Jack Tramiel died this week at 83 and that means I missed my chance to know the guy. People have complained in the past that my work ignores Commodore, which Tramiel founded, and Atari, which he took over after leaving Commodore following a fight with chairman Irving Gould. That’s a fair criticism. I haven’t written much about those topics because, frankly, I didn’t know Jack Tramiel. But asking around about the guy yesterday and today it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t at all the way he was typically portrayed.
Here’s what most people know about Jack Tramiel: 1) he founded Commodore in Canada to make typewriters then digital calculators; 2) he was an Auschwitz survivor; 3) he said “business is war,” and; 4) he bought Atari out of spite to wreck his vengeance on Commodore and his former partner Irving Gould.
What I learned this week that I didn’t know before was that the people who worked for Tramiel really loved him. Jack Tramiel was no Steve Jobs: he was better.
“As tough as he appeared on the outside, he was genuine through and through,” said Antonio Salerno, who was vice president of applications for Atari.
“Jack was the most intuitive, naturally brilliant and inspirational person I’ve ever met,” said another friend who worked in engineering at Atari and asked not to be quoted by name. “He was a true visionary and an instinctively brilliant businessman. He could see through anyone, right to the heart of their motives. At a personal level, I absolutely loved brainstorming new product ideas with him and I learned a lot.”
That’s an extraordinary statement coming from one of the best engineers I know: he learned a lot about computers and video games from a guy who drove a cab in New York before entering the manual typewriter business. Jack Tramiel was a genius.
What mattered most to Jack Tramiel was his family — something you don’t hear very often in Silicon Valley. But remember Jack wasn’t from the Valley, having started Commodore in Canada then moved to Pennsylvania where computers were actually invented before following to the Golden State the aroma of Chuck Peddle’s 6502 microprocessor.
The Commodore 64 was a phenomenal success. People forget that in the early 1980s the C64 outsold the Apple ][, IBM PC, and the Atari 400/800 combined. Commodore was the first to sell computers through discount retailers, opening whole new distribution channels. And don’t forget it was Jack who saw the value in Amiga, which in many ways set performance targets that took Apple years to beat. It would have been very interesting to see how the Amiga would have faired had Jack Tramiel stayed at Commodore.
But he didn’t stay because he wanted to bring his three sons into the business, I’m told, and Irving Gould didn’t want that. The rest is history. Atari under Tramiel took a good shot with its ST and Mega toward making a cheaper Macintosh and the Jaguar video game was the best of its time. if the company eventually failed it was due mainly to Microsoft’s and Sony’s success with third-party developers, not Atari’s failure.
Jack Tramiel is gone but the Tramiel boys are not. It will be interesting to see what they do next.
I still miss the Amiga. Thanks Jack, it was a wild ride!
Jack was in Atari Corp at the time heading up the Atari ST not the Amiga.
IMHO, what killed the Atari home computers was inexpensive PC clones, before them, there was a niche for a $995 machine. Would ‘ve been interesting to see how a TOS 8 or 10 would run.
It’s more complex than that. Atari could have matched the clone hardware prices. In fact they DID match them. Their failure was getting enough apps on the platform to attract a larger customer base. It’s a chicken and egg thing that every new platform faces. Atari couldn’t convince developers like Apple did and they didn’t have the money to pay for apps, so the platform ultimately failed.
The conspicuously missing piece of software was Microsoft office, with some editors demanding documents done in office, the ST was at a disadvantage, but there was enough software to do nearly anything else you’d want. I suppose another factor was the FUD about compatibility, some of it real.
Apple also had the benefit of riding on continuing strong sales of the Apple II line to schools and consumers to float the Mac through the end of the 80’s.
With the Apple IIe selling for two to four times the price of a similar tech 6502-based 8-bit computer from Atari or Commodore they must have had crazy margins in the late 80’s. It was worth enough for Apple to keep them on sale all the way to the end of 1993 (with the “killer app” for its longevity surely being AppleWorks).
Turns out the “overpriced” Apple II had the last laugh over the cheap C64 and Atari 8-bit machines after all. Even the Atari ST was discontinued the same year as the Apple IIe, and Commodore went bankrupt six months later.
“Their failure was getting enough apps on the platform to attract a larger customer base. It’s a chicken and egg thing that every new platform faces. Atari couldn’t convince developers like Apple did and they didn’t have the money to pay for apps, so the platform ultimately failed.”
