Jack Tramiel: 1928 - 2012

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The king of Commodore, and later Atari...

Computer Legend and Gaming Pioneer Jack Tramiel Dies at Age 83

Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore International and crucial figure in the early history of personal computing, passed away surrounded by his family on Sunday, his family confirms. He was 83 years old.

Tramiel was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1928. During World War II, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz, after which he and his father were sent to a labor camp called Ahlem, near Hannover. Tramiel was rescued in April 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1947.

In America, Tramiel started a typewriter repair business. Staying in the forefront of technology, his typewriters morphed into calculators, and later computers. In 1982, Commodore International launched the Commodore 64, which went on to the best-selling personal computer of all time. In 1984, after being forced to leave the company he founded, Jack bought the crumbling Atari Inc.'s Consumer Division and formed Atari Corporation.

"Jack Tramiel was an immense influence in the consumer electronics and computing industries. A name once uttered in the same vein as Steve Jobs is today, his journey from concentration camp survivor to captain of industry is the stuff of legends," says Martin Goldberg, a writer working on a book about the Atari brand and the early days of video games and computing with Atari Museum founder Curt Vendel.

"His legacy are the generations upon generations of computer scientists, engineers, and gamers who had their first exposure to high technology because of his affordable computers – 'for the masses and not the classes.'"

Tramiel is survived by his wife Helen, their three sons, Gary, Sam and Leonard, and their extended families

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidth...d-gaming-pioneer-jack-tramiel-dies-at-age-83/
 
Loved by gamers, hated by co-workers...you can't get where he got at his peak without making some enemies. I was always a fan because I loved my Atari 800, 1200 and 520 ST (that I hacked up to a staggering 4 MEGAbytes of RAM and a battery powered clock years before Doonesbury made fun of Windows 95 requiring 4 MB RAM). I know the Amiga had some superiority and many NES games were better than their Atari 8 bit counterparts but I loved both systems for games, printing, and programming. Neither system would have been as successful without Tramiel. And no offense to anyone but to me this is a bigger story than Mike Wallace.
 
Loved by gamers, hated by co-workers...you can't get where he got at his peak without making some enemies. I was always a fan because I loved my Atari 800, 1200 and 520 ST (that I hacked up to a staggering 4 MEGAbytes of RAM and a battery powered clock years before Doonesbury made fun of Windows 95 requiring 4 MB RAM). I know the Amiga had some superiority and many NES games were better than their Atari 8 bit counterparts but I loved both systems for games, printing, and programming. Neither system would have been as successful without Tramiel. And no offense to anyone but to me this is a bigger story than Mike Wallace.

Agree 100%.
 
Amiga question

Farewell to a true survivor..reminds me of the story where the young American soldier was strapping down with leather belts the commandant of a death camp to the hood of his jeep.
The commandant said, "You speak German."
The soldier rolled up his sleeve, showed him his tattoo and said, "Yes, I was once held here."
True story. He got the honor of arresting the commandant because he was the only soldier in the unit who could speak the language fluently.


Anyway..

Wasn't there a time when the Amiga was state of the art if you wanted to do digital video as an end user?

There was this thing called a video toaster, help me out here, someone...
 
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Agree with droler, but the 800 (and 800 XL)and 1200 (which sucked) we're all products developped under the Warner Communications regime and not Jack's.

Jack dropped the price of the XL range when he took over and had the XE developped and of course the ST in a breathtaking short time.
 
Agree with droler, but the 800 (and 800 XL)and 1200 (which sucked) we're all products developped under the Warner Communications regime and not Jack's.

Jack dropped the price of the XL range when he took over and had the XE developped and of course the ST in a breathtaking short time.

Hey, my first computer was 1200xl.. I think I got it on clearance at sears or montgomery ward for like $50. I liked it as you could pull out basic and it had 64k of memory. I remember getting my 1050 dd at a record store on clearance (rainbow records?). Not sure where I got the 830 acoustic coupler modem, but back then, usenet was an interesting place..

I rememeber getting a good deal on a 256k ST from macy clearance center. You had to load the operating system in that one and it wasted 1/2 of the 512k.. I was lucky enough to meet john russell and he upgraded it to 2meg and put TOS in it. I later got a developers 4096 ste from him..

Not that fond of jack and his boys. The company nearly screwed me over on a deal. I sold them major havoc and tempest arcade games for a show(E3?).. They shut doors after the show and luckily, I was able to get my games back. The guy I was dealing with knew I was getting screwed(they damaged the tempest cab in shipping) and was very cool and he let me pick up almost all the games made for the lynx that they had in the warehouse shelves...
 
Agree with droler, but the 800 (and 800 XL)and 1200 (which sucked) we're all products developped under the Warner Communications regime and not Jack's.

Jack dropped the price of the XL range when he took over and had the XE developped and of course the ST in a breathtaking short time.

