Who Owns Commodore? The Retro PC Brand Still Exists, but a Lot Has Changed | Hacker News Reader

Who Owns Commodore? The Retro PC Brand Still Exists, but a Lot Has Changed

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30 pointstheanonymousone12 comments

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The picture of the teenager holding a piece of paper in front of a commodore is of Regina King [0].

[0] https://www.fineartstorehouse.com/michael-ochs-archives/regi...

Article is dated yesterday but says,

> Hyperion has only just settled the various legal issues as of writing, today, August 4, 2026.

Discussion on main source then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175868

this links to one of these stupid endlessly loading back-button injecting garbage sites. Is this slop?

It's Boy Genius Report, which used to be decent but was sold to a media conglomerate, with predictable results as you can see.

I mean, I wish Commodore was still around, a lot of nostalgia, but what do you expect, when your only differentiation is price, and you do not build a structure around your business that creates customer lock-in in some way, it becomes hard to create sustainable profits and stick around.

With Windows and Intel locking down the enterprise, you really had to create some kind of premium brand like Apple did, not focus on the low end.

The Amiga was hardly a low end computer. I bought a 500 in 1989 and they were wonderful machines. The high end systems could run Unix and were used in commercial video production. You just can't compete with platform effects though, and there wasn't a gap in the market between the Venn diagrams of the PC, Apple and Linux behemoths. In the end not even Sun could make a go of it.

I think what was meant is that Amiga’s market share was predominantly in the home computer space. And its software catalog consisted primarily of video games rather than productivity software. In that sense it was low end.

It was wedged between game consoles and PC’s, and it eventually couldn’t compete against neither.

There was the Video Toaster, but that was a small business at the time compared to desktop publishing. And unlike Apple's immensely profitable LaserWriter, the Toaster was a 3rd party product.

yeah basically stuck in the middle market, a pre iminent death.

They couldn't compete because the company was horrible run. They basically relied on chips designs from the early 1980s until 1992. They did almost nothing to improve the product line while their CEO earn a huge amount. They fired the only decent CEO they had.

Had the taken some money in hand and all-in-one Amiga 500 SoC that had some sales potential left, and combined that with a next generation chip set that could run the modern games of the early 90s I think you would have had a great product.

And Windows wasn't really actually good at all the games media stuff for a long time. I think the home market for that stuff was possible if somebody grabbed it along with continuing some higher level unix, video, audio workstations.

And many people who had one liked it and grew up with it. There was a market there. Many switched to PC simply because the product was no longer competitive. Many had grown up with the Amiga 500 and were ready for an upgrade.

If you look at what Acorn achieved with even fewer resources and a much worse market position. Imagine and ARM chip with modern chipset but Amiga 500 compatible. Maybe along with non-backwards compatible console version like the CD32.

Would it have been a hyper-growth company, I don't really think so, but survive for the rest of the 90s was possible.

Yeah, the story of Acorn is ridiculous, and the fact that Intel rejected them, forcing ARM to make their own chips, really goes to show how things change.

Can you give me source on that Intel story, I haven't heard of that.

Intel generally reject anybody trying to do their own thing. Sun also wanted to work with them SPARC.

Acorn eventually worked with VSLI Technologies, and that seems smoother then some of the earlier chip design technology cooperations I have read about.

I am kind of surprised still how complex original ARM actually was compared to 'pure' RISC. It could be considerably smaller. And it kind of insane how a tiny company did this and produced something faster then the insanely complex 32 bit VSLI designs from DEC, Motorola, Bell. RISC really was a complete cheat-code in that period.

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