How Commodore Invented the Mass Market Computer

I have vivid memories of my family's first computer: a blocky Commodore 64 parked in a corner of our basement, its cursor blinking on a royal blue screen. It was just one of the more than 12 million units sold, an astonishing business success pioneered by a Holocaust survivor and Polish immigrant named Jack Tramiel. In his latest piece for The Crazy Ones, Gareth Edwards recounts Tramiel’s journey from Auschwitz to founding Commodore, and later reviving Atari. His ruthless approach to vertical integration and relentless cost-cutting made computers accessible to millions of families who could never have afforded them otherwise—launching a generation of tech careers and helping shape our digital present. Plus: Listen to an audio version of this piece on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.—Kate Lee

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In 1980, Commodore opened its first computer factory in Germany. In just three years, the company had become the third-largest computer manufacturer in the world. With annual revenue of $680 million (more than $2.2 billion today), its success was largely due to its Polish-American founder, Jack Tramiel. As he ascended to the front of the 2,000-employee crowd at the new factory, he was advised to avoid mentioning his past. Specifically, to omit that he’d been a prisoner in Nazi slave camps and at Auschwitz during the war. Tramiel listened to the advice and took to the stage.

“I told them I was Jewish and that I was a survivor of the concentration camps. And then I said that I wanted anyone who was in the SS in my office in the next two days.”

Nobody—nobody—told Jack Tramiel what he could or couldn’t do.

Over the next few days, six men resigned saying that they would never work for a Jew. Over 15 others presented themselves to Tramiel and confessed that they had served in the SS. Tramiel thanked each man for his honesty, offered his forgiveness, and then told them to get back to work. He was determined to make Commodore a business of the future, not the past. He just wanted them to know who he was. And that they worked for him now.

This is the story of Jack Tramiel, one of the most explosive and ruthless founders the computer industry has ever seen. It is the story of four machines—the PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Atari ST—and of the man who ruled home computing for over 20 years.

This account is based on contemporary accounts in Time, Fortune, and the New York Times, as well as books such as Back into the Storm by Bil Herd, Retro Tech by Peter Leigh, and The Home Computer Wars by Michael Tomczyk. I am particularly indebted to Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall, and to both the Computer History Museum and the Commodore archive for their considerable archive of material. It is also based on the words of former Commodore executive and computer designer Leonard Tramiel, creator of the PET computer Chuck Peddle, and former editor of Commodore’s print publications Neil Harris. Also, on the words and testimony of Jack Tramiel himself.

Coming to America

When Idek Trzmiel was an adolescent, he worked as a tailor’s apprentice in Łódź, Poland. In 1939, at the start of World War Two, Trzmiel, who was Jewish, was sent to the Łódź Ghetto with his family. He would spend the next five years there fighting to survive and to avoid being deported to Nazi Germany’s extermination camps. In 1944, the Łódź Ghetto was finally liquidated and its remaining occupants were marked for death. Alongside his father, Trzmiel was sent to Auschwitz. During the process of liquidation, they lost touch with Trzmiel’s mother.

By that time, Trzmiel was 16. He was saved by his ability to work. At Auschwitz, he and his father were among the small number of Łódź deportees selected by the camp authorities for survival. For almost a month, they were used as slave labor within Auschwitz itself, witnessing some of the worst horrors of the Nazi regime.

Trzmiel escaped death at Auschwitz by the narrowest of margins. In August 1944, Germany’s desperate need for slave labor at home meant that approximately 10,000 people were relocated from Auschwitz to a new work camp in Hanover. The Trzmiels were among them. They were saved from death, but this salvation would prove only temporary for many. As slaves, they were treated brutally. Once they were no longer able to work, they were killed. 

In early 1945, this fate befell Idek’s father. Because he was no longer able to work, he was murdered with an injection of gasoline. By April 1945, only 250 of the original slave laborers sent to the camp from Auschwitz were still alive. This number included Idek. They were emaciated and unable to work. The Nazis ordered them to start digging their own graves. Right at that time, American forces finally reached the camp and liberated it.

Idek spent three months recovering in an Allied hospital in 1945. Amid the chaos of liberation and immediate post-war Germany, Idek, like many others, struggled to come to terms with what they had just survived. 

“I came out like a wild tiger,” he remembered later. “I wanted to get back everything I had lost.”

Like many survivors, Idek struggled to understand his experience. Over the next two years, he took odd jobs in Germany wherever he could find them. He also became fixated on revenge. When a German police officer disparaged his Jewish background, he beat him, which led to Idek’s arrest and trial for assault. A sympathetic American lieutenant helped him escape jail by telling Idek the exact statutes he needed to cite to be sentenced as a Polish combatant, rather than as a civilian survivor. As a result, he was sentenced to only 30 days of confinement in a military stockade operated by American occupation forces, rather than in a German prison. 

While serving his sentence, a brief encounter changed the course of his life. “There I met a priest, because there was no rabbi, and he opened my mind up, you know? He said: ‘If you are going to be killing them the same way that they did to you, then what’s the difference between you and them?’”

Once his sentence was complete, Idek decided that he needed to leave the past—and Germany—behind for good. In November 1947, Idek, who was in his early twenties, emigrated by ship to the United States with the help of a Jewish survivors’ charity. He had married fellow Holocaust survivor Helen Goldgrub a few months before but had to leave her behind. The couple agreed that she would follow once he had secured reliable work. By the time he arrived in New York City, Juda Idek Trzmiel had Americanized his name and become Jack Tramiel. He had no money, job, or connections but was determined to make his mark. He lived out of a shelter for Jewish emigrés, worked odd jobs, and learned English. Then, in 1948, he joined the U.S. Army.

"I felt I owed something to this country,” Tramiel explained later. “And I believed in paying it back."

The ‘Religion’

This idea—that a debt should always be repaid—became the first of a series of rules by which Tramiel decided to live his life. It was his philosophy that applied to everything from relationships to personal choices—and especially to business.

“Jack called his management philosophy ‘the Religion.’ ‘You have to believe in it, otherwise it doesn't work,’ he’d say,” Michael Tomczyk, who worked for Tramiel at Commodore and Atari, later remembered. 

At this stage, “the Religion” was still a work in progress. In many ways, so was Jack himself. He spent four years in the U.S. Army. While in uniform, he returned to Germany, where he discovered that his mother had also survived the war and was reunited with her. On his return to the U.S., he was accompanied by his wife Helen. Thanks to his army position, Tramiel had the paperwork—and financial security—to bring her back to the U.S.

By the time Tramiel left the Army in 1951, he’d also become a father to the first of three sons. The army had given him a new set of technical skills—typewriter maintenance—that he intended to put to good use. He took a job at a typewriter store in New York but wasn’t there long. Tramiel used his army connections to secure a lucrative repair contract for the store’s owner. In return, he expected to get a raise. When that didn’t happen, he quit on the spot.