That's right - the company that was developing the Amiga didn't want to deal with the "Tramiel regime" so instead of selling to Atari (which Tramiel just became a part of) they instead sold to Commodore. And then Tramiel drove development of the ST to combat the Amiga (and did a fair job - and outsold most computers in Europe where the ST became a standard for games, graphics and programming not to mention music).

And yes, here in the States the Amiga became the go-to computer for animation for a time partly due to thousands of colors and Video Toaster.

Atari ST was home to Cyber 3D and 3D Studio - both precursors to 3DS Max - and the ST was used well after its lifespan as a MIDI controller/sequencer due to its built in MIDI ports and ease of use.

One of our favorite games on the ST was MIDI MAZE, the first deathmatch maze game I had ever seen, using a MIDI token ring LAN with up to 8 players.
 
I was a huge Atari 8-Bit and ST hobbyist back in the 80's. Jack was like a double-edge sword. He was making products we wanted, but not marketing them in the US so we were slowly loosing the things we loved to the ever more popular PCs and Apples.

He was a legend.

If you'd like to see video of him at the time of the Atari ST, check out:

http://archive.org/details/LowEndCo1985
 
He tried to kill Atari with the Commodore 64...then he took over Atari and finally succeeded. RIP, definitely a giant in the 70's/80's computing world.
 
daze of old

I bought a VIC-20 brand new in the box back in the day and the only thing I remember about it was playing Lunar Lander on it for hours. Then I discovered marijuana. Might be why I don't remember much.
 
That's right - the company that was developing the Amiga didn't want to deal with the "Tramiel regime" so instead of selling to Atari (which Tramiel just became a part of) they instead sold to Commodore. And then Tramiel drove development of the ST to combat the Amiga (and did a fair job - and outsold most computers in Europe where the ST became a standard for games, graphics and programming not to mention music).

Except none of that ever happened. The Amiga/Atari agreement was with Warner and their Atari Inc., not Tramiel and his Atari Corporation. Likewise there was never any agreement to purchase in place, it was a chip licensing deal only. Additionally, the ST being driven to combat the Amiga is a myth. It was already 90% laid out before the purchase of Atari Consumer, and the wirewrap actually started August 1st. It was never planned around any Amiga technology.

When Jack bought the Consumer Division in early July, Commodore launched an injunction against Shiraz Shivji and two other ex-Commodore engineers barring them from doing any computer work, effectively shutting down any computer development. While Jack's son Leonard was doing evaluations across July to go over what they inherited with the purchase, he came across the cashed check from Atari Inc. to Amiga which is when they discovered there had been a pending deal between Amiga and Atari Inc. He then went to Warner and renegotiated for the Amiga deal from them (since that and several other direct Warner contracts stayed with Warner) and launched a countersuit against Commodore by going after Amiga in mid August.

Most of the material you're quoting comes from the storytelling of RJ Mical, who while he tells a great story is not always concerned about facts. He also was not involved in any of these business dealings.
 
Except none of that ever happened. The Amiga/Atari agreement was with Warner and their Atari Inc., not Tramiel and his Atari Corporation. Likewise there was never any agreement to purchase in place, it was a chip licensing deal only. Additionally, the ST being driven to combat the Amiga is a myth. It was already 90% laid out before the purchase of Atari Consumer, and the wirewrap actually started August 1st. It was never planned around any Amiga technology.

When Jack bought the Consumer Division in early July, Commodore launched an injunction against Shiraz Shivji and two other ex-Commodore engineers barring them from doing any computer work, effectively shutting down any computer development. While Jack's son Leonard was doing evaluations across July to go over what they inherited with the purchase, he came across the cashed check from Atari Inc. to Amiga which is when they discovered there had been a pending deal between Amiga and Atari Inc. He then went to Warner and renegotiated for the Amiga deal from them (since that and several other direct Warner contracts stayed with Warner) and launched a countersuit against Commodore by going after Amiga in mid August.

Most of the material you're quoting comes from the storytelling of RJ Mical, who while he tells a great story is not always concerned about facts. He also was not involved in any of these business dealings.

references? or were you a direct witness to this?
 
I am not privy to all of the machinations that went on between JT and the Amiga team, but I did know most of the founding Amiga guys and they got screwed big time.

Jack came in under the guise of a "white knight" to finish the final round of funding to get the Amiga manufactured. The original Amiga was an amazing little machine. 68000 powered with a Unix microkernel to allow true multitasking. It had Ethernet built in and had a built in XWindow client in EEPROM (actually the whole BIOS was EEPROM so it could be upgraded easily in the future, IIRC). It had 8 expandable slots and was a kick ass machine. Then Jack exercised a clause in the contract and took control of the company. He brought in his boys and they dumbed down the Amiga to an incredible degree. The consumer version of the Amiga bears very little resemblance to the machine that was set to go into production.

ken

Disclaimer: Part of the Sinistar team from Williams went out to help form Amiga, so I had a chance to meet most of the Amiga team several times. I also had a standing job offer from the founders, so I followed the Amiga saga fairly closely.
 
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