This book suffers the "exhausted author" syndrome, the initial effort is only maintained for a little while, after which the quality recedes to a very average level.
The beginning of the book is very interesting, the narrative is coherent and correctly written. After a while, several hints point at an increasing loss of interest by the author. The most noticeable is the amount of repetitions, in two different forms:
- the author feels compelled to back his narrative by quotes that say exactly the same '[some fact] happens: "and then [some fact] just happened at this point," says Y'. Sometimes it's even several different people repeating the same fact, as if there were any doubt on it. "Here, I can prove it, they say the same," says the author. This is even more unnecessary since there are references to other documents that include those quotes;
- facts and anecdotes repeated in different paragraphs or chapters, most probably by lack of a correct editing phase or because of poor review process.
Those repetitions tend to be very annoying, and most importantly, lengthen the book considerably.
Another issue that appears after 1/4 - 1/3 of the book is the difficulty to keep track of the timeline. The author often mentions the year only, like 1982, but a great deal happens that year, so it's hard to tell whether such fact occurs after or before the other ones. Then the author tends to mix the events when it's not necessary, by jumping quickly ahead before coming back in details and mostly repeating what was presented before. This leads to a inextricable spaghetti of factual threads that the readers must sort out by themselves.
The language becomes a little bit casual in the 2nd half of the book, the author uses expressions that are not really fit for this style of written narrative. The quotes could also be adapted for comprehension or correctness.
Factually though, the book is correct with very rare exceptions, as far as I can tell, it is a good compilation of many sources of information on the subject. It rectifies misconceptions published by other books such as, for example, several biographies of Steve Jobs according to which the Apple II sales dominated the market from the start. It also adds very interesting facts on the interaction between the big players of the time: Tandy, Commodore, Apple, Texas Instruments, Atari, ... and the key people working in those companies. The early chip design process is also detailed quite accurately.
But what is the subject? The title suggests it is about Commodore, but I would argue that this is about Jack Tramiel more than about Commodore. The book stops when Tramiel leaves the company, yet the history goes on for Commodore, for another 10 years. To be fair, the Kindle version doesn't miss the opportunity to mention the next book on the Amiga, once the end of this one is reached (but I'll pass on the offer, it's from the same author).
### In conclusion ###
This could have been a great book. In order to reach that status, I would recommend another pass to reorganize the story by sticking more rigorously to the timeline, to remove the unnecessary repetitions and "justifying quotes", then proofreading the result. And adapting the title to its actual content would be fair, too.
Despite all that, I can recommend the book for its first 9-10 chapters (there are 36 of them!), to people interested in the beginning of personal computers.
As a reader who has a strong technical background, and for whom computer history is a passion, I devoured the first chapters, but past the first half of the book, I began to skip entire paragraphs at a time because I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I'm glad I could reach the end, but it was painful.
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