“I have no intention of working for people who have no brains,” he told the man. Then, he walked out the door.

A second tenet of Jack Tramiel’s Religion had been laid down: Only work with smart people.

With the help of veteran grants, Tramiel set up his own typewriter repair shop in the Bronx. The shop was breaking even, but there wasn’t any real scope to expand. That was when another tenet of his Religion was laid down: Always look for opportunities. 

In 1955, Tramiel was selling mechanical adding machines, an early form of the calculator. They were sourced from a company known as Everest. During a conversation with one of its agents, Tramiel learned that the company wanted someone to be its exclusive importer in Ontario, Canada. Tramiel took on the contract and moved his family, including his first son, to Toronto.

In 1958, opportunity struck again. Sears was looking for a supplier for typewriters in Canada. Tramiel persuaded the company to issue him the contract, along with roughly $175,000 in advanced sales (about $2 million today). It was an extraordinary coup for Tramiel, but he faced one problem: Despite what he’d told the department store, he lacked the knowledge and manufacturing capacity to build typewriters himself.

Tramiel approached the leading U.S. manufacturers, including Royal and Smith-Corona, to see if they would help bring the typewriters over to Canada. Both firms refused to supply machines to Tramiel. They wanted him to fail so they could secure the Sears contract themselves. But Tramiel had no intention of failing. He flew to Europe to find the right manufacturing partner. In Prague, Czechoslovakia, he made a deal with a local typewriter manufacturer. Tramiel’s firm would import Czech typewriters to Canada, where they would alter them just enough to be able to rebadge the machines as domestically produced, exempting them from import tariffs.

All he needed now was a brand name for his rebadging operation. He wanted a word with a military connection, something that would sound authoritative to Canadian Sears customers, but also in the U.S. if he decided to expand there. All the good ones like “General” and “Admiral” seemed to be taken. One day, while in a taxi in Berlin, he saw a particularly stylish car in front. The name of its maker—Hudson Motor Company—was emblazoned on the trunk. So was the model. It gave Tramiel the word he was after.

Commodore.

Commodore’s rollercoaster ride

 Under Jack’s leadership, Commodore was a financial success, but Jack was never satisfied. Whenever Commodore made money, Tramiel would invest it all back into the firm. He expanded existing facilities, spent more on advertising, and purchased new businesses to add to the Commodore brand, including an office furniture factory. This created periods of enormous growth, but also often left Commodore financially fragile and without significant cash reserves.

Another tenet of Jack’s religion was established: All growth opportunities must be taken, regardless of the financial burden they might place on the company.

In conversation with Tomczyk, Tramiel acknowledged that this approach was partly a result of his experiences in the Holocaust. He couldn’t trust what tomorrow might bring.

"’I live in the future,’ he told me. ‘Only the future. There's nothing else.’" 

Eventually, this growth came at a cost. In the late 1950s, Tramiel was forced to sell half of Commodore to Atlantic Acceptance, the third largest non-bank lender in Canada. Then, he took out further loans from Atlantic Acceptance, which allowed the company to expand into electronics, such as radios, and office supplies. This time, the price was surrendering the chairmanship of Commodore to C. Powell Morgan, president of Atlantic Acceptance.

Then, in 1965, Atlantic Acceptance collapsed in a financial scandal considered one of the largest in Canadian history. C. Powell Morgan was jailed for financial fraud. Tramiel, too, was investigated for financial fraud, although he was ultimately cleared.

This was a financial catastrophe for Commodore. The company was heavily indebted to Atlantic, and other lenders called in their loans as well. 

Tramiel frantically hunted for a new financial patron. What he got was Irving Gould.

Gould, born in 1914, was a powerful Canadian financier and owner (or part-owner) of multiple businesses around the world. Although his exact wealth in 1965 is uncertain, the lowest estimates place it in the hundreds of millions (enough to make him a billionaire, in modern terms). That wealth was, in part, built through his ability to spot financial opportunities lurking in the gray area between business activities, and the regulations and tax authorities that governed them. It was Gould who would later create a byzantine corporate setup at Commodore that would see all of its global business profits reported in the Bahamas, saving the corporation hundreds of millions in tax worldwide.

Tramiel first met Gould in the fall of 1965. The financier was a man who liked to operate in the background but enjoyed a flamboyant personal lifestyle. Tramiel was the exact opposite. He was a loud, bombastic figure who lived a frugal life. Despite their differences, both men recognized a mutual talent for business. Gould could see that Tramiel knew how to create profitable businesses—with occasional cash flow crises. Each crisis allowed Gould to take a little bit more of Commodore. Once the crisis had passed, Gould would take the money back out. 

On the other hand, Gould had cash to help Commodore survive. During that first investment, he took 17 percent of the company and was appointed chairman.

This arrangement would cause Tramiel problems in the future, but Gould opened other doors. Their relationship triggered one of the most important events in Tramiel's life: his first visit to Japan.

The calculator pivot

When Tramiel visited Japan in the late 1960s, he realized that Commodore was in the wrong business. There, he saw the future. That future involved electronic calculators, not typewriters. Electronic calculators used silicon chips to carry out the same range of calculations as Commodore’s mechanical machines, but were much smaller, easier to use, and far less prone to failure. 

"I made the trip to Japan and I found out the world was changing,” he later remembered. 

As is often the case with the history of Commodore, why Tramiel decided to make that trip is open to question. Tramiel often claimed it was on his own volition, but Gould was a life-long Japanophile with shipping interests (and a mistress) there.

“Yeah. Irving [Gould] told Jack to get his ass to Japan,” Chuck Peddle, later one of the most important figures at Commodore, told the Computer History Museum bluntly in 2019.

Whatever the reason, Tramiel was deeply influenced by his trip. Upon his return, he pivoted Commodore to the calculator business, importing Casio calculators and rebranding them for Canadian and U.S. markets. Soon, Commodore set up factories to build calculators of its own in the U.S. These were funded by Irving Gould—in return for a little bit more of the company.

For five years, Commodore flew high in the calculator business. Tramiel bought silicon chips from domestic manufacturers such as Texas Instruments, one of the largest chip makers in the world, and turned them into calculators, selling the finished product at considerable profit. He wasn’t the only one doing this. In Albuquerque, an ex-Airforce officer named Ed Roberts had founded a company called MITS that was doing the same.

Both men were generating large profits, but Texas Instruments was watching. Texas Instruments decided to start making calculators itself, and because the company made its own chips, it could make the machines cheaper than anyone else. By 1974, it was selling almost 30 million calculators a year, destroying the market for third-party calculator manufacturers like Commodore and MITS almost overnight.

In Albuquerque, Ed Roberts reacted by accepting his defeat. In what would prove to be a key moment in the history of computing, he pivoted MITS to produce a personal computer known as the Altair 8800. Tramiel took a different lesson from the experience. He added a new tenet to his Religion: Always control the means of production.

