I really wanted to like this history of Commodore by Brian Bagnall, but I ultimately disliked the writing too much.\u00a0 The topic itself is interesting.\u00a0 Commodore produced some great pioneering hardware and introduced a lot of people to computing.\u00a0 I had Commodore machines in high school and graduate school.\u00a0 Supporters of the company and the technology tend to be fans for life, so I was very curious to hear about the company history.<\/p>\n
But, man, 500+ pages without getting to the Amiga line is a lot of text.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t help that Bagnall tells his story completely from the words of his interviewees without interpreting at all.\u00a0 He often makes an assertion, then produces quote from a participant that says the exact same things, and then moves on.\u00a0 There isn’t enough attempt to provide a context or an understanding of the whole picture.<\/p>\n
There’s a good argument that this first book should be about Commodore’s founder and CEO pulling them into the computer business and then being ridden out of the company.\u00a0 It’s a compelling narrative, and the CEO in question seems so larger-than-life that a book about him is a sure winner.\u00a0 But Bagnall gets lost in minutae that don’t advance the overall story.\u00a0 Those side trips are more often than not about technical issues, but I never got the feeling that Bagnall understood what was interesting and important about them in the big picture.<\/p>\n
I got the feeling that Bagnall conducted his interviews, broke out the interviews into chronologically ordered quotes and framed each quote in a paragraph.\u00a0 That makes for a decent high school term paper, but over 500 pages, it gets old quick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I really wanted to like this history of Commodore by Brian Bagnall, but I ultimately disliked the writing too much.\u00a0 The topic itself is interesting.\u00a0 Commodore produced some great pioneering hardware and introduced a lot of people to computing.\u00a0 I had Commodore machines in high school and graduate school.\u00a0 Supporters of the company and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1819,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions\/1819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}