I would not say it was problem…
please take a look at software list that conceived life on Atari, Amiga and Mac: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=22856
among them: Cinema 4, 3D max, LightWave, CuBase, Logic, PageStream…
this are all GREATEST apps that had been ported to PC only when Microsoft manage to make fairly usable OS with GUI: Windows 95. So all these “alternative” platforms (including ST) did not lack of software, but as Tim H. already mention: “…another factor was the FUD about compatibility, some of it real.” – Atari ST had far more sophisticated software than PC (just compare WordPerfect vs Signum or STeve, or Calamus vs Ventura) but it was not file-format compatible with PC programs (not to mention 3.5″ vs 5.25″ floppy drives which was common on IBM/clones PCs)!
When IBM finally adopted the 3.5″ drive, the ST was there waiting. The only difference was 1 bit that was set differently. You could format the floppy on the ST, set the bit (Make IBM compatible) and the resulting floppy disc actually ran quicker (reads and writes) in the IBM than the same disc formatted in the IBM.
There was also a cartridge-based emulator that allowed the ST to run Mac apps (and use its variable-speed floppies). When Apple announced the newly release (first) Mac laptop, at least 1 journalist was in the audience taking notes on an ST laptop running Mac emulation.
The ST community was amused and the story of the release was often accompanied by, “Welcome. What took you so long?”
@Fed Up: “There was also a cartridge-based emulator that allowed the ST to run Mac apps (and use its variable-speed floppies). When Apple announced the newly release (first) Mac laptop, at least 1 journalist was in the audience taking notes on an ST laptop running Mac emulation.”
do you have some references to this event?
I went over to Apple in 1996 after 5 years on an Atari 4160 STe and found the MacOS a lot less stable than TOS. Atari really had a lot of promise and if they had got the developers I would still be with them today.
Tim,
Not to start a flame war (I owned several Amigas and a couple of 1040 ST’s) but GEM was just terrible. Intuition had plenty of faults, but GEM was UGLY! GEM was however fast, and it read MS-DOS floppies.
If you look at the OS’s in the middle 80’s MacOS looked good, Windows and GEM were bad on any platform.
Those were good days. My first “true” computer was an Atari 800XL. Man I loved that machine. Had lots of accessories. Never cared for the Commodore because of the “special” command codes one had to learn to do anything.
Regarding GEM and Windows, I used GEM for a brief period of time. It was for a college course being taught on Macs and at the beginning the instructor said we could use PCs for the final project. Then mid-term he switched and said we had to do the work on the Macs.
The school did not have enough Macs for the students enrolled. One classmate had to take all her vacation time just to get her projects done.
Enter GEM. With Gem I was able to produce the reports and charts required for this class. Because we were supposed to turn in a disk as well as a printed report, I went to Computerland with a couple of floppies and there we converted from GEM files to Mac files. The poor instructor never knew.
When we turned in our assignment, he took it out of the brown paper wrapper, looked it over and informed the class to cease trying for the single ‘A’ on the final project, it had just been delivered.
So while GEM may have been terrible compared to other platforms, it allowed my wife and I (we were taking the course together) to create and complete an unrealistic project and get it converted back to the “approved” platform.
Man those days were fun and now they are gone.
Take care,
Ah yes, Jack Tramiel. Now there is a name from the past. I only know of one insider book about Commodore. I remember reading it back in 1985. Not terribly well written, badly edited but a real gold mine when it came to explaining at to just why Tramiel was so intent on funneled all the business ops through Bermuda. I know the rest of us were scratching our heads at the time as to just what was going on inside the Commodore mad house. Home of the infamous “Jack Attack”. Not quite Bernie Madoff territory but Tramiel was very very lucky that an inquisitive DA did not start poking around. Because it would have been at least 10 to 15 if the Feds had started digging. There was a very good reason why both Commodore and Atari under Tramiel blew up. No one could quite explain where all the money went. Which is why Tramiel tried so hard to keep all power, and information, within the family. And why it all eventually fell apart.
See Jeremy’s comment below for a reference to a very complete book of history on Commodore.
You want to be careful about sweeping statements like “…Pennsylvania where computers were actually invented…” given how sensitive such a statement is to the definition of ‘computer’.
One word: Colossus?
Fared, not “faired”.
It’s also “wreak vengence”, and, from a different column, “champing at the bit”.
