Jack Tramiel

Jack Tramiel (born Idek Trzmiel; December 13, 1928 – April 8, 2012) was an American businessman and Holocaust survivor, best known for founding Commodore International.

The Commodore PET, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 are some home computers produced while he was running the company.

Tramiel later formed Atari Corporation after he purchased the remnants of the original Atari, Inc. from its parent company.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 his family was transported by German occupiers to the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, where he worked in a garment factory.

When the ghettos were liquidated, his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He was examined by Josef Mengele and selected for a work party, after which he and his father were sent to the labor camp Ahlem near Hanover, while his mother remained at Auschwitz.

Like many other inmates, his father was reported to have died of typhus in the work camp; however, Tramiel believed he was killed by an injection of gasoline.

Tramiel was rescued from the labor camp in April 1945 by the 84th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army.

On November 10, 1947, Tramiel immigrated to the United States.

He soon joined the U.S. Army, where he learned how to repair office equipment, including typewriters.

In 1953, while working as a taxi driver, Tramiel bought a shop in the Bronx to repair office machinery, securing a $25,000 loan for the business from a U.S. Army entitlement.

He named it Commodore Portable Typewriter.

Tramiel wanted a military-style name for his company, but names such as Admiral and General were already taken, so he settled on the Commodore name.

In 1956, Tramiel signed a deal with Czechoslovakian typewriter manufacturer Zbrojovka Brno NP to assemble and sell their typewriters in North America.

However, as Czechoslovakia was part of the Warsaw Pact, they could not be imported directly into the U.S., so Tramiel used parts from Zbrojovka's Consul typewriters and set up Commodore Business Machines in Toronto, Canada.

After Zbrojovka began developing their own hardware Commodore signed an agreement in 1962 with Rheinmetall-Borsig AG and began to sell Commodore portable typewriters made from the parts of older Rheinmetall-Borsig typewriters.

In 1962, Commodore went public, but the arrival of Japanese typewriters in the U.S. market made the selling of Czechoslovakian typewriters unprofitable.

Struggling for cash, the company sold 17% of its stock to Canadian businessman Irving Gould, taking in $400,000 and using the money to re-launch the company in the adding machine business, which was profitable for a time before the Japanese entered that field as well.

Stung twice by the same source, Gould suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to learn why they were able to outcompete North Americans in their own local markets.

It was during this trip that Tramiel saw the first digital calculators, and decided that the mechanical adding machine was a dead end.

When Commodore released its first calculators, combining an LED display from Bowmar and an integrated circuit from Texas Instruments (TI), it found a ready market.

However, after slowly realizing the size of the market, TI decided to cut Commodore out of the middle, and released their own calculators at a price point below Commodore's cost of just the chips.

Gould once again rescued the company, injecting another $3 million, which allowed Commodore to purchase MOS Technology, Inc. an IC design and semiconductor manufacturer, a company which had also supplied Commodore with calculator ICs.

When their lead designer, Chuck Peddle, told Tramiel that calculators were a dead end and computers were the future, Tramiel told him to build one to prove the point.

Peddle responded with the Commodore PET, based on his company's MOS Technology 6502 processor.

Gould had controlled the company since 1966.

He and Tramiel often argued, but Gould usually let Tramiel run Commodore by himself.

Tramiel was considered by many to be a micromanager who did not believe in budgets; he wanted to approve every expense greater than $1,000, which meant that operations stopped when Tramiel went on vacation.

It was first shown, privately, at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show in 1977, and soon the company was receiving 50 calls a day from dealers wanting to sell the computer.

The PET became a success—especially in the education field, where its all-in-one design was a major advantage.

Much of their success with the PET came from the business decision to sell directly to large customers, instead of selling to them through a dealer network.

The first PET computers were sold primarily in Europe, where Commodore had also introduced the first wave of digital handheld calculators.

As prices dropped and the market matured, the PET's monochrome monitor (green text on black screen) was at a disadvantage in the market when compared to machines like the Apple II and Atari 800, which offered color graphics and could be hooked to a television as an inexpensive display.

Commodore responded with the VIC-20, and then the Commodore 64, which became the best-selling home computer of all time.

The VIC-20 was the first computer to sell one million units.

The Commodore 64 sold several million units.

It was during this time that Tramiel coined the phrase, "We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes."

He was one of 6 people spotlighted when the computer was denoted "Machine of the Year" by Time magazine in 1982.

Tramiel was born as Idek Trzmiel (some sources also list Juda Trzmiel, Jacek Trzmiel, or Idek Tramielski) into a Jewish family, the son of Abram Josef Trzmiel and Rifka Bentkowska.

An industry executive attributed to Tramiel the discontinuation of the TI-99/4A home computer in 1983, after the company had lost hundreds of millions of dollars, stating that "TI got suckered by Jack".