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Jack Tramiel, Founder of Commodore Business Machines, Dies At Age 83
LoTonah writes "Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore Business Machines and later, the owner of Atari, died Easter Sunday. He was 83. He undoubtedly changed the computing landscape by bringing low cost computers to millions of people, and he started a price war that saw dozens of large companies leave the market. He also took a bankrupt Atari and managed to wring almost another decade out of it. The 6502 microprocessor would have withered on the vine if it weren't for Tramiel's support. Could anyone else have done all of that?"
Looking at every article and documentary on the late 70's and 80's computing scene these days, you would think that the only computers that existed were Apples and PC's out of Silicon Valley, and that everyone out there had $2,000 to spend on a new computer back when that was the price of a decent used car. But the most popular computer in the 80's wasn't a Mac, or a PC. Commodore was by far the most popular computer line of that era. And they made computers than didn't require a second mortgage for working-class people to buy. And they were EVERYWHERE (not just in the yuppie homes).
Not that you'll even find Commodore mentioned in The Pirates of Silicon Valley, or any other popular computing accounts about that time. You'd think everyone was going around back then just talking about IBM, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates--when most people hadn't even *seen* a PC or Apple outside of a school or business.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/1989_you_dont_know_jack.htm
seems he got around to do quite a lot.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The computer that started my love, and now my career, was an Atari ST. I would spend hours watching demos, playing (probably pirated) video games, and experimenting with voice synthesizers, drawing, and music programs.
TOS ERROR #35 in heaven, Jack.
One thing that's particularly interesting about Jack Tramiel is that, unlike some of the other 70s tech entrepreneurs (Woz, say), he was really from a previous generation, not natively a computer guy. But, he managed to anticipate and succeed over several technological transitions. He immigrated to the U.S. after surviving a concentration camp during WW2, and started a reasonably successful typewriter company in the 50s. That successfully transitioned to mechanical calculators in the early 60s after the typewriter market started getting too competitive and low-margin, and then once transistors started becoming affordable, he digified that line and put out a line of digital calculators in the late 60s. In fact Commodore in effect put out the first Texas Instruments calculator, using commodity circuits sourced from TI, which TI only later realized they could assemble under their own label, resulting in the now-famous TI calculator line.
Then, finally, he anticipated the home-computing trend, with Commodore releasing its first design in 1977, the same year as the Apple II.
It's not very difficult to imagine an alternate history where Commodore was a typewriter company that had a brief adding-machine phase before completely missing the digital-computing wave and going bankrupt by 1980.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I can tell you unequivocally that being a supplier to both companies sucked big time. They never paid you. It got so bad that we (when I was a supplier to them) basically made any business with them COD because if you didn't you would never get your money. You may all love Jack but I couldn't stand doing business with them. Major PITA.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Rest in peace, Jack Tramiel, famed for "The Jack Attack."
The Commodore 64 truly was The People's Computer, like the Volkswagen "bug" was The People's Car.
At a time when an Apple //e cost $2500 for monitor, CPU, extra RAM (necessary), and two disk drives, you could walk out of the store with a full Commodore system for $350 and hook it up to an old TV.
This is why C64 culture was so vital: people took risks with their computers instead of treating them like business machines or expensive curiosities. Back in the BBS days, the Commodore boards were where it was at. Total anarchy zones. If the feds or feebs swooped in to confiscate them, one paycheck later they were up and operating again.
I hope Jack gets the recognition he deserves in the great beyond. With any luck, he's just finished sliding a whoopee cushion onto Steve Jobs' easy chair and is watching from behind a corner with a devilish grin.
Futurist Traditionalism
Yes, this book details Jack purposefully not paying suppliers, nice to hear it repeated from someone first-hand. According to the book they made a point of not paying suppliers, especially if they were interested in acquiring the company. When the company was cash-strapped and desperate, Commodore would buy them out.
It made more money on the short-term, but was bad for the long-run because it burned bridges in the industry. This made it hard for Jack to get now-wary suppliers and dealers to help him grow his business when he saw an opportunity for a new market/device.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
He's not. That's Chuck Peddle's baby.
He did allow Chuck to design the Commodore PET, but this was only after Chuck witnessed the Apple prototype and finally convinced Jack that the calculator market was dead.
Jack was a smart businessman who could run a tight ship, but he was a poor prognosticator of the tech industry. Most of his products he pushed were derivatives made more efficiently, and he (and Commodore management once the company grew) had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next big new thing.
