Yesterday was a really fun day at the office. I held a little show and tell with my Commodore SX–64. Full disclosure, this isn’t my original one, I sold that one back when I was still a teenager. This is a more recent eBay find, and it was a good one.
4 1/2 years ago I made a significant career change by exiting SAS as a senior manager in IT, and taking up product segment lead for mainstream and high-end desktop workstations at Lenovo. How it has reprogrammed my brain has been interesting.
As I first cracked the SX–64 open to check out my purchase, I immediately snapped into product manager mode. I wondered how, in 1983, they slapped a fully functional Commodore 64, a 5 1/4 floppy drive, and a 5” color cathode ray tube into a “compact” (please consider context 🙂 and “luggable” chassis. I suspect the teams were much smaller than today, but I’ll bet the meetings were still… rambunctious.
Sidenote, while this was not the first luggable computer, that was the Osborne 1, this was the first with a color display.
The C-64 holds a special place in my heart as it further kindled my passion for computing. Fast forward to today, and I’m proud to have played a role in creating the powerful and innovative Lenovo ThinkStation P620 and ThinkStation P8 (my first and most recent products, respectively). Seeing how far technology has come is awe-inspiring, whether it’s been 4 or 40 years.
While the hardware has evolved significantly, the essence remains the same – empowering users with top-notch performance and reliability. It’s incredible to witness the evolution firsthand and be part of shaping the future of workstation computing.
Here’s to embracing the past, while relentlessly driving innovation forward… Meanwhile, I’m taking a break to play Arkanoid 2.
