There was a time when the Commodore machines were the cutting edge, the greatest things since sliced bread. The PET, the Super PET, and the Color keyed Super Pet's were the beginnings, with their dual IEEE floppy drives they were perfect for home and business use. The VIC PC (yes PC does mean Personal Computer--or did then anyway) was the newest of home PC's; it had full Color, and could be hooked to your color TV set. They had an amazing 16 & 20K of RAM. This success was followed by the C64, a fantastic machine, with voice, color, and running on DOS created by Microsoft. Literally millions of these beautiful machines were sold, and at least 3 million are probably still in use. Equipped with a 1541 Floppy, or, in some cases the PET IEEE dual floppies, there were no machines that could compete.

This was followed by the incredible C128 and 128D, machines that ran in full 80 columns at 2 MHz, compared with the C64's 1 MHz. The 128's also ran the C64's programs at the hold down of a button.

Again huge numbers were sold. I remember the excitement I felt at having a C128 with twin 1571 floppies, and a 1200 baud modem, plus a 1902 monitor. I thought I had reached the top of all possible computer worlds...

I even began telecommunicating, and joined Q-Link, then the home of thousands and thousands of happy Commodore Owners. Q-Link was a place for games, for chats, for music, and for the libraries, the wonderful, marvelous libraries -- thousands of files to download, many new friends to make, friendships that in some cases still exist.

Alas, there were several dark clouds on the horizon, and the wonders we all came to love began to die. CBM made several machines that were to be considered mistakes. The 128B (a semi PC), the Plus 4 (DOS 3.1) and a few others began to cost the company money. That's a separate issue, and I have written extensively on it, as well as on the destruction of Q-Link.

As the death watch began, I moved to this wondrous place called Delphi, where I found a lot of other ex-Linkers who had discovered this safe harbor. For a brief while, we all watched in horror as Commodore began its death spiral.

Thinking themselves abandoned, many switched to the ever growing PC's (by then the term had come to mean IBM clones only) and their faster processors - with RAM and Hard drives-we were being left in the dust. Still, a hardy band kept the faith alive, in spite of scoffers, and in spite of the desire to belong and enter the main stream of the world of computers.

I felt that if there was to be any future for the Commodore it was to be with GEOS*. I used it and had loved it from the beginning. GEOS* was the first true GUI, for the home compute; "windows", no matter in what form, take their origins back to GEOS* There were forms of it for the Apple and the PC. The PC and the Commodore form still exist.

Then I discovered a company called Creative Micro Designs-and the world was beautiful once more. Other companies had made attempts at upgrading the Commodore machines, but have given up. CMD didn't. Thanks to them I now have a 128D with JiffyDOS, a 16 meg RAM Link, a 300 meg hard drive, a cartridge that lets me use a 28.8K baud fax modem, and other goodies.

With all of that, my Commodore is lagging behind the present machines. Now, I could add a 20mHz accelerator with 16 more megs of RAM, and a new chip for my system that will allow the use of the new 33.6K modems. On the horizon is an accelerator for the 128's, a vga card for the them, and a newly rewritten GEOS** as well as a FTP/IP program, and web browser for the C128s.

The future now looks bright and the possibility of the Commodores again unlimited. There is no longer the need to feel sheepish or embarrassed about owning a Commodore, in fact we find more and more PC users buying emulators to run the old and dearly loved games that they once played on their C64's. They use the emulators, in part for the speed of the PC's but an interesting irony has arisen. The accelerated C64 runs the Commodore games faster than the PC emulators. So all things considered, I have to say--as I have so many times before--"Commodore, the Computer they couldn't kill."