Hell, the legendary Commodore 64 chipset was only as amazing as it was because Jack wanted a game console. Never mind the fact that the console market was saturated, at the VIC-20 was the same price - Jack wanted to be the best console maker, and that was that. And when the console market caved he was left with a game chipset, and he still had to be convinced by an internal team of the best engineers at Commodore to turn it into a product.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Commodore bought MOS technology in 1976 when they were on the verge of bankruptcy, Apple would not have had a source for chips if they had gone under.
Jack was at Atari by the time that happened
The 6502 has had a very sorted past and changed hands many time. It ended up with Bill Mensch and the Western Design Center (http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/WDC_Founder.cfm) I worked with Bill when I was at VLSI Technology as we were fabricating the 65C816 for the Apple IICS. Let's just say it was "interesting" and leave it at that. Bill had his own idea what fabrication design rules "should be". Actually checking the design rules of the foundry you wanted to fabricate your parts at was a detail that was beneath him. Made for lots of "fun"........
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
It's important to note that the Commodore 64 incorporated graphics support hardware (aka the first "graphics card") which helped make the computer much faster than it's CPU speed would indicate, especially for gaming.
You Sir, must stop talking out of your ass.
Actually, he is correct. The C-64 did have "graphics support hardware" beyond offering a bitmap that programmer could directly manipulate. The GP is only mistaken in that he characterized the hardware as being like a "graphics card". The specialized C64 graphics hardware supported 8 sprites. It was a very handy thing.
You could also consider the reprogrammable character set as such graphics hardware that sped up games. Various VIC-20 and C-64 games used this technique to good effect.
Back then the Apple II had swappable video cards.
Huh? *If* such cards existed they were certainly so rare that hardly anyone had them, a real niche thing. Are you thinking of the 80 column card? It added 64K RAM too but I don't recall this card enhancing graphics. My recollection as a former Apple II, //e, and C-64 programmer is that on the Apple II you had bitmapped graphics and that on the C-64 you also had bitmapped graphics, but it was better, plus specialized hardware support for sprites. The Apple was primitive in comparison.
I hate the smell of noobs in the morning, It smells like ignorance.
You might want to check that attitude if you yourself aren't remembering things quite correctly either.
Thank you. :)
I never know what to think or say when I think about the last decade of Atari. Warner had no idea how to run a tech company, and there were too many projects going nowhere. They took a look at a few months-worth of profits and decided that they could spend money like that forever. Suddenly the videogame market, then the home computer market tanked.
So Jack comes in, and has a lot of hard decisions to make. Cut here, slash there. Discontinue products. Write off factories and warehouses full of product that isn't moving. Kind of like how Steve Jobs came back to Apple and had to gut things fast.
He knew that selling the Atari 8 bits wasn't going to work for long--PC compatibles and Macintoshes were starting to make inroads into homes and smaller businesses. Game machines were dead. He knew what Amiga had cooking, and when Commodore got ahold of that he knew he needed a counter-product. So, like the IBM PC, Atari used off-the-shelf components and built something quick and dirty.
A lot of people took him to task for not advertising. There was advertising, just not in expensive publications. Very little in Byte, for instance. There was a big campaign at first, but then it seemed like nothing. Atari turned inward, producing magazines like Atari Explorer instead. Besides, who is to say that spending $5 million dollars a month on advertising actually is effective? BTW, I heard that it cost $1 million to do a full page colour ad in Byte. So how much for Newsweek, Time, etc., and how effective is it?
I think Atari did a lot with the little money they had. I doubt Tramiel got any richer from his time there. He came into Atari with $40 million personal worth--how much did he leave with?
I have a story to tell about Mr. Tramiel. He touched my life in such an obvious way, with such a hackable C64, and I got the chance to thank him in person for his vision.
I used to work in Silicon Valley. When I first went there, I had visions of rubbing elbows with personal computing luminaries like Jobs, Wozniak, Tramiel, and Bushnell. Let me tell you, working in a startup is not the way to make this happen. Of course, Nolan Bushnell doesn't live in Silicon Valley, and Steve Jobs was busy running Apple, so they got scratched off my list. I did get to meet Steve Wozniak, simply because I was in the right place at the right time. But Jack Tramiel was... well, someone I wanted to meet badly enough to track down myself.