Let’s try to do it all at once: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/I_hear_people_say_chomping_at_the_bit_and_champing_at_the_bit_are_both_correct
Yes, as George Carlin once said after explaining the phraseology of champing at the bit and stamping grounds, “Next time you’re stomping around your old stamping grounds, you’ll be champing at the bit for someone to chomp the bait on that one!”
how about, “Iowa, where computers were invented, and Minneapolis, where they grew up”?
an almost infinte number of proud fathers when the kid turns out well. don’t forget Boston, where they became a business commodity… .
“…and the Jaguar video game was the best of its time. If the company eventually failed it was due mainly to Microsoft’s and Sony’s success with third-party developers, not Atari’s failure.”
This is a crazy statement. The Jaguar was not considered to be successful or even good at all. It had very few games, extremely poor sales, and a controller that was half cable box remote.
At one time there were several game systems in my house, and it seemed there was a way to get a Jaguar title to look and play like the identical title on PS1, pull pantyhose over your head and wear gloves. I was told that the reason AVP wasn’t ported to PS1 was someone said out loud that it looked better on the Jaguar. Where PS1 shone was the extra levels available on that capacious CD-ROM. The machine that exceeded jag graphics was Nintendo 64. And the keypad wasn’t in the way.
I thought Nolan Bushnell founded Atari…
Atari almost went under when the video game industry crashed in 1984 or so. I think unsold inventory of ET had something to do with it, and Jack bought Atari for a song and renamed it Atari Corporation. (Yeah, just checked Jack Tramiel’s Wikipedia page)
Nolan Bushnell founded Atari (with a couple of other partners) and sold it to the Warner Media Group as they were becoming a huge Cable TV and broadcast media conglomerate. Warner later sold Atari. Tramiel I think bought into it after Warner had already divested it to someone else. I met Nolan Bushnell at a Video Game Designer’s symposium at UCLA in 1978 or ’79. I met Jack T. at Comdex (of course) in the ’80’s. I still have his business card.
I was also an Amiga Developer (after being a Coleco developer for the Adam) during the Jack years. Had they brought out the 500 sooner than they did, it might have been much more successful. They instead tried to sell $2000 machines with $500 add-in PC-compatibility cards, competing against 386 clones at half the price. They got WordPerfect and the Lotus Suite, but no Microsoft software (announced but never released). The graphics were light years ahead of the competition, but they couldn’t figure out how to market it properly.
Jack is wholly underrated for his contribution to computer history.
[…] a great Cringley post on Jack Tramiel. What I learned this week that I didn’t know before was that the people who […]
I worked at InfoWorld in the mid-1980’s and had one of the IT people show me an Amiga. It had flat out amazing graphics but a lack of applications. We were stuck on working on old, HUGE DEC terminals. In ’91 I worked for a small Mac Developer in Seattle and they gave me a Mac to work off of. It just didn’t compare to the Amiga I had seen 5 years earlier at InfoWorld.
The PET and then the C64 propelled my college-less ass, and life. The SID and VIC chips coupled with the 6510/6502 produced true art and music when IBM and Apple PCs only beeped and boop’d.
The 8-bit Apple IIs officially could only “click” the speaker. It’s a testament to the amazing ingenuity of its programmers that they could turn that click into the intro soundtracks of games and even semi-intelligible speech synthesis like in Castle Wolfenstein and Dung Beetles (“We Gotcha!”).
The programmers for C64 did the same thing with the variable speed floppy drive motor, making it play anthems. But what they did with the 3 independent synthesizer channels on the SID chip in 1982 was amazing. Not only did it play classical music to rock and roll, it even talked! Those of us that played games might remember a few games that played back recorded voices using a similar, albeit higher quality technique (because of independent frequency SID channels) -well before the Mac greeted the world with “I am Macintosh”. It was a neat little machine.
And it was dirt cheap. I think my dad paid $99 for his C-64, we actually paid more than that for the floppy drive and monitor for it. Part of Commodore’s problem was they kept prices down by cutting essential features that could only be added through expensive peripherals. The $99 C-64 required a $200 exterior floppy drive. the Amiga 500 needed an external hard drive, or at least a second floppy (external), unless you really enjoyed swapping disks. I still miss my Amiga though.
Nice techno-nostalgia. My college roommate had a Commodore 64, I had an Atari 800. They compared favorably to each other, but I envied the RAM in the C-64.
We seem to have gotten stuck in a rut of boring computers. Mobile devices are still innovating and interesting, but I think even they have converged to a flat panel of glowing glass.
