I found this book the other week, On the Edge - the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall. I don’t often go out of my way to buy a book but in this case thought I would. Amazon have a 2-6 week delay, while ordering from the author is similar (using surface mail from the States) but is hopefully a lot more reliable than Amazon!

I don’t ever think of myself as a Commodore person, hey, I had an Atari ST after all. But of course I was really, using a Vic-20 and a C64 for years. Infact, the C64 broke and I was using the Vic-20 as part of my GCSE work, cassette tape player included. I played a lot of games on the C64, but really it is what got me into programming, firstly the Commodore BASIC and then really got into the way the memory was managed, peeking and poking. Writing small bits of machine code to do some strange and clever things.

Why did I defect over to Atari? The MIDI ports of course, I had been using Ataris at school in the music room and I wanted some of that at home too. Shame in a way as the Amiga was just something, it blew everyone away back then and aspects of it still blow the competition away even now.

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