The day of Easter, the 8th of april, 2012, Jack Tramiel has died. Most of the youngest readers won’t recognize him but if I owned a VIC-20 or a C64 during the 80s, then you have to thanks him because Tramiel founded Commodore, the famous american 8-bit computers factory.
- Jack Tramiel
Tramiel born in Polony in 1928; in 1945 he was saved by USA soldiers when they occupied the Nazi concentration camps. Two years later Tramiel moved to America where, at the beginning of the 50s, started a little company that sold and repaired typewriters, the Commodore company. At the end of the 60s he started selling mechanical adding machines and the, at the beginning of the 70s, electronic calculators, a market that was interesting at the japanese factories.
At that time, the main Commodore’s components source was Texas Instruments, that built every single component of the calculators but that didn’t assemble them. When it realized that it could made more money in building and selling by itself the electronic calculators, Texas Instruments started a strong price war against its competitors. Commodore was a Texas Instrument’s victim too, so it decided to start building its own calculators by producing the components it needed: so it decided to buy a microchip fab first, MOS Technology, a small factory that had released a revolutionary CPU, the MOS 6502. Talking with the MOS engineers that designed that CPU, Tramiel realized that the future would belong to computers instead of electronic calculators, so in 1977 Commodore showed the PET, and in 1980 showed the most famous VIC-20. In Italy, this computer had a special testimonial, Mike Bongiorno, who presented the VIC-20 in a popular TV show of him. Riding the succes of the VIC-20, Tramiel asked his engineers another product, and in 1984 Commodore showed the C64, the most sold computer ever: it was produced until 1993, with 30 millions pieces sold.
But in Commodore there were not only big successes. Like Texas Instruments had destroied its rivals in the ’70s with a price war that left the company not only the last survivor in the market but also a company with big losses, Commodore began the first company in the 8-bit market selling its products at very low prices but also a company with economical instabilities. This was the reason why Tramiel had controverties with his business partner and decided to resign from Commodore. After a few months, he bought from Timer Warner the computer assets of Atari, another best known video game company that had big financial problems. Very quickly, the new Atari Corporation presented the Atri ST, a good 16-bit computer that had the disavantage to fight against the Commodore Amiga, that was more successfull. At the beginning of the 90s Tramiel decided to enter into the videogame console market with the Atari Linx and the Atari Jaguar, two consoles that didn’t get a significant market share.
Atari started having financial problems in the middle of the 90s, so in 1996 Tramiel had to sell his society to JT Storage, a little HD producer. Tramiel entered into the Boards of Directors of JT Storage. But JT Storage had no better luck too, and in 1998 it had to sell the Atari trademark and all the related rights to Hasbro Interactive in an effort to save the company. The operation did not work and JT Storage went into bankruptcy the following year. So Jack Tramiel left the industry in which he had left some important milestones.