"I had to decide a way I could not depend on the outside. How to become vertically integrated."

Chip manufacturing

Being vertically integrated meant Commodore, like Texas Instruments, had to make its own chips. But chip manufacture was highly specialized. It wasn’t something you could start doing overnight. So Tramiel, ever ruthless, decided to take over someone else’s chip business instead.

That business was MOS Technology. Founded in 1969, MOS had perfected low-cost chip manufacture by the mid-seventies. At the beginning of 1975, it stunned the computer industry by announcing the launch of the 6502 central processing unit (CPU) chip for just $25. Meanwhile, rivals Motorola and Intel were selling their own equivalents for $179.

MOS Technology seemed to be on the verge of a bright future, but the company was in deep financial trouble. In part, this was because of a lawsuit from Motorola. It was also because MOS was sitting on a huge pile of unpaid invoices from calculator manufacturers—most notably Commodore, which was in deep financial distress due to its competition with Texas Instruments and Tramiel’s financial strategies.

Tramiel sensed a way he could save Commodore. Instead of paying his bills, he returned to Irving Gould. Gould injected sufficient capital to allow Tramiel to buy the near-bankrupt MOS. For another slice of Commodore, of course.

Overnight, Commodore became a major manufacturer of chips. Tramiel had vertically integrated his production line. He also took something else from MOS. The deal was conditional on one man leaving MOS and working directly for Tramiel at Commodore: the designer of the 6502 chip itself, Chuck Peddle.

The first Commodore computer

“The 6502 was specifically designed to be the universal solvent. It's just enough, and it's simple enough, and it's cheap enough that you can use it for anything,” Peddle told the Computer History Museum.

The Altair 8800 had proved that a market existed for low-end computers, but Peddle was one of the first to spot the market’s true potential. While at MOS, he designed the KIM-1, an extremely basic computer using the 6502 to prove it could be done.

Peddle had caught Tramiel’s attention not because of the KIM-1, but because Tramiel wanted a way into a growing off-shoot of the calculator market—chess calculators, or machines that would play you at chess. Once Peddle joined Commodore, however, he suggested to Tramiel that they go one further. Peddle pointed out that the Altair 8800 released by MITS for the computer hobbyist market had shown that there was demand for personal computers. He told Tramiel that they shouldn’t waste time with calculators. Instead, they should build a computer based on the 6502 chip.

“I can build a personal computer that can sell,” Peddle told Tramiel.

Tramiel had no real understanding of what a computer was or why people might buy one. But Peddle was a smart man offering up an opportunity. That fulfilled the two tenets of Tramiel’s Religion—work with smart people and look for opportunities. So he told Peddle to do it.

Peddle had talked briefly with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when they were working on the Apple computer. He knew the two men were hoping to use the 6502 chip in their next machine, the Apple II. So he suggested that they let Commodore buy them out. Jobs was excited by the possibility.

“Steve [Jobs] started saying all we want to do was offer [Apple] for a few hundred thousand dollars, and we will get jobs at Commodore, we’ll get some stock, and we’ll be in charge of running the program,” Wozniak said later.

Jobs and Tramiel sat down to negotiate. Overconfident, Jobs told Tramiel they wanted $150,000 (about $850,000 today) for Apple. Tramiel was prepared to back Peddle’s idea, but spending that much money on a company based out of a suburban garage seemed ludicrous. Jobs’s attitude also annoyed him. So he walked away from the negotiations, and told Peddle he had three months to assemble a team and design the computer himself. He wanted it ready for the January 1977 Computer Electronics Show (CES).

Peddle tried to explain that this was too short a deadline, but Tramiel waved his objections away and added a new tenet to the Religion: Give smart people a clear deadline and they’ll somehow figure it out.

Peddle set about designing and building a bespoke Commodore computer. At the time, MITS’s Altair 8800 dominated the hobbyist market, while companies like Vector Graphic were making machines like the Vector 1 for small and medium businesses. Both machines required users to understand complex machine language if they wanted to create their own programs. Peddle believed that this was a mistake. He concluded that the first successful mass market computer would be one that people felt that they could program themselves. He designed a machine that came with a keyboard and monitor. Then, he set about sourcing a human-readable programming language. He decided that the language that best met that requirement was Microsoft BASIC. 

Peddle approached Bill Gates at Microsoft and requested a version of Microsoft BASIC for the 6502 chip. Gates was skeptical. He thought the chip would use up so much processing power it would cripple the machine, but agreed to do it anyway. Peddle suggested a contract where Microsoft would receive a royalty for each machine sold. Gates laughed him off. He didn’t think the thing would sell, and he wanted the money upfront.

 Rather than charge Commodore a small fee for every machine they sold with BASIC on it, Gates offered a perpetual license. In return for a fixed fee, Commodore would be given a version of BASIC that it could install on as many machines as it liked, for as long as it wanted.

Commodore and Microsoft never revealed how much the deal cost, but most estimates have placed it at about $25,000. Commodore would go on to use that version of BASIC for every single Commodore designed and released during Tramiel’s time in charge—somewhere north of 15 million machines. In modern terms, the deal cost Microsoft more than $400 million in lost revenue. Bill Gates never made a fixed-fee deal again.

At CES 1977, the Commodore PET was revealed to the world, wrapped in a stainless steel case that was made by a filing cabinet factory that Tramiel owned in Canada. PET didn’t stand for anything. It was just a pun on the popularity of pet rock toys at the time. 

The machine was an instant hit. The only problem was that Commodore did not have the money to set up the manufacturing capacity necessary to bring it to market. Peddle raised this concern with Tramiel, who laughed it off.

“He says, ‘When HP first started selling calculators, you had to pay them in advance for 90 days,’” Peddle remembered. “So he said, ‘We're going to do that.’”

"Three million bucks in advanced sales,” Tramiel later confirmed with a grin in a Computer History Museum interview. “We knew we had a winner."

Tramiel suspected that no customer would ask for their money back once they’d pre-ordered the device, as long as they thought it was eventually on the way. Using pre-payments as a form of seed capital, Commodore was able to quickly build up the manufacturing capacity required to turn MOS chips into full-fledged computers, and to source monitors and keyboards to use with them. This strategy was successful, and several other computer firms followed suit. Unlike Commodore, not all of them delivered. Adam Osborne, one of the computing industry’s rising voices, raged about these practices in his Information Age column. He said that companies that used the pre-payment method gave the new computing industry a bad name and alienated potential users.

Tramiel shrugged the criticism off. He wasn’t in business to be nice. By 1980, thanks to the PET, Commodore was the third largest computer manufacturer in the world. 

An obsession with control

The success of the PET changed Commodore. From this point onwards, it was a computer company—and a global one at that. With Tramiel’s agreement, Gould restructured the business into a series of regional subsidiaries under a single parent company based in the Bahamas.