We need more experimentation in the marketplace, more gizmos and failures. More fun!
I should point out that ‘Commodore: A Company on the Edge’ says that Cringely called Commodore a ‘stock scam’. (in Accidental Empires book?)
https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0973864966/
The author is in dire need of an editor. He’s actually updated the book and split it into two parts (as opposed to culling it down some.) I give him credit for trying to record all of the information for posterity.
Regardless of the troubled penmanship, it is a fascinating read. According to the author, Jack was loving as long as you were in his good graces, but he could be brutal. Just downright mean. It was a new era (for personal computers) so the industry was still learning.
Cringley summed it up perfectly in that Jack was a “business is war” type of guy. He burned pretty much every business bridge and overworked his employees. Irving Gould was wormier in that (according to the author) he, too, kept money in offshore accounts and made sure not to spend too much time in the country less he get taxed.
Jack propped Amiga up with about a million dollar investment, then when he and Gould parted ways he tried to get Amiga into Atari. At the same time he had his Atari crew working on the ST (also 68000-based.) Commodore ended up spending something like $20 million to get Atari and then had no money left over to market it.
Even if Jack has stayed and Commodore had the money to better market the Amiga I don’t know how he’d have fared in the PC era. The Amiga was amazing, but as someone else noted, Microsoft Office was a huge factor in driving the PC’s success.
I got a Commodore 64 handed down to me from a cousin after he bought a PC. I’ve been hooked on computers ever since. A few years back I went on a nostalgia spree on eBay and picked up several old Commodores. Good times, good times…
I said:
“Commodore ended up spending something like $20 million to get Atari and then had no money left over to market it.”
I meant
“Commodore ended up spending something like $20 million to get Amiga and then had no money left over to market it.”
Also, Amiga was original funded by a consortium of dentists. They were dead broke when Jack bailed them out. We owe Jack for the Amiga seeing the light of day.
Jack never bailed out Amiga, that was Atari Inc. that lent them the $500,000. Jack’s company (Atari Corporation) came later after the purchase of Atari Inc.’s Consumer Division in July ’84. The money was by Atari Inc. back in March of ’84.
That’s just not right, Jack never funded Amiga. Atari, Inc. is the one that sank $500,000 in to Amiga that March of ’84. Jack’s Atari Corporation didn’t come until his purchase of Atari Inc.’s Consumer Division in July ’84.
“Jack propped Amiga up with about a million dollar investment, then when he and Gould parted ways he tried to get Amiga into Atari.”
NOT TRUE!
Amiga team did sign deal with Time Warner Atari, and not with Jack T. Atari Corp.
Jack Tramiel was not even aware of this contract between Amiga and Atari when he bought Atari Corp.!
You will find detailed reconstruction of events in Mr. Curt Vendel and Mr. Marty Goldberg book: “Atari Inc.: Business is Fun” (last chapter)
http://books.google.rs/books?id=3FwGMtRafrAC&pg=PA744&lpg=PA744&dq=John+Feagans+atari&source=bl&ots=1krpTnTqo2&sig=Wruwt3fnQ1p3SPnMVyl6gxjqBII&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pTpSUaeSDdD4sgbjjYC4AQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=John%20Feagans%20atari&f=false
Actually, his 2005 book, “On The Edge” (which I read a few years back) is a good read. Tech journalism is so Valley-centric, we forgot how much good stuff was NOT invented there…
https://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/0973864907
I always wanted a transputer, I think ATARI was first with a parallel machine, at least for the consumer. They were way ahead on a lot of fronts, including the Jaguar. I think I heard once that they even developed a picture phone system.
My buddy had a Commodore 64 with a cassette deck.
Weed and games that took 5 minutes to load, that’s my recollection.
Good to know I (indirectly) help him move from Canada.
I’m glad that you covered this, Bob. Commodore did some pretty amazing things during its time, and although Apple always comes to mind first when one things about computer owners passionately devoted to a company, Commodore 64/Amiga owners can’t be far behind.
I recently wrote a long piece for my website about the history of computer audio and one thing that’s hard to get across for anyone who wasn’t there at the time is how far ahead of the competition the Amiga was at the time it was released. When the Amiga 1000 came out, most of us were looking at four- or 16-color graphics and listening to PC speaker sound (or three-voice Tandy 1000/PCjr sound if we were lucky). It was years before IBM-compatible computers had any game approaching the audio and visual quality of Amiga games like “Defender of the Crown” on the Amiga.
