<p>Hello, good people of Hacker Public Radio, my name is Paul Quirk and this is my very first ever podcast. I would like to give credit Klaatu of Gnu World Order for making me aware of Hacker Public Radio, which I’ve been a listener of for the past year. As we near the holiday season of the winter solstice, I decided to give back to the open source community with this gift of a mini series of podcasts about the World of Commodore from December 7, 2019.</p>
<p>The World of Commodore is an annual computer expo dedicated to Commodore computers that is normally held on the first Saturday of December in the city of Mississauga, Ontario. It started off back in 1983 by Commodore Canada as a trade show where Commodore and related vendors could showcase their latest products for the holiday season. As a Commodore computer nerd kid of the 1980’s living within an hour’s drive of Mississauga, this was an event I always looked forward to with excitement. For me, this was bigger and better than Santa Claus. Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, but a decade later, the show was revived by the Toronto PET user’s group, or TPUG, one of the world’s oldest computer user groups of which I am a member. Today’s World of Commodore is very different from the expo’s of the 1980’s, and has transformed into an event where hackers from around the world gather together to share ideas and show off their own discoveries and products, both open source and commercial.</p>
<p>Since many listeners and contributors of Hacker Public Radio got started with a Commodore computer at some time, and since this event has grown beyond Commodore products and into open source hardware and software, I thought this event would be of great interest to this community, and it is my hope that many of you listeners might join us at next year’s World of Commodore.</p>
<p>I have decided to create a miniseries of podcasts of this event which I will release on a weekly schedule. In this first episode, I walk around the trade show floor and interview various exhibitors, vendors, and members of TPUG. As there is a visual element to this podcast, I have posted pictures of the exhibits in my personal non-commercial blog at pquirk.com, which I encourage you to visit in order to get the full experience. And so, with no further ado, let’s all go to the wonderful world of Commodore.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.tpug.ca/" class="uri">https://www.tpug.ca/</a></li>
<li><a href="https://signalsfromspace.ca/" class="uri">https://signalsfromspace.ca/</a></li>
<li><a href="https://doublesidedgames.com/" class="uri">https://doublesidedgames.com/</a></li>
<li><a href="https://pquirk.com/2019/12/08/world-of-commodore-2019-episode-1/" class="uri">https://pquirk.com/2019/12/08/world-of-commodore-2019-episode-1/</a></li>
</ul>