Gould designed this structure to minimize Commodore’s tax bills and avoid, as much as possible, the need to file detailed reports and accounts. The structure also mitigated a growing problem for the company: that of managing Jack Tramiel.

According to Tramiel’s management philosophy, his Religion, he needed control over almost all aspects of day-to-day operations. He wanted to interview every hire and sign off every expense. He wanted to be the final decision-maker in all aspects of design, sales, and marketing. He was obsessed with control.

When Commodore was small, this wasn’t an issue. As the third-largest computer manufacturer in the world, with subsidiaries across the globe, it didn’t work as well. Different markets required different approaches to sales. They used different regulatory frameworks, time zones, and languages. It simply wasn’t possible for these subsidiaries to function if every decision or invoice had to be run past Jack Tramiel back in California

On top of this, Jack Tramiel demanded absolute dedication and loyalty from his staff. He expected managers to be able to answer any question he asked about their teams or projects, and did not tolerate failure from anyone—no matter the reason.

If Tramiel felt someone had failed him, then no mercy would be offered. Failure often led to dismissal without warning. If Tramiel felt the employee still had some use or potential, he would subject them to what Commodore insiders called a “Jack Attack.” They would be summoned to Tramiel’s office and subjected to his full wrath. Sometimes, it would happen on the floor in front of the entire department. He would berate and insult them, question their competence and ability, and strip them of their projects or authority. Often, they would be summarily transferred to a distant location within the growing Commodore empire and given tasks well below their level or skill.

Long-term Commodore employees realized that these exiles were always temporary. This was a penance they were expected to perform. If they didn’t quit, they would eventually be summoned back and given their old responsibilities back. Sometimes, they found themselves trusted with even more. Tramiel seemed to believe that surviving a Jack Attack demonstrated character. 

"I wanted Commodore to be a family. Everyone should work together,” Tramiel said later, when asked about his reputation for Jack Attacks. “My personal job was not to tell them how good they are. But to tell them what they were doing wrong."

As a management method, it created a set of die-hard, talented loyalists around Tramiel who began to refer to themselves internally as the “Commodorians.” But it also created a hostile working environment that meant Commodore struggled to retain new talent.

“Once I asked Jack point-blank why so many managers got fired or resigned from Commodore. ‘Business is war,’ he said. ‘You have to be in it to win. Our generals are all in the trenches, so more of them get killed,’” Tomczyk remembered.

“He comes in like a lighted flare in a darkened room. He illuminates the scene with such brilliance that you’re almost blinded,” said James Finke, one of the many presidents Irving Gould put in place at Commodore to try and manage Tramiel. “But his vapor trails take a lot of the oxygen out of the air, and when he leaves the room there’s no more light.”

Tramiel wasn’t entirely happy with Commodore’s new structure. He negotiated to retain full control of Commodore’s U.S. arm, including chip design, manufacturing, and global strategy. Gould was happy to agree. His goal was to shield the regional subsidiaries from Tramiel’s need to micromanage, and it worked. This strategy was particularly successful in the U.K., Germany, and Japan, where talented regional managers pushed Commodore’s growth in ways that were hyper-optimized to their local markets.

Commodore’s breakthrough machine

Almost as soon as the PET, Commodore’s first computer, hit the shelves, Tramiel was pushing Peddle to design a new one. Peddle believed it was time to push the boundaries of what a home computer could do and began work on what became known as Project TOI (“Tool of Intellects”).

However, Tramiel and Peddle had opposing visions, and relations between the two started to deteriorate. Ever since Tramiel had first visited Japan, he’d become obsessed with the Japanese approach to technical development. It wasn’t just about pushing the boundaries of what was technically possible. It was also about finding ways to drive down costs. Doing so would create new buyers for technology by lowering the financial bar to entry.

Peddle wanted to deliver a generational leap in technology. Tramiel was happy being second, but cheaper. What he saw was a market full of computers, all priced roughly the same, competing for the same buyers. He didn’t want a computer better than the Apple II, which was a popular choice. He wanted something that was comparable but cheaper. 

And Commodore could go cheaper, because Apple didn’t make its own chips. The Apple II was built around the 6502 chip, which it was buying from Commodore-owned MOS Technology. Tramiel believed he could do to Apple with computers what Texas Instruments had done to him in the calculator market—release a much cheaper product, and outcompete.

The only point on which both men agreed was that the new machine needed to support color displays, something most computers at the time didn’t have the processing power to do. 

Peddle didn’t cede, and it wasn’t long before a different group of engineers within Commodore approached Tramiel with something closer to the kind of computer that he wanted. Bob Yannes, another engineer at MOS, had built a prototype known as the MicroPET. As with Peddle’s KIM-1, it wasn’t a full computer design. However, it proved that an evolved version of the PET could deliver everything Tramiel wanted—including a cut in production cost. Tramiel ordered parallel development to start on the project, code-named Project Vixen.

For a while, development on both machines continued. Things finally came to a head in April 1980 during a conference in London with the leaders of all of Commodore’s subsidiaries. For several days, debate raged over which project should be taken to production. Peddle and most of those present demanded all effort be focused on Project TOI. Only two voices spoke in support of Project Vixen: Kit Spencer of Commodore U.K. and Tony Tokai of Commodore Japan. It was not lost on Jack Tramiel that they were the two regional heads he rated most highly.

Finally, while all the key players were gathered for a pub lunch on the last day, Tramiel rose from his seat and pounded the table once with his fist. Everyone fell silent.

"Gentlemen,” Tramiel growled. “The Japanese are coming. So we will become the Japanese!"

Project Vixen is a go

He had listened to all the arguments, but it was his company. His decision was that the next machine would focus on driving down costs. Project Vixen, which had started as the MicroPET, won. The decision marked the end of the successful relationship between Peddle and Tramiel. True to his ruthless reputation, Tramiel forced Peddle to leave Commodore not long after.

Meanwhile, the joy of the Project Vixen team was short-lived. Tramiel issued a mandate that the machine launch at CES in January 1981, only eight months away.

This tight deadline was made worse as the team found that Peddle (who hadn’t yet left the company) and most of the Commodore U.S. research arm were indifferent or actively hostile to their efforts. They had wanted Project TOI and believed Vixen was doomed. They had no desire to work on it, and they believed that doing so would risk incurring the wrath of Jack Tramiel when it failed. 

Project Vixen might have been doomed, except for a quirk of Commodore’s new subsidiary structure. Out of respect for Japan’s electronics industry, Tramiel had allowed Commodore Japan, under Tony Tokai, to build a large research and development arm of its own. Tokai was one of the two subsidiary heads who had backed Tramiel’s decision to choose Project Vixen. The Vixen team asked Tokai for support, and he gave it to them.

Tokai’s support proved critical to Project Vixen’s success. He placed all of his development resources at the project team’s disposal. This included an engineering team led by Yash Terakura, Commodore Japan’s talented chief engineer.

