Inventor of Commodore 64, Jack Tramiel, dies at 83

Comment by Logos Tartaros on April 9, 2012 at 9:48pm

Commodore 64 Introduced: January 1982 Released: September 1982 How many: ~17 million Price: US $595. CPU: MOS 6510, 1MHz Sound: SID 6581, 3 channels of sound RAM: 64K Display: 25 X 40 text 320 X 200, 16 colors max Ports: TV, RGB & composite video 2 joysticks, cartridge port serial peripheral port Peripherals: cassette recorder printer, modem external 170K floppy drive OS: ROM BASIC

Comment by Non Sequiteur on April 10, 2012 at 7:14am

   " 1 MHz in the CPU... hahahaha; 64 Kb of RAM..." HAHAHAHAHA! .... I remember the printer for these things: the paper had holes in the sides.... ooo, a modem - so you could connect to AOL, no less! The Commodor didn't even use a mouse, did it?

I'm no real computer geek, but... wow... 

  These things are like what Steampunk is to modern fashion! In that sense, it makes one feel sentimental...

  Necessity is indeed a mother.

Commodore Pioneer lived Silicon Valley's story

  

  

Comment by Logos Tartaros on April 10, 2012 at 9:52am

Thanks for posting Kristina; it's a great short little bio...

"Boy, he was a tough nut," says David Laws, a curator at the Computer History Museum and a guy who once worked for a Commodore supplier. "He drove a hard bargain."

But Tramiel, who lived in Monte Sereno, had a soft side, as well, says his son Leonard, who remembers "an incredibly strong people person."

Born in Poland, Tramiel survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Leonard Tramiel says his father didn't talk about how the experience shaped him, but he did talk about Auschwitz -- at high schools and universities in the area.

"It was very, very important to him that people knew the story and that they would, to use that tired phrase, never forget," Leonard Tramiel said.

Tramiel eventually moved to the United States, where he enlisted in the Army. He later drove a cab, worked for a typewriter repair company and eventually started his own repair shop in the Bronx, N.Y. From there he embarked on the classic American dream journey.

Malone's "The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley" tells how Tramiel progressed from typewriters to adding machines to calculators and Commodore, which he moved from Canada to Silicon Valley just before the dawn of the PC revolution.

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