The 68000 Wars, Part 4: Rock Lobster | Hacker News Reader

The 68000 Wars, Part 4: Rock Lobster

filfre.net

78 pointsrvense11 comments

Previous episodes in this series on Commodore's history:

http://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine...

http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-2-jack-is-...

http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made-...

Although the article doesn't mention the rationale, I imagine the "Rock Lobster" moniker was chosen to follow Lorraine because "Quiche Lorraine" was another (albeit later) B-52's song.

Quite possible, but it's worth pointing out that Lorraine was named after the wife of David Morse, who was the CEO of Amiga Inc.

Here's more on the naming [1] of subsequent boards. Nothing to indicate whether or not George Robbins made the connection with "Lorraine", though. Worth noting that the initial codename for the A500 was B52, though. Apparently Rock Lobster came later.

[1] http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/b52board.html

I learned how to program on a C64, an A500 and a A1200.

When Commodore went bankrupt I was so heart broken I considered quitting programming.

According to this article, Irvine Gould had a lot to do with this.

Not sure what to feel for the man.

Edit: grammar.

Plenty of us saw Irving Gould as pretty much satan back then, though at the same time it's clear he was essential in funding Commodore in the early years.

You could probably still get a lot of people to pay for an opportunity to egg Gould (if he'd still been alive) and Mehdi Ali (Goulds last executive hire, who conveniently leave out what happened to Commodore under his tenure on his website these days) to this day.

If you haven't seen it yet, Deathbed Vigil is a documentary of the last days of Commodore based on contemporary video footage. It is pretty harrowing, and plenty of the people onscreen seem quite bitter with the management.

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvJjFYHGTnU

Hope its preserved in some national archive.

Commodore UK Boss David Pleasance Interview 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3ef8ronz9E

this is the guy that came up with Amiga 500 game bundles. Some good sad stories in there.

AMD is currently on the same crash course :(. What other great, but terribly mismanaged companies were there in computer history? DEC comes to mind.

SGI

Great interview, thanks for sharing!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com