PC World’s Harry McCracken attended Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum’s panel on the “25th anniversary of the Commodore 64 that included (among others) Commodore founder Jack Tramiel and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.”
McCracken writes, “Woz told a story… that I’d forgotten about, and which I always thought might be apocryphal: More than thirty years ago, Steves Jobs and Wozniak showed the Apple I to Commodore executives and entered discussions to sell their fledgling computer company to Jack Tramiel. The deal didn’t happen, and it’s just as well–I can’t imagine that even the Apple II would have emerged as the breakthrough machine it was, let alone that the Mac could have ever been built at Commodore. (I’m not even going to ask myself whether there could have been a Commodore iPod–it make my head hurt just to think about it.)”
McCracken writes, “The version of the Apple-Commodore talks I’ve heard has Steve Jobs declining to sell out, but Woz said that Commodore decided to pass in favor of building the PET 2001: ‘We got turned down—Commodore decided to build a simpler, black and white machine without a lot of the pizzazz of the Apple II.’ Woz also said that he didn’t meet with Tramiel at the time; in fact, this CNET blog post says that the two gents never met until tonight, despite the merger discussion and the fact that the Apple II used the 6502 microprocessor, a chip manufactured by a division of Commodore.”
“Tramiel was most famous for driving down the price of home computers, and he continues to revel in that reputation: I asked him what he was most proud of in his career, and he told me that it was the fact that the Commodore 64 eventually sold for just $199,” McCracken writes. “He seemed to get along famously with Woz onstage, but they both genially tweaked each other during the panel. ‘You built computers for the classes–I built them for the masses,’ he told Woz, echoing a famous Commodore slogan.”
“Woz, meanwhile, noted that the Apple II was cheaper to build than the PET 2001 and sold for three times the price. ‘We wanted to build a company that would be around for awhile,’ he told Tramiel, who’s associated with both the defunct Commodore and Atari, whose name is now used by a games company that’s not related to the computer company it was when Tramiel controlled it,” McCracken writes.
More in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jim – TIV” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Jumpman!
My very first computer was a Vic 20 which was the predecessor to the Commodore 64. That was way back in, let’s see… 1981
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Can still remember using a cassette tape for the programs.
All considered, I’m glad things turned out the way they did anyway.
Commodores suck….Timex Sinclair rewls!!
Regardless whether Jobs declined or Commodore turned them down… Apple really dodged a bullet on that one!
My sale went to the Hitachi Peach with the 6809 processor. So advanced with its 0.67 mhz of pure speed (yes, that is less than 1 mhz)…
My first computer was an HP 85.
@Ray
Yes, you are correct!
Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum was my first!
Had all of them, C-64, Atari 1040ST, Amstrad CPC128, Apples and Macs.
I guess we can be all glad about the turn of events.
Jumpman ruled!!!!
Texas Instruments TI for me, but a few friends had the Commodore and it was pretty cool. I’ll always remember the keyboard’s unique clickity click noise.
Skeale beet loppal!
FIrst!
MDN Take: Squirt
My brother had a VIC-20 and C-64. Later I owned the C-128 and the Atari 520ST. I was a kid then, and I was quite perplexed that the programs typed in from magazines (remember those?) required a C compiler, which the computer did not ship with. The Commodore computers shipped with built-in, ROM-based BASIC.
LOAD “NOSTALGI.PRG”,8,1
Clarification: The comment about about C was in reference to the Atari, not the Commodores.
Ray, while I cannot deny that the Timex was a bit of a marvel, it never gained any real traction. The C=64 did gain market traction … though the numbers seem a bit miniscule by today’s standards.
Commodore built some excellent computers, for the time, as did Atari. My first “real” computer was an Amiga … low cost and a real OS. Apple couldn’t match it until OSX came along. But … Commodore BOUGHT that system, didn’t design it. And then they let it sit around with little more than minor updates until it died (for all intents and purposes) when the company sank. Not the computer’s fault, management problems.
Tramiel did cut a serious swath through the business in his day, and worked with some of the best systems available. Windows has much to answer for. Commodity pricing killed two of the three real options.
But … that’s my opinion.
Dave
A trip down memory lane…
As for myself, my first “proper” PC was a ZX-81. Fantastic machine with it’s 1kb of RAM…
Didn’t have the nicest keyboard though.
Anyway, my hat is off for these crazy ones that changed the world.
My first computer was an Oric1.
I used a friends Sinclair ZX81 for a while before that and a teachers Sinclair ZX80 before that at our school’s computer club.
OMG. That was 28 years ago!!!
Awww… my old handle.
The 8-bit Atari systems (before Trameil got his dirty hands on the company) were AWE. SOME. The 800, 800XL blew the DOORS off the c64, and I remember this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach when Trameil got hold of ’em.
RIP Atari.
My elder brother had a C=64. I was dead jealous at the time. Sixteen colours on screen at once!!
@DLMeyer
Actually Sinclair (which Timex was clone of) was one of the most popular or maybe even the most popular computer in Europe.
It was probably the cheapest too.
Speaking about cheap, yes, Tramiel did drive the price of home computers down, taking his companies down with it. Low prices and price wars can harm many good companies.
Imagine M$ giving away free stuff to kill off competition, oh wait, they do that already!
If only the C64/AppleII/TRS80
– had come with upper case/lower case keyboards with proper character sets, at least one of those systems would have made major inroads e.g., in the then emerging word processor business, which didn’t really take off because of this
– had offered the possibility to develop some kind of relocatable code (and a place to load it in RAM!), then there might have been lots of developers adopting these machines
In retrospect, the Atari was the best machine.
(I am saying this, even though I owned a C64 (and did some very tedious assembly language programming on it), and an Amiga.
The Amiga shot itself in the foot because it damaged its own (kickstart+) boot floppies all the time, its graphic system was hard to program transparently for, RAM and other extensions where prohibitively expensive, and the system barely evolved).
My first computer was my fingers.
i loved my c64 as a kid – and i still do love it. the disk drives were wretchedly slow but i just thought of it as time to get up and get a snack while waiting for lode runner or donkey kong or, yes, jumpman, to load up.
great times, way back before i knew apple even existed.
My first computer was a Vic-20 in 1981. I still have a functioning C-64 with a 1541 disk drive. At one time I was receiving royalties from games I licensed for the Vic-20 and C-64. The Commodore was the ultimate hacker’s machine since you could modify the OS on the fly, and had control of the DOS down to the individual segment. I still remember removing the copy protection from a Word Perfect floppy with a refrigerator magnet.
I had a C64 when I was a kid. Learned basic programming on that machine. I played Annihilator, Spy vs. Spy, and my favorite was Apache Gunship. Then, one day, I decided computers were a dead end and gave up on them. That’s because there were no Apples around, I don’t even recall hearing about Apple. Every now and then I weep at night thinking about this, about how my development was delayed until I discovered Macs.
I started with an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P with, I believe, 1.7k of RAM in 1978; I used it to do the credits crawl at the end of TV shows back then. Later I had an Acorn Atom, which took all night to render 1 wireframe of a saddle curve. I also ran UNIX on a hacked Colecovision ADAM. Ah, the memories…
When I was a small little cubie, I bugged the crap out of my parents to get me a Commodore like my friend down the street. Fast forward to 2000 and I FINALLY get my first computer, a Cube. It was worth the wait.