Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 25 June 2004, 5:35 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
It's Nostalgia Friday. Let's kick off with some free publicity for my erstwhile employers, Ziff Davis Media, who might have abandoned Europe but haven't abandoned the fight. A new magazine called sync (lower case and all) has just been launched in the US, celebrating not just technology but the way it changes the way we live. Readers with long memories might remember a magazine called Computer Life that was published by Ziff, which celebrated not just technology but the way it... but that didn't have a nice lower case logo.
Readers with exceptionally long memories might also recall a magazine that celebrated not just technology but, etc, that was published way back in 1979. It did have a nice lower case logo, lasted for three years (more, I fear, than Computer Life) and was called, oh yes:
sync
Meanwhile, you don't have to have much of a memory to recognise the Commodore name and chickenhead logo. The Pet, the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64 may have been far inferior products to our own fine Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro, but they nonetheless provided many years of digital excitement to the poor, the benighted and the Americans of this world. It is thus grotesquely unfair that their hallowed names should be besmirched by Tulip, the Dutch company that's ended up with the rights after many rounds of capitalist musical chairs. It has decided to exhume the old nag for one last round of flogging and is branding a set of portable MP3 players mPets and eVics and stuff like that. No doubt there'll be a marine version called a limPet and a brass one called the trumPet. And what's the point of selling an MP3 player if you can't sell the music to go with it? Cue CommodoreWorld, which will be doing yet another iTunes me-too.
Slightly more respectably, the company will also be selling retro games through the Web site and will also be providing C64 emulators for PCs, mobile phones and so on. It'll also be marketing the C64-DTV, a joystick with a built-in C64 and "30 classic retro games" on it -- presumably those that don't need a keyboard, although a USB socket might solve that.
I hope Amstrad is taking notes. The market for a Sinclair version would be huge. Huge, I tell you.
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