Although I’ve never known exactly how technical Jack Tramiel was, I figure he must have had some role in pushing the company’s engineers to design something great during the development of the Commodore 64, and that mindset must have had something to do with the company’s decision to purchase Amiga later.
Jack Tramiel had nothing to do with the development of the Amiga (other than the fact that he lost out on buying the technology to Commodore when he was heading up Atari). Development began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer (developer of the Atari 2600 and 8-bit chip-sets). Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#History
It is my understanding that Atari failed because as everyone was hurting over the video game bubble burst, no was prepared to respond to Nintendo’s success with the NES which proved there still was a market after all. By the time Atari did try to catch up, it was already too late.
If I remember my time lines right, at the time of the NES and the Atari ST and MegaST machines, there were two Atari companies. Atari (games) and Atari Corp (computers, the one that Jack ran).
Outsiders were confused back then too.
An interesting read about Jack Tramiel and Commodore is “The Home Computer Wars” by Michael S. Tomczyk.
Tomczyk worked for Commodore for several years from the PET days to the Amiga (or thereabouts, I don’t quite remember). He presents a good perspective on Tramiel, and tries to show both how Jack would help people rise to their abilities and also how brutal he could be. I haven’t read the other book mentioned above.
My dad’s friend loaned us a PET long after most of my friends had C-64s. There were no “apps” for that. And hindsight, I’m glad. It was a lot more fun learning to write my own than playing Bejewelled or Angry Birds will ever be.
Thats for sure! For anyone who experienced Commodore computers in the 80’s would have felt that Cringely’s retelling of the story of the PC industry contained some rather large holes.
SHAME on you Cringely!
Back in the early ’80s, my partner and I were just getting our Seattle ad agency off the ground. I bought us two SX64s and two cheap Japanese daisy-wheel typewriters that took carbon ribbon. Our word processor was called SpeedScript, which I hand-entered, line by line, from a magazine. The typewriters were connected by RS232, and our correspondence looked like a million dollars. Those were the days before WYSIWYG — I wrote a program in BASIC that did copy-fitting, it saved us hours of production time. Those were the days.
Thanks, Jack, couldn’t have done it without you!
Ahh the Commodore days of computing! I would trade all the modern technology in to go back to those days of exploration, learning and mastering some great computers. First the Vic-20 then C64, C128 and finally several Amiga’s. I know everything is multi-core and multi-GPU today but the Amiga was doing this in 1983, or something similar. A custom chip for the graphics, custom for the sound, and being able to offload cpu cycles to these custom chips was HUGE! I still wish I had all my many Commodore stuff and hadn’t given it all away. Ah well, the joy of emulators still takes me part way back!
As for being popular in the USA, the C64 was very popular in the US, sold at toys R us, Gemco (If you can remember that one) and many other discount stores and camera shops. EB games, when it was Electronics Boutique, used to have a good selection of C64 and Amiga software. I had many friends in high-school to swap disks with and we had several BBS boards in our local calling area that were dedicated to Commodore 64 and this was a small community here in the Bay area. Featuring Online games, network feeds from across the states, game downloads, animations, sound files and a ton more all in 1983 and 300 baud!
Ahh yes the good old days. Makes you feel pretty old and young at the same time! 😉
I don’t know if Tramiel had a finger in that pie, but in the late 1970s Commodore also went toe-to-toe with HP and TI in the engineering calculator business. (Well, perhaps they were third, but also a contender …)
Yup, I had typed in Speedscript too, and did several high school reports using that word processor.
I had a RS232 mouse and GEOS years before Windows 3 came out. GEOS didn’t work great, but it was better than DOS. PC clones were still substantially more expensive than the good old C64 and C128.
I think ultimately it was configurability that allowed the PC to thrive, and what killed the C64, the Apple II, the Atari ST, even the Amiga.
Another thing that boggled my mind is when we had “SAM, The Software Automated Mouth”. The program occupied only about half the 64kb RAM and permitted BASIC programs to utter TALK commands, using plain English sentences. I remember years later playing with a Macintosh and doing the same thing, and it didn’t work nearly as good as SAM had despite the years of development in between and the megabytes of RAM the Mac had been equipped with.
