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 first computer was my fingers.”
My first girlfriend was my right hand.
exactly cubert, and isn’t it amazing that our first girlfriend is always the one we can count on.
And is was the TRS-80 color for me, it was on sale for $99 and my father said if my brother and 2 sisters could save up half, he we pay for the rest. It took a few weeks, then we went to radio shack and …….. now it was $149. My father funded the rest and away we went.
We loved typing in code. Wish I had some since of the future, I could have been the former whatever, of whatever former tech IPO gone bust. The money I could have been sitting on right now.
A digital girl friend. You were years ahead of CDs.
Commodore 64?
Damn, Lionel Ritchie is gettin old!
The first computer that I bought with my own money was one of the Apple II models. I used it as my “main” computer for about 8 years, which is much longer than any other computer I’ve owned since then. Back then, word processing, spreadsheet, and email were all that I needed from a computer, and that Apple II fill that role for a long time.
my first computer:
http://febcm.club.fr/english/ge_115.htm
not very personal tho’
is that dude really named Harry McCracken?!
that’s hilarious! why would someone do that to their son? hahaha
Had me a Sinclair ZX81. Then an Amstrad PCW9512. Then A Mac IIsi and then the dark ages of DOS/ Windows PCs
….and coming soon, a MacBook Pro (sometime after MacWorld in January. I see the light at the end of this tunnel.
MW latter : The latter days are better than the former
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Hell yes they should, this way it will actually be useful & purposeful.
Now, it just looks nice but it doesn’t do very much, with DVR it will be excellent. And being able to sync the programming to your Mac.
@Rob
It was not Tramiel that brought Commodore down. He had already been ousted. Commodore was brought down by an investment banker named Irving Gould.
@Vanfruniken
The C=64 had an excellent typewriter keyboard with standard upper and lower case letters as well as the graphic keys alternatives. In some ways it was better than the Mac keyboard introed in 1984.
First computer I ever used was a TRS-80. Then a Vic-20. First computer was an Amiga 500 – nice machine back in the day. Damn thing did windows better than microsh*t ever did. Hell of a machine with the MASSIVE 1 meg of RAM. Amazing what you could do with 1 meg of ram as opposed to a couple of gig and a quad core running vista (sloooooooooooooooooooow times ahead). We went backwards. Only Apple kept the light burning in the dark days of the nineties….but I’m feeling renaissance in the air…Mac and OSX…how sweet it is
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Interestingly, the Commodore 64/Vic 20 is one of the few lines I never did own. I did own an amiga though…awesome machine, and truly felt it was superior to the mac at that time. But alas, we know which company had the right business model in the long run…
@NCIceman
The Amiga was superior to the Mac at the time. You could run any Mac system in emulation on an Amiga FASTER than the Macintosh could run the same system on the same processor. At a few computer shows I had a 25MHz Amiga 3000 running System 8.1 in an Amiga window right next to a 25MHz Mac IIci running 8.1 and the Amiga consistently finished the same task first… while running other Amiga apps in the background. It blew away a lot of Mac users…
Too bad Commodore let the Amiga wither and die…
I remember back to when the Amiga was a much superior machine to the Mac. Better paint programs, Lightwave 3D, aahhh the Video Toaster. All this made the Amiga a bad-ass machine. A true artist’s tool. Which is my profession. But remember… this was before Photoshop. You can bad mouth Adobe all you want, but Photoshop changed the computer industry and made the Mac what it is today. I fact it still might be the single greatest piece of software ever written for any PC.
It still doesn’t stop me from remembering those long hours of playing Electronic Arts’ Archon (the greatest computer game of it’s time). EA got it’s start with Commodore and look where they are.