didn't really have any reason to exist outside of the niche market, which were still served OK by the big guys.

You may have liked the Amiga, and others have as well, but it's clearly a failure on a grand scale. If it weren't, Commodore would not have died. Why would they go belly-up with a big success?
 
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