Thanks to this injection of talent and personnel, the VIC-20 was finished in time for CES 1981—just as Tramiel had demanded. The VIC-20 was barely better than the PET, but it did have color, and could be hooked up to either a monitor or a television. This became a common practice, particularly outside the U.S., and it wasn’t unusual to see a home computer beneath, or alongside, a family TV in many households. However, what stunned everyone was the price. Commodore U.S. and Commodore Japan were both masters of cost reduction in different areas, and their cooperation accidentally created a masterpiece. The machine cost just $299.95 (about $1,000 today), which was less than half that of any other comparable machine on the market. 

Any doubt over whether Tramiel was correct evaporated once the orders came in. In 1983, two years after launch, the VIC-20 passed 1 million computers sold. It was the first computer to reach that milestone, beating the Apple II despite launching two years after it. 

Justifying a purchase

Commodore had made the first true home computer, rather than a microcomputer, as it had often been referred to before. Microcomputers like the Altair were for hobbyists—people who wanted technology to tinker with. The PET was a microcomputer as well. Others like the Apple II or the soon-to-be-released IBM PC were pitched as business or productivity machines, while companies like Atari or Intellivision created games consoles.

Most families didn’t have the kind of money—often $500 or more—required to buy a computer that was specialized around one of those goals. It made buying a computer a luxury purchase. The genius of the VIC-20 was that it could do all of these tasks. It was a machine you could tinker with, use for basic business productivity tasks, or play games on—all for less than $300. You could even hook it up to your television as a monitor if you couldn’t afford to buy one to go with the computer. 

Suddenly, every child or teenager who had been pestering their parents for something they could play games on had an argument they could make for buying a VIC-20 that they couldn’t for an Atari. The VIC-20 was educational. It was a computer. It just happened to also play games. This helped adults—many of whom wanted to play games just as much as their children did—justify the decision. Commodore ensured that a series of critically acclaimed text adventures were available to buy at launch, targeted at exactly these grown-up gamers.

It didn’t take long for Commodore to make the home computer the prime focus of its marketing message. They also found the perfect voice for the machine of the future: William Shatner.

The perfect home computer

The VIC-20 helped Tramiel decide the final tenet in his Religion: Low cost is everything.

“Computers for the masses, not the classes,” he was quoted saying after the launch of the VIC-20.

Then, in November 1981, less than a year after its launch, Tramiel decided it was time to create a successor.

The catalyst for the successor came, once again, from inside MOS Technology. Its chips now lay at the heart of various non-Commodore gaming systems, including the Nintendo Entertainment System and Atari’s full line of systems. The subsidiary had also been working on designing chips for a new generation of video game consoles. This included its VIC-II video chip as well as something new and revolutionary: the SID chip, for sound generation.

By the middle of 1981, MOS was struggling to find an outside buyer for the VIC-II and SID chips. They were bleeding-edge technology aimed squarely at video game console manufacturers. But that market had seen a downturn in investment. Ironically, this downtown was because of the arrival of home computers such as Commodore’s.

In November 1981, frustrated that his revolutionary design was languishing on the shelf, the SID chip’s designer went to Jack Tramiel. He dragged along Al Charpentier, the creator of the VIC-II, and MOS general manager Charles Winterble for support. He argued that Commodore should use the chips in a new computer instead of video game consoles, and that they should make a VIC-20 successor built around the VIC-II and SID. 

Tramiel recognized the designer. It was Bob Yannes, the same man who had brought him the MicroPET that had become the VIC-20.

Yannes had already given Commodore its biggest success (tenet one). He was clearly a smart man (tenet two). Though it might harm VIC-20 sales, there was a market opportunity (tenet three). Not least because Commodore owned the means of production for both the VIC-II and SID chips (tenet four). Jack Tramiel signed off on the project. The Religion demanded it.

Yannes left the room under orders that the new machine should be ready in time for CES 1982, less than two months away (tenet five). The Religion demanded that, too.

The deadline was short but not impossible. With Commodore’s vertical integration, board and chip prototyping could be done in house. Other home computer companies had to create chip designs, send them off to a chip manufacturer, and wait for them to be produced. At Commodore, it was just about finding spare staff or production downtime at MOS Technology. Nor did the team have to worry about project or fiscal management. Tramiel didn’t believe in such things.

“I had no formal budget accountability,” Winterble said later. “Other than Jack watching me. Jack said that budgets were a license to steal.”

The VIC-20 also gave the project team a solid headstart in components and casing for the new project—there is a reason that the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 look so similar. Even with the headstart, the production process was lightning-fast. The most successful computer that the world has arguably ever seen went from paper to production in just under six weeks.

That machine launched at CES in January 1982 as the soon-to-be-legendary Commodore 64. The 64 was a reference to the 64 kilobytes of RAM the machine contained. This had been the only other stipulation from Jack Tramiel to the team, even though this amount of RAM was expensive at the time, and was far more than most other home computer manufacturers included in their machines.

“Jack made the bet that by the time we were ready to produce a product, 64KB of RAM would be cheap enough for us to use,” Charpentier said later. Tramiel was right.

The Commodore 64 stunned both the industry and the press. It wasn’t just its groundbreaking design (which was due to the VIC-II and SID). It was the price. Other machines on the market with the same broad range of specifications as the Commodore 64 were retailing at $1,000 or above. The Commodore 64 was priced at barely half that.

“All we saw at our booth were Atari people with their mouths dropping open, saying, ‘How can you do that for $595?!” David Ziembicki, one of the Commodore 64 project team, remembered.

The cost of making the Commodore 64 dropped once production started. Another manufacturer with such a significant price advantage may have been tempted to bank these efficiency savings as profits, but that wasn’t Tramiel’s way. Whenever production costs fell, he dropped the retail price further. This created a permanent price war with his competitors, who were often forced to sell their own machines at a loss.

Commodore was now offering a record-making machine at a rapidly dropping price, one with a growing range of games from developers who loved its chipset. Commodore’s rivals desperately tried to match Tramiel’s price cuts to compete, but they couldn’t match the company’s vertical integration. Several were driven out of the business entirely. In a twist of fate, one of those companies was Texas Instruments. It had pivoted from calculators into computing; now it was Commodore’s turn to drive it out of the computer business instead.

Tramiel admitted that he found this very satisfying. Revenge is a form of debt, so it needs to be repaid. Tenet one.

An achievement unmatched

Over 12 million Commodore 64s were sold during its remarkable 12-year production run. By some estimates, this made it the highest number of computers sold of any type, ever. It marked the peak of Tramiel’s time at Commodore. It was the culmination of all his principles on how a business should be run. It took everything the VIC-20 had pioneered and distilled it into its perfect form. No computer has ever captured the time, the place, and the technology better.

It also did something that nobody could ever have anticipated. Over its 12-year run (which was itself likely another record), it opened up computing to people from backgrounds who never dreamed they would have access to it. Tramiel’s policy of ruthless price-cutting saw to that. 

