The Babbage Difference Engine #2

30 years ago today, the home computer era came to an end with the bankruptcy of Commodore. For fans of the cult computers C64 and Amiga, it is a day of mourning

Commodore International filed for bankruptcy on April 29, 1994. The company was later liquidated, with its assets purchased by the German company Escom. Escom then continued to develop the Amiga line until they also went bankrupt in July 1996. 

April 29, 1994, was a sad day for many computer nerds. With the insolvency of Commodore, a pioneer disappeared from the market, a company that shaped the home computer sector like no other with computers such as the C64 or Amiga. It was the end of a slow decline and the result of many wrong and inflexible decisions – Commodore often reacted too late to market developments and had no suitable response to the shift towards PCs and modern consoles.

Jack Tramiel founded Commodore. Born Idek Trzmiel in Poland, he was a Jewish child who survived the concentration camp in Auschwitz and forced labor in Ahlen near Hanover. After the war, he moved to the USA. In 1948, he learned basic technical skills in the US Army, which he later deepened as a typewriter mechanic in New York.

He moved on to Canada and founded the Commodore company in 1954. It sold typewriters, which it imported cheaply from Czechoslovakia in individual parts, assembled and sold under license. After low-cost Asian manufacturers entered the market at the end of the 1950s, Commodore switched to calculators.

Investor Gould joins Commodore

The Canadian businessman Iving Gould not only helped when Commodore was in difficulties in 1965, but also bought up over 17 percent of Commodore shares (worth over 400,000 dollars). Through several further financial injections, Gould became Commodore’s largest investor over time.

When the Asian suppliers also put pressure on the calculator sector, Commodore expanded its portfolio to include pocket calculators. Tramiel had seen the then new devices on a trip to Japan and came back with the idea of bringing them onto the market himself. Commodore purchased the corresponding processors from Texas Instruments – when TI, of all companies, brought its own calculators onto the market at dumping prices, Commodore was determined to become less dependent on suppliers.

This was achieved with the takeover of chip manufacturer MOS Technologies in 1976. Commodore not only acquired a supplier for pocket calculators, but also the developers of the important 8-bit chip MOS 6502. Chief developer Chuck Peddle immediately suggested building their own computer. Commodore’s first computer, the PET 2001 PET = Personal Electronic Transactor), made its debut at CES 1977. With a 6502 chip, monochrome monitor, cassette drive and 8 kilobytes of memory, it was a first success for the company. And not only that: with the MOS 6502, Commodore was now the supplier of one of the most important CPUs, which ran in many 8-bit systems such as those from Apple or Atari.

Home computers for the masses

Commodore launched the first low-cost computer on the market in 1981 with the VC 20: for 300 dollars, the device offered a 6502 processor, 5 kilobytes and rudimentary color graphics, which was the entry point into the computer world for many. In 1982, it was the best-selling home computer and the first Commodore computer to exceed one million units sold.

This success was only followed by the Commodore 64, which was released in September 1982 and turned the 8-bit market on its head: with an estimated 17 million units sold, it is considered the most successful home computer of all time. In the shadow of this success were devices such as the Commodore 128 or the Commodore 246 series, which did not sell nearly as many units.

Tramiel was a tough and feared businessman. His understanding of business had to be followed by the staff and endured by the trading partners. When Jack Tramiel was not allowed to bring one of his sons into management and had a falling out with Irving Gould over the company’s direction, he left Commodore in 1984, taking some of the best developers with him. Tramiel bought the Atari company and openly went into battle against Commodore.

Commodore, in turn, had now lost its boss and some of the C64 developers. Although the Commodore 64 dominated the 8-bit market, they had no access to the emerging 16-bit wave. This came with the purchase of a small company called Amiga. Under the leadership of developer Jay Miner, who was already in charge of chip development for the Atari 400/800, a small team of developers had wanted to develop the best home computer ever since 1982, but there was no major investor behind the project and they were constantly struggling to survive. Although the presentation of the Lorraine prototype at the 1984 CES was a success, it did not attract any investors.

A loan almost turned the Amiga into an Atari

Instead, Amiga obtained a loan of 500,000 dollars from Atari – well before the takeover by Jack Tramiel – to continue developing its project. When Tramiel’s Atari takeover talks later leaked out, the Amiga developers panicked. They were still smarting from a takeover meeting in which Tramiel had wanted to take over the company at a dumping price months earlier. If Amiga didn’t pay back the 500,000 dollars by August, he would probably have become their boss.

At the last second, Commodore bought Amiga for 27 million dollars and paid Atari off. Tramiel, still in takeover negotiations, had no idea what the 500,000 dollar check meant and later sued Commodore, which ended in a settlement a few years later. With Commodore behind them, the Amiga engineers developed the Amiga 1000, which celebrated its premiere in New York on July 23, 1985.

With the Motorola 68000 with 16 (internally 32) bits and 7.16 megahertz, four-channel sound and up to 4096 simultaneous colors, the Amiga was graphically far ahead of the competition at the time. The AmigaOS was also the first widespread home computer with an operating system that was capable of preemptive multitasking. However, the Amiga was not yet positioned correctly: With a remote keyboard, it looked more like an office computer and was still too expensive for the children’s room, while Atari already had a keyboard computer with the same processor on the market with the Atari ST.

The Amiga’s breakthrough came with the Amiga 500, released in 1987. It was a keyboard computer similar to the C64, but with the performance data of the Amiga 1000 and also significantly cheaper than the first version of the series. Games such as Turrican, Defender of The Crown, Shadow of The Beast, Settlers and Lemmings demonstrated the Amiga’s outstanding capabilities and led to Commodore overtaking Atari in terms of sales over time.

Later, more professional Amigas and CD versions appeared

The Amiga 2000, also released in 1987, was intended to appeal to more professional users. It had a separate keyboard and a spacious housing for additional cards. In 1990, the CDTV, an Amiga 500, was released as a CD console: very stylish, but unfortunately otherwise with technology that was now five years old. The Amiga 3000 was again intended for professional users. It was not until 1992 that two Amigas appeared with the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000, whose graphics capabilities were able to compete with the emerging VGA PCs. However, they came too late to turn the tide.

Amiga 500 Plus was supposed to replace the Amiga 500 in 1991, but brought hardly any improvements and instead incompatibilities. The Amiga 600, which appeared in 1992, was also not a real further development, as the performance data remained more or less the same. It had more compact dimensions due to the omission of the numeric keypad, the design was based on the Amiga 1200, but the processor was still the 68000 with 7.16 megahertz. As an alternative to its own Amiga series, Commodore successfully offered IBM PC-compatible computers, occasionally with the PC 10 to PC 70.

The Commodore 65 almost came onto the market as the successor to the C64 in 1992, until the planners at Commodore realized that new 8-bit computers were no longer in demand. The last product, the Amiga CD32, came too late as a CD console to save Commodore from insolvency. On April 29, 1994, the time had come: Commodore was bankrupt.

The German PC distributor Escom then took over the rights to the Amiga and continued to distribute the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 until 1996, when they themselves had to file for bankruptcy independently of the Amiga. Since then, the rights to the Amiga and Commodore names have passed into different hands.

Today, an active nerd community takes care of Commodore’s legacy: enthusiasts continue to supply the systems with software and expansions. C64 has a huge fan base. It was even re-released four years ago in an FPGA version in its original size and with technical innovations. On the Amiga, you can also play via FPGA on the Amiga 500 mini-console, or you can play on the original device with an SD card partition. Lovers of classic devices can also meet at exhibitions such as the recent Retro Computing Festival in Paderborn. source

buy a modern version here

The rise and fall of Commodore

buy a modern version here

https://goodshepherdmedia.net/30-years-ago-when-the-c64-and-amiga-pioneer-commodore-went-bankrupt/

Microsoft purchased Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion

Microsoft’s Skype has finally shut down, concluding its 22-year tenure as the once-dominant internet calling and messaging service.

Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion in what was then its largest-ever acquisition. At its peak, Skype had more than 300 million monthly active users and was synonymous with internet-based voice and video calling. For many, Skype was their first experience of speaking to someone halfway across the world for free, a radical shift from the dominance of telcos and expensive long-distance calls.

The service steadily declined in relevance in recent years, with its active user base shrinking to approximately 36 million by 2023 as competitors such as Zoom, WhatsApp, and Microsoft’s own Teams platform gained traction.

Teams has since grown to 320 million monthly users, far surpassing Skype’s remaining user base. The company’s decision to discontinue Skype is apparently part of a broader effort to prioritize artificial intelligence features within Teams. Employees who worked on Skype will be reassigned to other projects rather than being laid off.

Skype played a key role in popularizing VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, enabling businesses and individuals to connect around the world with minimal costs. It also served as an early testbed for AI-powered real-time language translation, a feature Microsoft showcased in a widely publicized demonstration in 2014. However, its frequent UI changes, reliability issues, ill-conceived social media-like features, gradual shift toward enterprise, and inability to keep pace with newer competitors, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately led to its obsolescence.

Existing Skype users had until May 5 to migrate their data and contacts to Teams or seek alternative solutions. Skype’s legacy lives on in the VoIP technology it helped to normalize—but as a product, it stands as a case study in how brand recognition alone can’t save a stagnant platform.

source

RIP Skype (2003–2025), survived by multiple versions of Microsoft Teams

Skype is no more, as Microsoft is retiring the once-popular video calling service on Monday.

Shutting down Skype will help the software giant focus on its homegrown Teams service by simplifying its communication offerings, Microsoft announced back in February.

To ease the transition from the platform, its users will be able to log into the free version of Teams using their existing credentials, with chats and contacts migrating automatically.

“Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of the journey,” Jeff Tepper, Microsoft president of collaborative apps and platforms, said in a statement.

Businessman discussing work on video call with team members. (iStock / iStock)

Those who do not want to use Microsoft Teams Free can export their Skype data. Those who do nothing will have their data deleted in January 2026, Microsoft’s website says.

Skype first launched in 2003. When Microsoft acquired it in 2011 for $8.5 billion, the service had around 150 million monthly users. When the popularity of Zoom surged during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, that number had fallen to roughly 23 million.

The decline was partly because Skype’s underlying technology was not suited for the smartphone era.

From espionage to home recording, the colorful life of the longest-used audio medium.

It’s bizarre but true: wire recording is the longest-lasting capture format in audio history, one that paved the way for reel-to-reel tapes and a host of others—even though most people today, and some techies included, have barely heard of it.

Invented way back in 1898 and patented two years later, wire recording was somehow still getting some limited use as late as the early 1970s, while rockets took man to the moon on an annual basis. In its wake, vinyl, with its 67 years, and CD with a mere 33, look like footling youngsters. In its none-too-brief life, “the wire” also found use in Hollywood, provided a broadcast aid to spying, helped launch digital data capture, and pioneered the new art of bootlegging—sorry, “home recording.”

Wire was longer-lasting in other ways, too—whereas shellac and vinyl records would only last a few minutes per side, and the first commercial tape decks weren’t that much better, the wire recorder could get down over 60 minutes of audio.

Hanging on the telegraphone

Of course, it didn’t start that way. The earliest wire device was cooked up at the end of the 19th century by one Valdemar Poulsen, a Danish-American inventor who, five years later, developed the first continuous-wave radio transmitter. This first “telegraphone,” as Poulsen dubbed it, was somewhat crude, but it did have the key conceptual elements: a metal wire was pulled between spools across a recording head, which magnetised the wire in accordance with the sound signal it was receiving at that moment. In other words it recorded recognisable sound.

After 14 years operating under the motto “Talk to strangers!” the popular video chat site, Omegle, has officially shut down, according to its founder, Leif K-Brooks.

In a farewell letter addressed “Dear Strangers,” Brooks cites the innocent ideal of what Omegle stood for, but also notes that “there can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.”

The most recent of a long series of legal discourse, a young woman sued the website in 2021, accusing it of matching her in a chat when she was 11 years old with a man who sexually exploited her.

According to NPR, “The young woman, identified only as A.M., sought $22 million in damages in her lawsuit. Omegle was shut down days after the two sides agreed to settle the lawsuit.”

Founded in 2009, Omegle has been around for the adolescent years of many Seattle University students, and Gen Z youth across the world.

Karim Jooma, a second-year law student, opened up about his experience using the platform.

“Omegle was a staple for meeting strangers on the internet,” Jooma said.

Typical to many others, Jooma used Omegle for fun, whether it be during sleepovers or whilst on FaceTime with friends, commenting on the range of people you could meet on the site.

“It was one of those things used by a lot of people, but hardly if ever for its intended purpose,” Jooma noted. “It went from kids like me to old guys sitting there naked.”

Many students and former users weren’t shocked to hear of the current legal debacle surrounding the platform. Given the nature of what took place on the site, for many people, the shutdown wasn’t surprising.

Joseph Garcia, a junior at Albuquerque Academy, weighed in on the controversy surrounding the platform.

“I wasn’t very surprised, it’s a crazy place,” Garcia said. “It felt like it was going to happen sooner or later.”

Similar to Jooma, Garcia would often visit the site late at night when hanging out with friends, noting the danger of using Omegle alone.

Nonetheless, Garcia did make sure to point out he is sad about Omegle being gone. Aside from being fun and exhilarating, never knowing who was going to pop up next, Omegle was a place where people from across the world were able to connect.

