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Commodore's story is more about achieving the impossible with 1-2 engineers building each computer. Commodore was a company built around Jack Tramiel who wanted his widgets to ship in volumes to "the masses, not classes". When he left then it was a lifestyle sucking cash machine for Irving Gould who appointed incompetent CEO after incompetent CEO after Tramiel. The miracle is it staggered on ten years post-Jack.

But the reality is the Commodore 64 kept Commodore going during most of that period rather than Amiga sales. It's similar to Apple where the Apple 2 kept Apple afloat during the 80s and 90s until Steve returned.




Times changed though, too, and Tramiel couldn't replicate his success w the C64 at Atari Corp, despite bringing the same philosophy (and many key engineers) over there.

By the late 80s the "microcomputer" hobby/games market was dead and systems like the ST and Amiga (or Acorn Archimedes, etc.) were anachronisms. You had to be a PC-compat or a Mac or a Unix workstation or you were dead. Commodore and Atari both tried to push themselves into that workstation tier by selling cheaper 68030 machines than Sun, etc, but without success.




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