Folks in Calgary Alberta may remember H1ndson’s computer store, near Glenmore and Macleod Trails in the SE. They had a video camera demonstration allowing direct image capture for the Commodore 64 in the 1980s, years and years before webcams and digital cameras appeared. The Computer Shop of Calgary (World’s oldest computer store!) is still sort of around too, it is now based in Milk River, Alberta.
I got my start in computers with a tandy 1000, followed by a series of x86 from 286 to 486. The same year I bought my very own first computer, a 486dx50 with a scsi HD, soundblaster pro and ati vga wonder for $7,000 (shudder, my vehicle was only $1000!) I aquired an Amiga 1200 from friend who was getting rid of it, because Commodore was out of business.
Professionally, on DOS/Windows, mostly DOS, I was working with a multi-thousand dollar software program that was delivered on no less than 16 diskettes, 1.44mb each. It’s name doesn’t matter, Pamap GIS, now long out of business, but think of Autocad 9 or thereabouts and you have the general idea. It was DOS based, used a lot of graphics, and was computationally intensive. We send one vendor of a ruggedized “portable” computer packing when Pamap lit his sales demo unit up in smoke, literally, as the cpu overheated and melted the motherboard solder.
For the Amiga 1200 I bought a program called World Construction Set, which I saw in a magazine and purported to be able to render semi photo realistic terrain pictures from digital elevation models. It would be the perfect complement to the wireframe terrain models we were building with Pamap. When the WCS package arrived and I opened the box, I swore because I I’d been ripped off. Inside, excepting the booklets and other printed material, was only a single 720KB diskette(!) I almost threw it all out, but I was out of my personal pocket the coin, and I’d been talking it up to my boss and didnt’ want to admit I’d been taken.
Anyway, to make a long story a little shorter: it was definitely no rip off. That second hand Amiga castoff and a single 720kb disk could do things our expensive PCs couldn’t even imagine. Why draw wireframe landscapes when you could draw *pictures*!?
Sadly, the business case never worked out for us. Too hard to get the data in and out of the Amiga and there was never going to be a new machine. (WCS itself is still alive and well on Mac and Intel.) Great games and awesome sound though. 😉
There is one thing about the Amiga I still miss every single day: ASSIGN.
On the Amiga, `anystring:` behaved the same as `C:` and friends do on Dos/Windows, and could be pointed where you like. Stick a disk in and the volume label becomes the drive “letter” with no effort from the user. `Music:`, `Games:`, `work:`, etc, etc. Forget “C:Documents and SettingsmynameMy DocumentsProjects2012Foobar” or C:Program Files (x86)” it’s just `Home:`, `Foobar:` and `Apps:` dammit!
Nearly everyday I curse that “progress” has left this great idea behind in the bit bucket of forgotten inventions. Even linux, that great bastion of experimentation and liberty, is oblivious.
Apple disk operating systems have used named disks ever since SOS on the Apple /// in 1981.
e.g. /[disk name]/[folder name]/[file name]
(classic Mac OS and maybe the Lisa curiously used colons instead of slashes for separators, which keeps colons out of Mac file names to this day–even though on the command line in Terminal on a Mac you use the Unix standard slash as a separator.)
Another story I read about regarding the Amiga: apparently, the graphics chip prototype was built out of discrete components on a board that occupied a huge table. This was how they demoed its capabilities at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1984 (remember the bouncing ball demo with shadows and lighting effects? I think it eventually made its way into their logo). People couldn’t believe it was being done in real time and kept looking under tables and behind counters to try and find out how they were faking (which, of course, they were not).
That huge tabletop prototype eventually became the Amiga graphics chip…
[…] it is hard to keep track of them. And not just about the rich and famous. For example, Cringely offered a fun story about Jack Tramiel. And Fred Wilson writes well about his […]
I learned to program on a PET, but the Amiga taught me about innovation and inspiration. Nothing since has excited me like the day I kicked up my Amiga 1000.
Today we get a momentary buzz from search and social mish-mash and cellphones with tiny screens trying to be computers (iphone & android, harumph). Technology’s gotten boring.
Actually computers were invented at Bletchley Park in England during WWII but that was top secret for 30 years.
Tramiel was a scary man who, when looking at Japanese yakuza tattoos, said they were beautiful.
He also felt that, since he survived the holocaust, he had a right to screw whoever he wanted.
There are an abundance of stories about how he screwed many Japanese manufacturers without remorse back in the 80’s. In fact, he boasted of his triumphs.
