“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,” Dave Their reports for Forbes. “He was 83 years old.”
“Tramiel was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1928,” Their reports. “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.”
Their reports, “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.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A true pioneer. Rest in peace, Mr. Tramiel.
In addition to our Macs, we owned Commodore-64 units with which, among other things, we attempted to wear holes through our Jumpman floppy disks and later used Commodore Amigas for broadcast television character generation (CG).
A Commodore 64 was the first computer our family owned. God, I loved that thing. I had tons of games for it, some legit, some pirated (my first programming project outside of school was to create an interface to launch the various pirated games on a floppy).
Anyone remember COMPUTE! and COMPUTE!’s Gazette? Those two magazines always had programs you could type in for the C64, some in BASIC, some in machine language using an editor they created. I typed in a word processor they published, over a period of days (it was that long). My parents liked it so much they were still using it after I went away to college!
——RM
Farewell Jack and thank you for contribution to my career. For without you my farther would not have opened a shop and I would not have sold hundreds of C64’s and Amiga’s. This would have then not led me to Apple and being the reseller I am today. My deepest condolences to his family. RIP JACK
Martyn Ford
Unique Design Systems
Anyone remember COMPUTE! and COMPUTE!’s Gazette? Those two magazines always had programs you could type in for the C64, some in BASIC,….
Yes! I Loved the begining of home computing, in some ways more fun than today, because of an easy to use BASIC.
I used a TRS-80 for voice recognition.
You could write BASIC programs that could:
Use voice recogntion that could turn lights on/off.
Play a game of 21 that would draw cards on the screen.
Have a talking calculator.
THIS WAS ALL BEFORE SIRI !!! The computers at that time were made to have BASIC, at the center.
And for things that needed more speed–a machine launguage subroutine, that would put you right BACK IN BASIC.
Steve Jobs (in Revenge of the Nerds), talks about how HE loved it.
So Apple, the company about making things simple has WHAT?
What Steve Jobs HIMSELF ENJOYED? Or just a convoluted, damm near incomprehesable C shit? Realbasic is not much of a real BASIC, sorry. I call it Clickbasic, and it’s based on Microsoft type o” realbasic. Now there was a fantasic thing called Futurebasic—but I see there’re phone # has been disconected.
Any suggestions, on doing what STEVE JOB’S said HE loved to do?
One more point, (relevant to Commodore), the AMIGA STARTED with a 4,000 COLOR display, and was EXPANDABLE, while the Mac was black and white !! And NOT expandable.
I laughed at the Mac, now I own one.