“I firmly believe that Commodore launched more tech careers than any other company, by far,” said Matthew Gracie, a senior engineer at Security Onion Solutions. “Even a working-class family like mine in the 1980s could plausibly afford the Sears bundle of a Commodore 64 and monitor. That set me on my path.”

CES 1983 didn’t bring any major new announcements from Commodore, but nobody was overly concerned. Both the Commodore 64 and its precursor, the VIC-20, were selling in extraordinary numbers. Behind the scenes, Tramiel was pushing for a new computer line that completely diverged from the PET/VIC-20/Commodore 64, and would focus more explicitly on business and education. 

However, from the moment development began, it was troubled. A lot of that trouble was created by Tramiel, his management philosophy, and his Jack Attacks.

Computing was changing. Advances in technology and user expectations meant that machines and chips now required more intense—and more planned—development. Development like that took time and cost money, neither of which Tramiel believed in providing.

“Tramiel is not an investor,” Peddle said later. “He never invested in any development activity…He never invested. Which is what it takes to get a new high-capability processor.”

The PET, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 were all the result of chip development at MOS that had started prior to Commodore’s takeover, or were designed by the few smart and talented people who could tolerate Tramiel’s Jack Attacks. That was a shrinking pool.

By now, there was a shadow management layer operating within Commodore, built around the “Commodorians”—the people who knew how to manage, and survive, Jack. This often didn’t align with the official management chain. It created constant change in staff at the executive level within Commodore, and the firm was incapable of retaining talent.

Despite all of this, CES 1984 began with the launch of the Commodore 16 and the Commodore Plus/4—the first two machines of the new business-friendly line. Tramiel himself took to the stage to announce that Commodore had reached $1 billion in sales—a first for the entire personal computer industry. This was a moment of celebration, but something seemed off for the experienced Jack-watchers in the room.

“Jack was on stage and he didn't look like a happy man, and Jack was not someone to hide his emotions generally—it just seemed strange for some of us in the back of the room,” Neil Harris, then-editor of Commodore’s print publications, remembered.

Shortly after this appearance, Tramiel departed CES. Three days later, he met with Irving Gould. Immediately afterwards, to the shock and amazement of the computing world, Commodore announced the departure of Jack Tramiel.

The departure

Behind the scenes at Commodore and unbeknownst to most, a struggle for power had been underway between Irving Gould and Jack Tramiel.

Over time, two distinct narratives have emerged for what happened that day. The first is that Gould had become increasingly frustrated and angry with Tramiel’s aggressive management style, including his obsession with maintaining personal control over strategy and spending within Commodore. Gould decided enough was enough, and fired Tramiel.

The other narrative is that Tramiel had become increasingly frustrated with the way Gould treated Commodore’s assets as if they were his own, and took money out of the company. Tramiel had tolerated this as long as Gould didn’t interfere with how Tramiel ran the company, but when Gould blocked Tramiel from appointing his sons to the Commodore board, Tramiel quit in disgust.

Debate continues to rage to this day over which of those narratives is closer to the truth. What that debate tends to miss is that both accounts are likely true.

In September 1983, just a few months before CES 84, Osborne Computing had gone bankrupt. The company had produced the Osborne 1, the first truly portable computer, and was seen as a stable and successful business with a bright future. Its sudden and spectacular fall sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley. Adam Osborne, its flamboyant founder, was already defending himself from accusations that his autocratic and chaotic personal leadership style had caused the implosion. Meanwhile, IBM—the most traditional and conservative among technology companies—had come from nowhere to dominate low-end business computing thanks to Don Estridge’s IBM PC. 

It’s easy to imagine Gould wondering if Commodore, his golden goose, would be ruined by Tramiel—his Adam Osborne. Gould had tried multiple times to establish a senior management structure that conformed with standard expectations of how a billion-dollar multi-national business like Commodore should operate. His efforts had continually been undermined by Tramiel and his loyal Commodorians. There are even rumors that Tramiel insisted that one or more of his sons be elevated to the board, strengthening his control.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that Gould had been taking enormous amounts of money out of Commodore. He regularly treated corporate assets (including the company jet) as if they were his own. This was infuriating to the eternally frugal Tramiel, who still regarded Commodore as his company, not Gould’s. From Tramiel’s perspective, Gould’s continuous attempts to add layers of unnecessary management was an expensive mistake, a direct threat to his control, and a risk to the financial health of the company. If Gould wasn’t going to let Tramiel build Commodore his way, there was no reason for Tramiel to stay there. It was natural for him to have wanted out.

Both men wanted Commodore to continue growing, but they disagreed over the way to make that happen. It was a battle between Jack Tramiel’s Religion and Gould’s vision of Commodore as a corporate clone of IBM. The result, at that fateful January meeting, was a short but decisive war for the soul of Commodore. As Commodore’s chairman and its largest shareholder, it was a war that Gould was always going to win.

"It was like the air went out of the room.” Neil Harris said, remembering how it felt when the news became public. Most people assumed that this would be the end of Jack Tramiel.

Enter Atari

In the immediate aftermath of his resignation, Tramiel told former colleagues and the press that he planned to spend a year traveling the world. Three months later, Tramiel and his wife were at a hotel in Sri Lanka when he was summoned to the phone. On the other end of the line was Steve Ross, the CEO of Warner Communications.

Warner had a problem—a problem called “Atari.” Warner had bought Atari in 1979. Atari’s iconic line of home videogame systems, featuring titles such as Pong, Pac-Man, and Super-Breakout, had made it the most successful home video-gaming company in the world. Almost immediately after Warner’s purchase, a crash in the video game market tanked its value. Since then, it was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Warner’s share price weakened the company so much that media tycoon Rupert Murdoch nearly executed a hostile takeover of the entire company. Ross successfully fought it off, but he knew that he might not be able to do so again. He wanted to ask Tramiel if he would consider becoming Atari’s new CEO.

Tramiel refused and instead made Ross a counter-offer: Warner should simply give him Atari instead. Warner’s CEO was confused but intrigued, and Tramiel flew back to Silicon Valley to explain his plan.

After this, things moved fast. In early May 1984, a small group of Commodorians were invited to meet with Tramiel at a rented room in a small apartment complex in Sunnyvale, California, near Atari’s headquarters. Among them was Shiraz M. Shivji, Commodore’s director of research and development and a former member of the Commodore 64 development team. Tramiel told them what was coming and swore them to secrecy.

On May 17, 1984, Tramel Technology Ltd. was founded. The spelling was deliberate. Tramiel had grown tired of people mispronouncing his name.

Meanwhile, over at Commodore, a number of Tramiel’s old Commodorians started to resign from the firm.  Initially, these departures didn’t raise much suspicion or alarm in Gould’s reworked C-Suite. This changed at 4 a.m. on July 2, 1984, when Warner Communications announced that it had sold Atari’s entire home computing arm, including all of its assets, facilities, and the brand, to Tramel Technology, owned by Jack Tramiel.

The deal of the century

Tramiel may have been on vacation when Ross called him, but his business instincts were as sharp as ever. He exploited Warner’s desperation to be rid of Atari to propel himself instantly back to the top of the computer business. But he did it on his terms, not the company’s.

Warner lent Tramel Technology $240 million in return for the option to buy up to 32 percent of Tramel Technology at a predefined share price. Tramel Technology used that money to buy Atari from Warner. In effect, Tramiel made Warner pay for him to take Atari—and the huge liability it represented—off its hands. In return, Warner had the option to get a chunk of the value back if he managed to turn the company around.

“Both the home computer and video game marketplaces continue, in my view, to offer great opportunities,” Tramiel told the Associated Press that day.

The scale and speed with which Tramiel was moving quickly became apparent. By lunchtime, Jack had installed himself in the CEO’s office at Atari’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Alongside him were his three sons—newly appointed company directors—and more than 20 new Atari senior executives. They were his loyal Commodorians, swapping roles at their former employer for near-identical roles at Atari—including Shiraz Shivji and Commodore Japan’s Tony Tokai.

Gould and Commodore’s new C-suite realized that Tramiel was looting them of talent. Then, to their horror, they discovered that they had no way of stopping it. It turned out that many of the best and brightest at Commodore didn’t have non-compete clauses. Many didn’t even have written contacts. The former head of Commodore had never really believed in such things. A good, solid handshake was enough. That former head was, of course, Jack Tramiel.

"The word started passing through the grapevine, after Jack bought Atari, that if anyone was interested, there were opportunities out there,” Neil Harris remembered. He handed in his notice shortly after. He, too, was off to Atari.

Jack was back. He announced that Atari would unveil a new machine—one that would surpass anything Commodore had planned for the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1985, just six months away.

Commodore and Atari head to court

Tramiel didn’t have a new computer ready to go. He just knew that he needed one. Atari was bleeding cash and his only chance of Atari competing with—let alone beating—Commodore at its own game was if he got a next-generation home computer out before his former company did. He also knew that Commodore had already begun development on such a machine.

Just before Tramiel’s takeover of Atari became public, Commodore had announced the purchase of Amiga, a struggling computer company that already had a much-hyped machine in development. Commodore planned to release this machine as the Commodore Amiga in early 1985.

To make things worse for Atari, Commodore also filed a legal case against Shiraz Shivji and several of the other engineers that Tramiel had poached. Commodore accused them of intellectual property theft, alleging that they had taken commercially sensitive documents and designs from Commodore when they left. This was swiftly settled, but it delayed Shivji from starting work on Atari’s new machine by another month.

For a brief moment, it seemed like Tramiel had finally been outmaneuvered. The Amiga was already half-built. Commodore would beat Tramiel to market, unless he could find a way to undermine the company yet again.

It was Jack’s son Leonard (the middle of his three boys) who gave him what he needed to turn the tables. Tramiel had tasked Leonard with chasing down old payments that Atari had due from partners or suppliers, and in a stack of checks he found one to Amiga.

“I looked through that stack of checks and pulled out ones that were either big, or had interesting people they were made out to,” Leonard recalled. “And one of them was [a] canceled check for the money that Atari gave to Amiga.”

The check was for $500,000 (almost $1.5 million today) paid to Amiga by Atari in early 1984. Leonard took it to Tramiel, who sensed that there was something lurking behind it that he could use to hamstring the release of the Commodore Amiga.

Tramiel discovered that Atari had loaned Amiga $500,000 in early 1984 to help the latter stave off bankruptcy, prior to his takeover. As collateral, Jay Miner, one of Amiga’s founders, agreed to enter talks that would allow Atari to use some of the chips the company had designed for its Amiga computer. The loan was a good-faith payment to ensure Amiga could keep running while the companies negotiated a royalty fee. If Amiga and Atari didn’t agree on a fee within 60 days, Amiga would have to pay back the loan with interest. If they failed to do so, Atari would get the rights to use Amiga’s chip designs for free.

From Atari’s perspective, this was a smash-and-grab on Amiga. Atari had no real intention of negotiating. In 60 days, the company would get chip designs that were worth far more than the value of the loan. What nobody at Atari realized was that Miner had no intention of negotiating, either. He was gambling that the extra 60 days of development that the money secured would allow Amiga to refine its computer design further and finally find a buyer for the whole machine elsewhere.

Enter Commodore.

The extra development time allowed Miner to demonstrate a more complete machine to potential buyers, one of which was Commodore. In fact, Commodore was so impressed with Amiga’s machine that it decided to buy Amiga as a company. As negotiations between Amiga and Commodore neared completion, Miner revealed the details of the loan from Atari. Unwilling to give chip rights to a competitor, Commodore wired Miner enough money to cover paying off Atari. Miner delivered the check for the full amount personally to Atari the same day, just one day before the deadline on payment would have expired.

Atari was surprised, but thanks to the interest payments on the loan, the company had still made money for effectively doing nothing. So the paperwork was filed away and forgotten about, until Leonard Tramiel stumbled upon it. 

Once he learned the full details in July 1984, Jack Tramiel sued Amiga, its founders, and Commodore. He argued that Atari had the right to use Amiga’s chips, and Commodore should cease development on its computer until the terms of that agreement could be negotiated. This was because Atari had loaned Amiga the money in good faith, but there was no evidence that Amiga had opened negotiations (Tramiel’s lawyers skipped over the part where Atari hadn’t opened negotiations, either). 

The case was spurious at best, and Tramiel knew it. But he didn’t need to win. What mattered was that it brought Commodore’s plans to bring its Amiga computer to market to a screeching halt while the case was being settled.

The Commodore run by Jack Tramiel would have spotted that the case was a spoiler action and settled immediately. The new Commodore didn’t. Its executives could see that Tramiel would lose the case in court, so they decided to fight it. It took a few months for them to realize that Tramiel didn’t care about winning, only about the development delay it was causing them. Once that had sunk in, they bought him off, agreeing to an out-of-court settlement that Tramiel later described as a “rather large seven-figure sum.” By that point, however, the damage had been done. While the two parties were arguing in court, Jack’s ex-Commodorians had been completing the design of his promised new computer.

That computer, when it launched, was called the Atari ST. It beat the Amiga to market by over a month.

The birth of the ‘Jackintosh’

The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST stand together as the last great machines of the home computing age, before 32-bit games consoles and PCs would come to dominate. While debate still rages over which machine is better, it’s remarkable that Atari’s machine was even in a position to compete with Commodore’s. The Commodore 64 will always be the peak of Jack Tramiel’s “Religion,” but the Atari ST deserves an honorable mention as the last time his principles actually worked.

