Mark McDermott
283 Fir St., Park Forest, IL 60466

Markm    @    MarkMcDermott    .    com

Tramiel, Jack (1928- ), founded Commodore Business Machines and produced the
most popular home computers of the 1980's. He was symbolic of the early period
of personal computer manufacturing.
     A Polish-born Holocaust survivor, Tramiel emigrated to New York in 1947. In
1958, he opened a typewriter sales and repair shop, later expanding into
typewriter manufacturing by acquiring a factory in West Berlin. While in Japan
to acquire an adding machine factory, Tramiel saw an early electronic calculator
and decided adding machines were a dead end. In 1969, Commodore produced the
first hand-held calculator, the C108, using Texas Instruments chips. One of
Commodore's purchased subsidiaries, MOS Technology, developed the 6502
microprocessor, the foundation of the first generation of home computers. The
first Commodore computer, introduced in 1977, was the PET (Personal Electronic
Transactor), a single casing holding a keyboard, processor and monochrome
screen.
     Commodore's consumer breakthrough came in 1980 with the VIC-20, an 8-bit
unit with 5K of RAM memory. Aided by placement in department stores and
saturation advertising (starring William Shatner), Commodore sold a million of
the $300 VIC-20's by early 1983.
     In August, 1982, the first Commodore 64 shipped as a direct competitor to
the Apple II and Atari 400 lines. It had 64K of memory, three music synthesizer
chips, game sprites and a $500 list price (which dropped under $200 within 16
months). Soon, more 64s were being sold each month than Apple IIs. By the end of
1983, nearly 2.5 million VIC-20s and 64s had been sold.
     Tramiel, however, resigned as president of Commodore in January, 1984,
after a power struggle. By July, he had purchased the ailing Atari from Warner
Communications. (see Bushnell, Nolan K.). He took enough Commodore technicians
with him make the 68000-based ST series, priced starting at $400.
     Atari was first to introduce the CD-ROM drive. Tramiel, managing Atari with
his three sons, actually brought the firm out of debt, but he also failed to
ride the second wave of video gaming, and Nintendo dominated Atari's former
market. Atari had become old news. Tramiel eventually abandoned the ST computer
and worked on a new game machine, the Jaguar, finally unveiled in 1994. But it
did not succeed. Atari was folded into a Silicon Valley disk-drive manufacturer,
JTS, and Tramiel has retired.

Bibliography
Hafner, Katherine M. "Father Knows Best -- Just Ask the Tramiel Boys." Business
     Week 15 Dec. 1986: 106.
Loomis, Carol J. "Everything in History Was Against Them." Fortune 13 April
     1998: 64. Online. LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe. 6 June 2000.
Tomczyk, Michael. The Home Computer Wars. Greensboro: Compute!, 1984.

                                                                  Mark McDermott

from: The Guide to United States Popular Culture, Ray B. Brown & Pat Browne,
editors
Copyright 2001 © Bowling Green State University Popular Press