Jack Tramiel

Jack Tramiel was born Jacek Trzmiel in 1928 in a Jewish family in Łódź. Being Jewish and growing up in Poland when the Nazis invaded the country didn't give him a good start in life. First he was held in the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, then, when the ghetto was liquidated, he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There he was examined by Dr. Mengele, and selected - along with his father - for the Ahlem labor camp near Hanover. His mother remained in Auschwitz; his father died in Ahlem.

He was rescued from the labor camp in 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1947. As always, Wikipedia has a more complete biography of the following years, but I'll just skip ahead to August 1982 when Tramiel's company, Commodore International, released the Commodore 64. We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes[*], as Jack put it - and did they ever. In a time when a PC would set you back $2000 ($4800 in 2012), the C64 could be had for $350 ($840), much thanks to the vertical integration of Commodore. The Commodore 64 went on to become the best-selling home computer of all time. It was so popular that when it was finally discontinued after an 11-year production run, in April 1994, it was because Commodore International went bankrupt - not because it wouldn't sell. That's something quite different from the one year product cycles of today.

Jack Tramiel was the guy that launched a million computer hobbyists, myself included - but despite that he wasn't known outside of those with an interest in IT company organizational charts, and I don't ever recall him being mentioned. Maybe that's just as well. By not having an idol, we were free. I never had to conform to an idol - which was good, because God knows I had a hard enough time conforming to everything else. Nonconformity need not be a good thing, but not having Tramiel as a superstar of C64-dom undoubtedly was a good thing.

My Commodore 64 was a birthday present for me. The C64 started off in BASIC 2.0 mode, meaning that one could, with function keypresses, switch the text color and draw with CBM-ASCII characters on the 40x25 character screen. I think I started off drawing a house.

Then, slowly, slowly, I started with Basic. Now, almost thirty years later, I'm here blogging about it.

64k is enough for anyone.