Jack Tramiel

1929) is famous for founding Commodore International, manufacturer of the Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga home computers.

Tramiel was born in 1929 in Lodz, Poland, as Idek Tramielski (or maybe Trzmiel, see below). After the Nazi invasion in 1939 his family was transported to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, where he worked in a pants factory. When the ghettos were "cleaned out" his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was examined by Dr. Mengele and selected for a work party, and he and his father were sent to Hanover to build another concentration camp, while his mother remained at Auschwitz. His father was later killed after being injected with gasoline when he got sick. Tramiel was rescued in April 1945 by the US Army.

In 1947, Tramiel emigrated to the United States and soon joined the US Army. In the army he learned how to repair office equipment, including typewriters. In 1953, while working as a taxi driver, he bought a shop in Bronx to repair office machinery, and named it Commodore Portable Typewriter. Then later started a business importing typewriters from Europe, and in 1955, to circumvent import restrictions, he set up Commodore Business Machines in Toronto.

In 1962, Commodore went public. During the 1960s the Japanese started producing low-cost typewriters and Commodore could no longer compete in that market. He then turned to adding machines, but it was not long before the Japanese were entering this business as well. Commodore's main investor, Jack Gould, sent Tramiel to Japan to learn ways to complete, but when he returned he had a different idea instead.

In 1970 he started work on electronic calculators, and in the early 1970s Commodore became a major supplier of calculators based on a Texas Instruments chip-set. In 1975 TI decided to take over the market, and started producing their own complete calculators which sold at a cost lower than the price of the chip set alone. This drove most manufacturers out of business, but by this time Commodore had enough of a war chest to survive.

Tramiel started looking for a chip producer to buy, thereby guarenteeing a supply of chips in the future. The obvious solution was MOS Technology, a small company in Pennsylvania that had been set up as a second-source of the TI chips, and was currently stuggling with cash-flow problems. MOS was bought in 1976, becoming a part of Commodore.

One of the engineers at MOS was Chuck Peddle, the man who had designed the ground-breaking 6502 chip. Peddle convinced Tramiel that the calculator was a dead-end as a product, that the computer would take over, and that the 6502 was the first in line for success. Peddle showed him a "test system" using the 6502, the KIM-1, and while Tramiel was interested he demanded that it be put into an all-in-one form in time for the Comdex in six months.

Combining the KIM with a new display driver chip, 4kB of RAM, a version of Microsoft's BASIC programming language, and an all-in-one case including a monitor and cassette tape drive for storage resulted in the PET 2001. At $599, it became a hit, notably in schools where it's tough construction was a major advantage over technically superior machines like the Apple II and Atari 8-bit family.

Although Peddle left the company, improvements were made to the platform. In 1982 a new display driver with basic color output and a RF modulator for television display produced the Commodore VIC 20, which became a huge seller. Intended to be a "upscale" version known as the VIC 64, a new display chip and more RAM resulted in the Commodore 64, which was an even bigger seller and went on to become the most popular home computer in history, with about 22 million units shipped. In 1984, the sales surpassed US $1 billion.

However the success of the C64 was based on a massive manufacturing effort that cost a huge amount of money to set up -- borrowed money that should have been easy to pay off in profits on the sales. However Texas Instruments was also in the market, and it appears he was so upset about their earlier dealings in the calculator market that he decided to kill them in this one. He started a massive price war, with the C64 eventually selling for $199 when it was originally intended to sell for over $1000. The profits evaporated, Commodore's cash flow along with it. The company was almost bankrupt by the end of 1983, and Tramiel was fired in January 1984.

His own personal fortune was enough that he was able to buy Atari outright. Atari, once the "golden child" of silicon valley, had been destroyed by the price war between Commodore and TI as well, and their owners, Warner Communications, was desperate to sell it off. Although it would seem to be a reasonable match, by this point the market was no longer interested in home computers, and he failed to reproduce his earlier success with the new Atari ST.

It is rumoured that Tramiel has a large gold and platinum sword from a contest hanging over his fireplace from Atari's Warner days when Warner Bros. owned the Franklin mint. The sword was part of an elaborate video game contest of multiple golden and gemstoned prizes worth several thousand dollars, the Sword itself is when created was worth $50,000 (although the dip in the price of gold has no doubt lowered its value). The contest aruptly ended when the Tramiels took over, leaving three of the five prizes unawarded.

It is possible that Jack Tramiel's original name was not Tramielski, which does have any particular meaning, but rather Trzmielski or maybe simply Trzmiel, this last word meaning bumblebee in Polish. The busy mouse pointer image on Atari ST computers was precisely an image of a bumblebee.