Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
Summary: The recent death of Digital Equipment Corporation founder Ken Olsen is a reminder that it's tough to get to the top of the tech world but it's even tougher to stay there.
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The Commodore Portable Typewriter Company was founded in 1954. The company became Commodore Business Machines the following year, as Japanese typewriters had flooded the market, and moved into selling adding machines. Japanese adding machines flooded that particular market in the late 1960s, and then-named Commodore International moved into the electronic calculator business. The calculator market was, however, taken over by Texas Instruments in the mid-1970s, and Commodore went into PCs.
The Commodore Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) came out in 1977 to an enthusiastic reception in the education sector, but it was 1981's VIC-20 — as endorsed in TV ads featuring Wiliam Shatner — that made Commodore a familiar brand in the home.
It was that model's successor — 1982's Commodore 64 (pictured) — that remains the company's most enduring legacy. Already cheaper than rival 64K systems, the C64 enjoyed a price cut the following year, kicking off a pricing war in the home computer market. Commodore won: with 22 million sold, the C64 became the best-selling computer ever.
In 1984, Commodore bought Amiga Corporation. Around the same time Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, who had just quit to form his own company, bought Atari from Warner Brothers and released the Atari ST as a rival to Amiga. The rivalry between Commodore and Atari continued through most of the remaining decade, but in the end the PC market was won by the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh platforms.
Following several releases that failed to replicate the success of the C64, Commodore declared bankruptcy. The brand is now used by a completely different company, which sells an Atom-based netbook PC in a replica C64 shell.
Photo credit: Bill Bertram
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Talkback
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
What about CompuServe?
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
AOL
Yahoo
CopmpuServ
ask.com
I know for a fact that AOl and Yahoo are still here, though these are shells of what they once were, in no way on top. I haven't heard anything about Ask.com for a couple of years back when they were trying to be in direct competition with Google. Web of Trust lists ask.com as an untrusted site, but I don't know how realistic that is, considering WoT is opinion based, (and in IE9 lists igoogle as untrustworthy).
Most of these were mentioned above, but just wanted to re-list them together and try and get a handle on whether or not the blog lists dead companies or once greats
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
Kaypro
CPM
VisiCalc
WordStar
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
I still use WordStar for DOS or a work-alike Z.EXE that came with XTree on my tri-core AMD computer every day.
Unisys
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
The Tandy name is still alive and well, in Australia where it is the name used for RadioShack stores.
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
But in reality, Tandy were taken-over by Dick Smith Electronics some years ago and Dick Smith is really the major name. However, in their early days, Tandy were very important to the development of home computing in Australia.
To be more precise
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
Case in point..., as Sun Microsystems combined its real estate holdings with Oracle, they left Menlo Park, CA, just recently acquired by Facebook. The same was true of many of Digital's campuses in the greater Boston area. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ontheblock/detail?entry_id=39801
RE: Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen