What is Reddit's opinion of The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge?

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Brian Bagnall’s books examine this. The series starts with:

The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0973864907/

Was just a reference to the lengthy saga of the ahead-of-its-time and often fondly-recalled Commodore Amiga personal/home computer range. It was rather more popular in Europe than America, despite being an American computer. Quite a few Europeans of a techie persuasion would have first gone online with an Amiga and a dialup modem back in the 20th century, as I did. It was also a popular gaming platform in Europe, though in America it was mostly known for its niche use in video effects - as the original underlying computer of the "Video Toaster" system.

When the parent company Commodore imploded through legendary levels of mismanagement (books were written), the Amiga division - initially an independent company Commodore had bought - was mostly taken down with it, though there were a succession of ill-fated subsequent owners like Escom and Gateway, Amiga never exactly recovered.

The platform/community eventually sort of entered an eternal "undeath" rather than dying, with an open source clone of the OS and a small community of enthusiasts still existing today, making new hardware even.

Personally I moved to dual-booting Linux - initially on Amiga hardware - in the 1990s, then eventually Linux on x86 PC hadware (and x86-64 through today of course) so not really involved in the present-day Amiga shenanigans, just look at it sometimes.

The Video Toaster was kind of niche killer app for the Amiga in the USA alright, niche but steady user of high-end Amigas for ages. Commodore's poor management was stuff of legends though, particularly the american parent company (irritatingly for Commodore UK). Books we written.

Yes, Amiga was important in Europe (not just UK and Ireland, pretty big in many European countries, and the demo scene still features Amiga competitions, though gone are the days when the Amiga kicked everything else's behind...), despite actually being produced by an American company, There was the long running Commodore Amiga / Atari ST "war" period that pretty much passed the USA by. Some good games from the European Amiga (yeah yeah okay ST too) scene would show up later ported to platforms more common in the USA, but not all.

The first game I remember playing is COMBAT on my cousin's Atari 2600. It wasn't actually new out at the time as it was released before I was born.

My parents got a C64 primarily for word processing and allowed gaming on it, then upgraded to a C128 (with its builtin machine code monitor) There are dozens of us. dozens. Obviously the C64 has its enormous game library, with some really good ones. Very few games used the C128's modest additional features but it was essentially fully C64 backward-compatible.

Then a succession of more and more powerful/upgraded Amigas, the Amiga pretty much blew its contemporaries out of the water and certainly the C64. A lot games you've probably heard of started on the Amiga, and were later ported to other platforms more common in the USA.

Obviously the PC eventually caught up with the Amiga through brute force and ignorance (and of course commodore's legendary managerial incompetence) in the 1990s, but it took a long time. Eventually had to get a PC for university though (mostly running linux), did some gaming on it, mostly Descent series, love that 6dof.

The Playstation 1 came out when I was necessarily somewhat focussed on secondary school final exams (Irish points system, your secondary school hiscore decides what you do in uni :-/ ) and off to university. My brother and various friends had playstations though, so I played the odd playstation game, and I do still favor the playstation's now-iconic joypad design.

My brother also acquired gameboy eventually, eventually progressing to gameboy advance, and I still have a gameboy micro somewhere (very well made tiny piece of hardware, sort of a gameboy advance swan-song).

I was always into programming etc. not just gaming too, so while I casually played other people's consoles happily enough they were meh and I preferred having a computer. I never finished any amateur game dev project, hah, but I still mess about sometimes. Happy enough emulating old platforms now though for bouts of retrogaming.

On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore