Commodore Brand Comes Home

The venerable and once-proud Commodore computer brand has been sold by its Dutch owners to a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based digital content distributor for 24 million euros ($32.7 U.S.).

Tulip Computers NV of the Netherlands signed a letter of intent Wednesday with Yeahronimo Media Ventures, a U.S. firm that distributes digital music, and sells real-time access to sporting events and concerts. The deal gives Yeahronimo "full control of the brand Commodore in order to further develop a worldwide entertainment concept," said Tulip in a statement.

Yeahronimo had recently obtained the rights from Tulip to distribute music and games through the CommodoreWorld portal, and sell Commodore hardware online.

The Commodore brand was famous in the early days of personal computing, especially its Commodore 64 computer, a machine with a whopping 64K (that's K, as in kilobytes) of memory. Other models in its line during the 1980s were the VIC-20 and the Commodore PET, an all-in-one system that beat the original Mac to market with a machine that stuffed both computer and monitor in the same chassis.