“I think it was a good way to communicate with people from other places,” Garcia said. “One time, when I was taking French in school, I typed French into the category search so I was able to connect with people who spoke French and practice with them there.”

Unfortunately, this positive experience was not respected enough by a large number of Omegle’s users, many of whom abused the site for its anonymity—exposing themselves on camera, or requesting sex acts from others.

“There was an excitement around the platform, because it was something you were obviously not supposed to be looking at. Parents were unaware, teachers were unaware, and even politicians, it seemed, were largely unaware,” Tyrah Majors said, an adjunct professor in communication and media at Seattle U and anchor and reporter for the weekday morning newscasts on KOMO News.

Growing up, Major’s middle school years came at a time when kids were frequenting the site. Omegle was launched before mainstream social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.

Popular almost instantly after launch, Omegle quickly reached millions of daily users, and remained in wide usage up until 2023 according to a recent New York Times article. Peaks came during the pandemic, when people sought relationships while in isolation.

Coupled with its scale, in the letter, Brooks notes that while the company had “implemented a number of improvements” to its services, including human and AI moderators, the standards that critics had set were “not humanly achievable.”

“I wish there were better restrictions back when I was a teen, and up to the day Omegle was shut down,” Majors commented. “There should be no spaces anywhere where such crimes are allowed to occur.”

The end of Omegle comes at a time when lawmakers and law enforcement agencies continue to examine the role of technology and social media in the lives of young people.

“I think that Omegle is an example that all eyes are on social media platforms and how they are affecting minors especially,” Majors said.

As Omegle shuts down, an opportunity to connect with strangers goes missing. Whether for better or for worse, this restriction is a clear sign more attention is being paid to the social media landscape all of us take for granted. source

Omegle, the anonymous video chat site, shuts down after 14 years

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) collects reports of suspected child sexual abuse material from tech platforms.

Child sexual abuse and the online sharing of child sexual abuse material has become a sweeping issue that has affected nearly every social media platform. In 2022, Omegle filed over 608,000 reports to NCMEC, while Instagram submitted more than 5 million and Facebook submitted over 21 million.

In his statement, K-Brooks said that a war was being waged “against the Internet” under the banner of child safety.

“Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere,” he wrote.

The website had declined in relevance amid the rise of other chat platforms like Discord but saw a surge of popularity in 2020, with many TikTok users posting videos of them using the platform. As of Thursday, videos with the Omegle hashtag have been viewed on TikTok 11.4 billion times. Some creators on TikTok and YouTube had specialized in Omegle “prank” content.

The closure announcement sparked some to recall fond memories of the platform. X users posted their favorite memes spawned from the chat site, including infamous burns and awkward moments.

Still, viral reactions to Omegle’s shutdown largely focused on the platform’s notoriety for connecting minors with adults. Matt Bernstein, a progressive politics influencer who has over 400,000 followers on X, posted: “rip omegle, thoughts and prayers to all the 35 year old men i talked to when i was 14.” source

Omegle shut down: Video chat website closed after abuse claims

WORDS FROM THE INVENTOR HIMESELF

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams

Dear strangers,

From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.

As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me.

In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person.

Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.

I launched Omegle when I was 18 years old, and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere. If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.

The premise was rather straightforward: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. It was the idea of “meeting new people” distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.

Building on what I saw as the intrinsic safety benefits of the Internet, users were anonymous to each other by default. This made chats more self-contained, and made it less likely that a malicious person would be able to track someone else down off-site after their chat ended.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”

Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights.

Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.

I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.

Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.

All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won. It’s a never-ending battle that must be fought and re-fought every day; and even if you do the very best job it is possible for you to do, you may make a sizable dent, but you won’t “win” in any absolute sense of that word. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a basic lesson of criminology, and one that I think the vast majority of people understand on some level. Even superheroes, the fictional characters that our culture imbues with special powers as a form of wish fulfillment in the fight against crime, don’t succeed at eliminating crime altogether.

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.

To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.

Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish – specifically, to the bedrock principle of a free society that, when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime.

Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best intentions in the world – then society is practically doing the work of rapists for them.

Fear can be a valuable tool, guiding us away from danger. However, fear can also be a mental cage that keeps us from all of the things that make life worth living. Individuals and families must be allowed to strike the right balance for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances and needs. A world of mandatory fear is a world ruled by fear – a dark place indeed.

I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.

Unfortunately, what is right doesn’t always prevail. As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.

The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.

I thank A.M. for opening my eyes to the human cost of Omegle.

Sincerely,
Leif K-Brooks
Founder, Omegle.com LLC