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Guy way less famous than Steve Jobs dies
13 years ago
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57411467-235/commodore-founder-jack-tramiel-dies-at-83/?tag=mncol;editorPicks
Jack Tramiel, founder of (the original) Commodore Business Machines died yesterday. Like many 'great men', he was a horrible mean bastard to a lot of people. I've heard stories from his heyday that he would place huge orders to a parts supplier and then stiff them on the bill. The supplier, heavily invested in an unpaid order, would go bankrupt, and Commodore/Tramiel would swoop in an buy them up for a song, gaining the parts he ordered and the facilities to produce them in one shot. He was a big advocate of computers "for the masses", and Commodore under his watch produced the C64, the best-selling single computer model of all time. Tramiel was forced out of Commodore around 1984, in no small part because of his strong intentions to keep the publicly-held corporation as a family business for his sons. Almost immediately after, he took over Atari Corp. from Warner communications and ran it for several years, but without quite the same success as the market changed. An immigrant from Poland, and survivor of Auschwitz and German labor camps in WWII, Jack Tramiel died among family at 83.
I had a Commodore 64 from 1983 to 89, and an Atari 7800. That's my only semi-direct connection. That, and the mindset that computers don't have to cost a couple thousand to be any good.
Jack Tramiel, founder of (the original) Commodore Business Machines died yesterday. Like many 'great men', he was a horrible mean bastard to a lot of people. I've heard stories from his heyday that he would place huge orders to a parts supplier and then stiff them on the bill. The supplier, heavily invested in an unpaid order, would go bankrupt, and Commodore/Tramiel would swoop in an buy them up for a song, gaining the parts he ordered and the facilities to produce them in one shot. He was a big advocate of computers "for the masses", and Commodore under his watch produced the C64, the best-selling single computer model of all time. Tramiel was forced out of Commodore around 1984, in no small part because of his strong intentions to keep the publicly-held corporation as a family business for his sons. Almost immediately after, he took over Atari Corp. from Warner communications and ran it for several years, but without quite the same success as the market changed. An immigrant from Poland, and survivor of Auschwitz and German labor camps in WWII, Jack Tramiel died among family at 83.
I had a Commodore 64 from 1983 to 89, and an Atari 7800. That's my only semi-direct connection. That, and the mindset that computers don't have to cost a couple thousand to be any good.
*salutes*
Where is Airworld?
And when will they hold that contest again?
God, it would be nice to finally have a final word on those issues.
Still that contest was amazing - I can't believe they actually held that!
It's not like there aren't a ton of stories out there about Steve Jobs acting like a total prick either. (doesn't help that he wore a turtleneck so often either. )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN3fYng87SM
He wasn't really a bad guy, but he did have the mobster mentality. "Nothing personal, it's just business", and all that.
Not an excuse, of course. It's just the way things are when you're among the 1%.
However, Tramiel knew talent when he saw it, and let the engineers do what they felt was right. Commodore wasn't a company bogged down with red tape and corporate rules. It was... a billion dollar garage business. They were cheap, shipped as soon as it turned on without crashing, and made a lot of crap that fell apart. But, they were also agile and adaptable, not afraid to try crazy stuff, and make affordable stuff for the masses while the pathetic PCs of the time just beeped and printed green text while costing an order of magnitude more money.
Like him or not, he was the right man for the job. Without him, there would have been no C64 -- not from Commodore, and not from any other company.
(don't hold me to being %100 accurate on that. )
Well they have remade these machines but they in a keyboard as a whole unit & are quite expensive
Fuck.
Commodore was a fine line of computers
"In an interview with CNET in 2007, Tramiel said, "I'm quite happy if people do not know me." However, it's hard not to know a man whose contributions and life story are so unforgettable."wow. . .
Still got my C64, though.
Makes me wanna play Super Mario Bros. on it again sometime.
I'll have to have him refresh me on any pearls next time we're chatting about the hey-day of the Bernoulli drive! (and DELUXE PAINT 5, baby!)
Although I have to give him some criticism. The Atari STs were heavily rushed and hardly ever worked. In fact you even got a steep discount if you accepted 5% defectives. If they would have been properly designed, and they would have used some unixoid OS instead of CPM/M 68k, the company might still exist today.
Fun fact: after 6 years of horrible sales, Apple flat-out lied in their ads about the AppleII being the first home PC to sell a million units (and they didn't even sell a million systems!) Meanwhile, the Commodore VIC-20 already sold a million machines a year earlier, after being on the market for less than a year. As a bonus, the VIC-20 wasn't even a fraction as successful as its replacement, the infamous C64.
I never had an Atari though but my friend still has his.
http://www.pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=15
he had pluses, he had minuses. Both are in God's hands now.
Anyhow, RIP Jack. And, never forget: PRESS PLAY ON TAPE =)