After reading The Rise and Fall of Commodore on Slashdot, I started reminiscing about my own experiences with personal computers.

While my memory is sketchy about how it all started, I do remember working at the Automated Services Center at Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma, Arizona in 1981 and 1982. I was the administrative and supply clerk for the computer operators and programmers. While they worked with mainframes by IBM and Burroughs using punch cards and multipart paper, the individual battalions were using "The Green Machine", a field-expedient ancestor of the current notebook computers. It used the then state-of-the-art 5 1/4 inch disk drive to load and run the operating system as well as store data on other floppy diskettes. Diskettes or disks, it didn't matter which term was used since both were considered correct.

In 1984, I was introduced to a funky word processing system while I was stationed in Hawaii. The 5 1/4 inch floppies were used in two different drives. In order to claim the space used by deleted files, one floppy had to be copied to another. The floppies were expensive media at the time. Thankfully, I was separated from that machine when I was transferred.

In 1987, while stationed in Okinawa, I was introduced at work to the Zenith 248. It was an IBM 286-compatible computer. We primarily used WordStar to do all of our correspondence on it. The printer was, if I remember correctly, an Epson-compatible Alps dot matrix printer. Later, during the same one-year tour and while living in the barracks, I was introduced to the Commodore 64 and all of its assorted peripherals. I fell in love with the machine instantly.

I didn't buy my own C64 until I was stationed in North Carolina in 1988. I bought it at a Toy-R-Us store. A year later in 1989, I replaced it with a Commodore 128D. I bought a compatible printer and software to do my own correspondence at home with it. It was more reliable than what we used at work back then. I used it to connect to my first bulletin board system (BBS).

In 1992 while stationed in Phoenix, Arizona, I started up a BBS and ran that on the Commodore 128D plus some 3rd-party peripherals. I ran the BBS pretty much until I retired from the military in 1998. By the time I shut it down, there were very few BBS's in the US and even fewer BBS's that ran on Commodore equipment. Everyone that I knew was abandoning BBS's for the Internet.

During that time, around 1994, I bought my first PC. It was a Packard Bell with the first Pentium 60 in it. It had Windows for Workgroups (3.11) preinstalled on it. I obtained a copy of Trumpet Winsock (this was before Microsoft got into the Internet game) and signed up with one of the first ISP's in Phoenix. I believe the name was "Internet Direct" and it was at a whopping 19.2K dial-up speed. I had the computer set up with a printer and scanner and such and used it for everything at home. The World Wide Web was fairly new and I was using Netscape Navigator 1.1. There wasn't much to do as far as web surfing went. Until Yahoo created a link directory, most people couldn't find anything they were looking for. Email was the primary application. It's amazing that email is still the primary application for many people, despite other forms of communication that are far superior.

I sold or gave away the last of my Commodore equipment in 1999, after it had been sitting on a desk unused for more than six months. Nostalgia kicked in later on and I learned to use an emulator on my PC and play old C64 games.

I've gone through several desktop computers since 1994, building the last two myself. Now all I have is this single notebook computer. I don't have a printer or a scanner yet, but I plan to get both in the next few months, along with a real computer desk (I'm currently using a homemade desk that looks horrible).

Despite what history tells us, the Commodore computers were far superior to the IBM-compatible computers of the time. Bad marketing tactics and the reluctance of Commodore to continue the Commodore brand line of computers (which excludes the Amiga) in newer, more powerful machines caused the company to fold in the early 90's. Just prior to folding, they were working on a new C65 computer of which only something like 50 prototypes was ever produced.

In 2002 a young, self-taught, computer engineer named Jeri Ellsworth started working on a new motherboard called the Commodore One. It started out as a project to make an upgraded Commodore-style computer available but evolved into a reconfigurable and powerful hobbyist computer.