A few years ago, Brian Bagnall, author of On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore, and Commodore: a Company on the Edge announced that his followup book, Commodore: The Amiga Years was officially cancelled.

Now it seems to be back on.  I was not able to find any official word from Bagnall, either at his publishing website or on his Twitter account, but Amazon is showing The Amiga Years to be scheduled for release in November of 2015.

Get your pre-order in. 🙂 UPDATE June 7, 2015: Looks like Brian has announced a Kickstarter to get this published. It was listed for pre-order on Amazon before that announcement, and if you made a pre-order you may want to see if any of the perks make it worthwhile to cancel and fund the campaign instead.

If you don’t know: The original book, On the Edge, is a single volume history of Commodore which goes all the way to 1994. This is an excellent book and well worth a read, though now out of print.

Bagnall had so much information that he could not squeeze into a single volume that he decided to release a new two-volume history of Commodore. He published Commodore: a Company on the Edge which, essentially, is the first half of On The Edge but much expanded. This is also a great read and should be in your library if you are a computer history buff.

But things did not go well for the second volume (The Amiga Years) and for a long time it looked like we would never see it. But now it looks like we will finally get the “long version” of the definitive history of the fall of Commodore.

Bagnall’s history is great. He sets the record straight about what really happened with Apple and Commodore, showing conclusively that a lot of the “revisionist history” proffered by Apple fans is a lot of nonsense. The reality is that Commodore did more to introduce computing “to the masses” than any other company during its time, and Bagnall’s research and writing does an excellent job reminding us what was going on, and what was so special about Commodore.