Jack Tramiel dies at age 83

[vidarh]

The father of the C64 saved my life and then had his company stolen from him by the Islamic Crime Syndicate in cahoots with other criminals who then intentionally destroyed the company.  A classic case of Corporate Assassination (corporacide).

This must be an all time most ridiculous comment, surely?

If you're intent on bringing religion or ethnicity into it: He was jewish, and was forced out by Irving Gould, also jewish. So how you manage to get Islam into it is beyond me.

It was also pretty clearly "just" business: Gould and Tramiel were both flawed in their separate but very human ways. Gould was in it for the money and control and prestige, but was relatively clueless about the business. Tramiel desperately wanted it to be "his" family enterprise the way it had been before he had to turn to Tramiel for an investment to save the company. He kept running the company that was as it grew into a major multinational, and he also wanted his sons into important positions when they were old enough, something which worried Gould immensely when Tramiel was pushing for it just as Commodore had hit the big leagues. Recipe for a major conflict.

It's easy to blame Gould for it in retrospect, especially since he utterly failed in getting a replacement that had any much clue about what he was doing, but it's hard to tell how Tramiel would've managed either - the guy burned out executives faster than other people burn through cigars.

[vidarh]

Man, its funny to watch Jack and Woz trade jabs.  There is no love lost there!

Frankly, Woz is massively overrated, so I'm not surprised.

He seems like a lovable enough guy, and a good engineer (or at least he was), but he only gets the amount credit he gets because he left Apple before the going got tough, and because Apple did very well in the US and particularly on the West coast and even more specifically with West coast "hackers", many of whom later ended up in tech journalism, while Commodore ultimately failed and did best outside the US. It's survivor bias (for Apple) coupled with a lot of revisionism, an amazing marketing and PR machine at Apple even in the early days, and lack of perspective. Unfortunately it seems like Woz has come to believe a lot of the hype that's gotten attached to him over the years.

That's not to say that they guy didn't do amazing stuff, but a lot of other people did amazing stuff too, including people like Tramiel and Chuck Peddle (people's written about him that while Woz made a machine starting with chips made by Peddle, Chuck Peddle made a machine by starting with sand; and Peddle himself reportedly said to Tramiel a few years ago that while Tramiel "ruined his life" he is still thankful to Tramiel for giving him the chance to change peoples lives that he wouldn't otherwise had), and a bunch of later Commodore engineers, as well as people elsewhere.

While the early Apple's by all account were good machines (never seen one in real-life - they were non-entities in Norway where I grew up), they were for most intents a niche product for middle class Americans, and for a very long time not a very successful one. Commodore, Texas Instruments, Sinclair and Tandy/Radio Shack all did vastly more to popularize computing than Apple did in its early years.

The veneration for Jobs is more understandable - his turnaround of Apple after his return, coupled with his successes with Pixar and Next and the way he hung in there at Apple while battling cancer and losing  -, is the stuff of legends whether or not you like the guy.

But Woz was a one hit wonder that went on to live off his one success and image and hasn't really done anything of note since the early 80's (unless you count driving a Segway around and waiting in line at Apple stores for no good reason). Nothing wrong with that, and something to dream of being able to do if that's the lifestyle you want, but not really worth the level of admiration he gets.

A lot of the lack of credit both to Commodore people and others comes down to the US bias in the computer press and survivor bias, coupled with the desire for a lovable or admirable hero or anti-hero to build up. Tramiel wasn't as charismatic as Jobs, and not as lovable as Woz. And the engineers in Commodore has not really been made as visible to anyone without a special interest.

In many ways, the biggest difference between Tramiel and the two Steve's is probably that Tramiel was way more human than Jobs (for both good and bad - his tempers are of course famous, but so is his dedication to his family, to the extent that he was willing to lose Commodore at least in part over his sons involvement), and way more committed and determined than Woz (in that way he was probably closer to Jobs).

[vidarh]

I quite liked this obituary at siliconvalley.com as it's not just the "copy and paste and slightly adjust wording" that most of the other obituaries comes off as.

CNet's obituary is quite good too., and links to a great interview with Jack from 2007.

Also, Michael Tomczyk, who became largely responsible for the marketing of the VIC-20 (and the foreword to its manual) has updated his website with some quite nice additions about Tramiel.

[vidarh]

Commodore had the same strategy here in Canada.  Canadian schools were full of PETs and C64s.  So naturally every parent bought for their child the same computer that was being used in the schools.  

Nary and Apple to be seen in schools here.

Commodore did that in the US too at one point, but they reduced focus on the US market because they could sell PET's at a far higher markup in Europe and elsewhere, while the US market was far more competitive, and they had problems ramping up production early on.

In retrospect perhaps that was a mistake - it bought them important revenue, but when the time came to try to boost their presence in the US again with the VIC-20 and C-64, they'd lost a lot of mindshare.

They even had a PET version with networking and software that let the teacher remote control the other PET's in the class room etc.