I had heard he still lived near Silicon Valley, but it was only by sheer luck that I came across a way to contact him (which I won't share here). It was my last week to work before moving back east, and I worked up the courage to initiate contact with him. Immediately, I found out he was someone who valued what privacy he could get, so I had to explain why I wanted to meet him in person. He graciously agreed to meet me for Thursday lunch. That gave me two days to think about what I wanted to say to him, and to ask him.
Not that it mattered. I got there a little bit before he did, got shown to his customary booth, and started tripping over my own tongue as soon as he showed up. Any photos you've seen of him reflect exactly how he looked: somewhat rotund, mostly bald, clearly Jewish, and very contented with life. The ease with which he greeted me showed I wasn't the first 37-year-old Commodore fanboi he'd ever met.
We ordered our meals, and began to chat. I tried to present myself as respectfully as I could, but... really, this was Jack Tramiel, and I was having lunch with him! He explained right away that he had just come from the gym, he always ate there after his workout, and that's how the restaurant host knew where to seat me. He worked out three times a week, as a way to stay somewhat active, but he had a good life, he knew it, and it showed.
We talked about how he had learned what American business was about, and how he had learned about America. When I told him I was from Ohio, he piped up immediately with, "Ah, my favorite city is Toledo, Ohio. Even though I've never been there." I knew he was a Holocaust survivor, but I didn't know that an American from Toledo, Ohio was the first Allied soldier to greet him when the Ahlem labor camp was liberated. This soldier taught him to speak basic English, talking about Toledo, Ohio enough that it essentially became young Jacek's understanding of what city life in the USA was like.
We talked about Commodore Business Machines, and how the design evolved from the early PET, through the VIC-20, C-64, and C-128. He had wanted economical designs from the beginning of his involvement with computers, and his products reflected that. He bore no ill will towards IBM, Apple, or any of the other competitors. It was all business; life is too short for animosity on any level. As the fortunes of CBM varied through time, that philosophy made it easier for him to stand aside and let history take its course. (I've heard that from a few other Holocaust survivors as well.)
We also talked a little politics. I asked him what he thought about the conservative/liberal polemic, and his response was simple: The government governs a nation, but it's a nation of people. When a government prefers the nation over her citizens, they suffer as he suffered. He asserted that no form of government was completely immune to this hazard, but some are less suceptible to it.
I had a website that the time, and said something about what an incredible brag I would have for it. He demurred a little, and asked that I refrain from speaking publicly about having lunch with him, at least while he was alive. So I did.
The hour and a half I spent
My family couldn't afford a Mac, but could manage a 'Jackintosh' -- a 520ST with a single-sided floppy drive and a monochrome monitor. Sure, it wasn't as fancy as a Mac, but neither is a Toyota Corolla as fancy as a Ferrari. It had a mouse-driven GUI, didn't need a bunch of disks just to get to the desktop, could play some pretty cool games -- even in monochrome mode (Bolo anyone?) -- could use a standard printer, and the floppies were PC-compatible!
In terms of business, gaming and design and music, the ST was a really cheap way to touch on all of these when no other contemporary computer could, at an even-remotely similar price-point. Amiga for business? Yeah, right. Macintosh for home gaming? Not that inspiring, Dark Castle notwithstanding. PC for design? Bleah. Never mind MIDI. You can't really argue with the ST's flexibility -- and it was remarkably easy to sell the idea of buying one to parents who already felt burned when they discovered too late that using that 8-bit computer you talked them into had an extremely steep learning curve when it came to business and productivity applications.
The ST's only real failing was it wasn't marketed particularly well. Had Jack been willing to lift prices to cover advertising costs I expect that it would have done much better, but he seems to have always had a bit of a personal philosophy on that matter that in retrospect was perhaps a little naive.
Regardless, were it not for the ST I probably wouldn't have had a 16-bit computer until several years later. Thanks Jack.
I'd have known a lot less about computers -- since the built-in decompiler came in handy when "compatibility" with C64 programs meant you had to recode because they moved the video addresses, among other things. I guess sometimes the best master is the one who throws you down a well and makes you find your own way out.
It's in the only "big boy" word processor that matters: emacs.
transpose-chars is an interactive compiled Lisp function in
`simple.el'.
It is bound to C-t.
(transpose-chars ARG)
Interchange characters around point, moving forward one character.
With prefix arg ARG, effect is to take character before point
and drag it forward past ARG other characters (backward if ARG negative).
If no argument and at end of line, the previous two chars are exchanged.