Tramiel’s new colleagues took the experience they had built up at Commodore and created a machine that featured a Motorola 68000 chip. Like the Commodore 64, it launched with more memory than most competitors—512kb of RAM, which could be upgraded even further. Like the Commodore 64, the computer was reasonably priced—less than $800 (about $2,300 in 2025).

Commodore’s woes were far from over. The company even lost the case it had originally filed against Atari, that some of its employees—including Shivji—were stealing IP for the new company. While the engineers were forced to return some documents they had taken from Commodore when they departed, the court ruled that no infringement of Commodore’s intellectual property took place during the design of the Atari ST.

In most cases, this would be the end of the story. But no story involving Jack Tramiel is ever that simple. Eyebrows have often been raised in computer forums across the internet at the alleged design similarities between the Atari ST and an aborted Commodore computing project called the “Commodore 900.” Those eyebrows were only raised further when Commodore veteran David Haynes was asked directly about the Atari ST’s origin in 2011.

“At one point while at Commodore, Jack had a few of the then-C900 engineers (I guess they were the second team on the project) meeting ‘off-site’ on some super-secret project. This was probably late 1983 or early 1984,” Haynes replied. “Shortly after Jack left, those guys all followed, and of course surfaced at Atari. With a new 68K computer that looked an awful lot like the second spin of the C900. Well, other than the fact it actually worked this time.”

Whether there is any truth to Haynes’s allegation is unclear. What is indisputable is that Atari achieved a hardware miracle and had the new Atari ST ready for launch by January 1985. It received broadly positive reviews from both industry experts and the wider press. Impressed, they provided it with its nickname: the “Jackintosh.” The Atari ST, and its later variants, sold almost 2 million units.

Tramiel confounded both the critics and Gould. He revived Atari almost overnight. It was a remarkable achievement, but it would be his last in the world of computing.

The end of an era

In 1996, Atari announced that it was merging with disk-drive manufacturer JT Storage. It was only a merger on paper. In reality, JT Storage was buying Atari out. After 11 years of trying to build a new empire with Atari, Jack Tramiel finally decided to bow out.

The Atari ST was no failure. It was an excellent machine and sold well. For eight years, the Atari ST slugged it out with the Commodore Amiga for the position of top dog in the home-computer market. The problem was that the home-computer market was dying.

Perhaps if they had spotted this sooner, Commodore and Atari would have been able to adapt. Tramiel should have spotted it, because the reason for the decline was the same reason for Commodore’s meteoric rise: price drops.

The home computer market only existed because it offered a mid-tier option for lower-income households to get on the computing ladder. Home computers offered gaming and productivity in a single package—hence why Commodore had thrived while Don Estridge’s IBM PC had dominated all other markets. In the 1980s, the IBM PC’s price point was low enough to disrupt business and more affluent computer owner markets, but not low enough to beat what Commodore (and later Atari) could offer the average family.

While Commodore and Atari spent the late eighties slugging it out like tired old wrestlers, they failed to notice the new contender running toward their ring: Rod Canion’s Compaq. Behind Compaq were the other PC clones such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell. They brought the same ruthless push to drive down cost to the PC market that Tramiel had brought to the home computer market. By the early nineties, people didn’t need a computer under their TV any more. They could have a PC on their desk.

Whether it was Gould or Tramiel who ultimately pulled the trigger on Jack’s exit from Commodore, the irony was that both men were right. Gould had no idea how to run a computer company, only how to loot one. Commodore needed direction, and it never had it after Tramiel. Gould was right about one thing, however. Tramiel’s management philosophy was on borrowed time.

In the dying days of Atari, Tramiel first tried to push development on a PC clone, and then tried to pivot back into gaming with the Atari Jaguar console. Both plans failed. His tyrannical approach to management left Atari short on talent, and even shorter on friends in supplier, retail, or developer markets. Tramiel had always abused Commodore’s position as a market leader to make money at their expense. They were in no mood to do him favors at Atari. Because of higher expectations, new machines also required complex, multi-year development processes, which entailed significant investment. As Chuck Peddle had always said, Tramiel was never an investor.

Coming full circle

One day in 1982, Michael Tomczyk, who had led the project to develop the Commodore 64, found himself sitting in Jack Tramiel’s office. Tomcyzk had just returned from a trade show in Hanover, Germany. During the course of their conversation, Tomczyk mentioned how impressed he’d been with the Autobahn highway network on the way there.

"I built that road," Tramiel told him matter-of-factly.

“Jack went on to explain that during World War II as a teenager he had been selected to work on the road gangs,” Tomczyk remembered. “He said that it was one way to survive, because they had to feed the people that did that kind of hard labor, or they wouldn't work. ‘We built good roads,’ he said.”

Tramiel had never hidden the horrors in his past. He was proud that he had helped build a better future through Commodore and Atari. However, the longer he lived, the more concerned he became that people would forget what that future had cost. And that which is forgotten can be repeated.

"You know," Tramiel said once, "it's hard to believe it really happened. But it can happen again. In America. Americans like to make rules, and that scares me. If you have too many rules you get locked in a system. It's the system that says this one dies and that one doesn't, not the people. That's why I don't hate the German people. Individuals, yes. Rules, yes. But not all Germans.

"They just obeyed the rules. But that's why we need more Commodores. We need more mavericks, just so the rules don't take over."

When Tramiel finally walked away from the computer business in 1996, he didn’t walk away from public life completely. Instead he switched his focus elsewhere, to something he’d begun doing a while before.

In October 1988, work began on the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum was built using $190 million of private funding. That funding included a significant donation from two of the museum’s founding patrons, Jack and Helen Tramiel. In 1990, Jack contributed his own oral history to the museum. It represented a growing desire to tell his own story, and to help other Holocaust survivors preserve theirs.

In 2005, a new museum that covered the history of Polish Jews was announced in Warsaw, on the site of the Warsaw ghetto. Among the founding benefactors were Jack and Helen Tramiel.

Tramiel died in April 2012. In life, he was hated as much as he was loved. Jack Tramiel was always one thing or the other—never in between. What nobody can deny is that he changed the world.

We live in a future that was conceived by Jack Tramiel. Tramiel didn’t just promise “computers for the masses, not the classes”—he delivered. He forced the entire computing industry to do the same.

Tramiel was the first and last king of home computing. That brief age of a computer under every TV or on the desk. The world of technology today is led by people who fell in love with computers because of Jack.

Speak to a tech founder or visionary. Speak to a CEO or CTO. Speak to a lead software engineer or senior games developer. Ask them who built the computer that made them realize they weren’t just living in the future, but could help shape it.

Most will give you a single word:

“Commodore.”

Gareth Edwards is a digital strategist, writer, and historian. He has worked for startups and corporations in both the UK and U.S. He is an avid collector of old computers, rare books and interviews, and abandoned cats. Follow him on X, Mastodon, and BlueSky.

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