To every person, there are two sides. Funny how no one shines a light on his dark side…
“i”
Yes, the story of Commodore as told in “on the edge” is one that is missed by a LOT of people. The story the late 70’s and early to mid 80’s in regards to home computing simply CAN’T be told honestly without understanding Commodore’s role in it (good and bad). I don’t know if Cringley has read the aforementioned book…I seem to recall in an email he wrote me a while back that he had heard of it but had not read it (as of then).
As a historian he definitely should, even if just to get a more complete history of the era. I’m not looking to inflate Commodore beyond what they were, but commodore directly influenced key components in other computers (price, availability, etc). Components like the 6502/6510. Companies we take for granted now (like Activision and EA) might not be where they were today without the profits they made off of Commodore computers.
Another great book (a must read) is:
“THE HOME COMPUTER WARS” by Michael S. Tomczyk (Jack Tramiel assistant)
Regarding importance of Commodore:
“Commodore rose to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s, producing the first computer to sell a million units. Another model, the Commodore 64, sold more than 20 million units — four times the sales of the Apple II, which is often said to have established the personal computer market. Sales of the 64 exceeded $1 billion.”
I knew Commodore well. Worked at corporate for almost two years when the Vic 20 and Commodore 64 came out. That meant I worked for the company a lot longer than most of my comrades at marketing and PR at Commodore. The Marketing and PR departments were very lean (between 2 to 6 people most of the time). Most of my bosses lasted less than three months. I think I was there so long because I stayed as far under the radar as I could.
I have worked for a lot of corporate moguls since. Few impressed me. Jack did. My take is that like Steve Jobs, Jack could be a tyrant. Both also pursued a tyranny that got them where they wanted to go. The difference was that Jobs wanted elegant products. Jack wanted products with lots of pizazz so he could sell lots of boxes. Seems to me he was less concerned than Jobs about how well they would work once they were sold. Buy something from Commodore and you got a lot for your money. But you were likely to encounter more than a few glitches when you brought that product home.
A couple of cases in point. When the Commodore 64 came out we received lots of commendations for our great feature set and lots scorn for our shoddy quality control. In attempt to counter this negative impression I suggested we consider installing an 800 support line to help our loyal customers over a few of the rough spots. Those lines were approved. The budget for a support staff was not approved. So they put the two 800 support phones on my desk where they rang night and day. It allowed us to advertise that we had 24 hour hotline support. Which was technically true. I even picked up the phone a couple of times a day when I was not too busy doing other things .
The questions I got when I did pick up the phone could be interesting. When I could get answers I wrote them down in a little book . As my list of questions and answers grew got thicker and thicker I suggested it might make a good basis for a support manual or better yet a support magazine. The magazine idea got approved two weeks before a big conference when Jack decided it would make a great marketing tool. Two weeks to write a magazine, hire artists to make it pretty and lay it out, and a printer to publish it was par for the course of what we did at Commodore. I was also asked to write a TV commercial one day. It was busy day. I wrote the script in the morning, hired the actors and booked the studio to shoot it and bought the air time by 3 PM. It might have been a terrible commercial, but it ran on a couple of local TV stations that night. I was a Commodore man. I was in another meeting where Jack was furious that Apple had a well selling integrated package and we did not. He gave the software team two weeks to produce one and get it delivered to stores .
The magazine did pretty well, and I got lots of subscriptions by the end of the trade show. I was told I could keep on publishing it, but of course my free ride was over. It had to pay for itself from that day on. By the second edition my little magazine had turned from a support tool for loyal customers to another profit center for Commodore. That’s the way Jack worked.
A year after I left Commode I attended a press conference in which Commodore announced a new computer with an astounding set of features. All the other reporters were impressed. Me less so. I knew Jack was just telling them what they wanted to hear. And I had a pretty good idea how compelling the pitch was. You see I had written that news release and the product sped a year before. They gave me a day to come up with a spec sheet and release for a product that would amaze the world. I was given some details but I used my imagination to fill in the many holes. Guess what I came up with that day a year ago was just futuristic enough so that it had enough sizzle to sell a year later. Jack always knew you sold the sizzle, not the steak.
Great story.
You’ve been very wise to never have written about the subject previously, due to your lack of historical knowledge concerning the subjected article, propagated by grossly inaccurate, sweeping statements.
Stick to your love affair of Apple and Jobs.
I saw you on a short clip on So You Think You Can Dance when? they were introducing the three roommates that do a variation of this dance! I was shocked!