A bit of nostalgic news this week: Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore International, died recently at the age of 83.
Who was that? Why should anyone remember him? Because of this:
Jack Tramiel was born in Poland in 1928. He was a Jew and during World War II, he and his family were imprisoned in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. After the war, he moved to Canada and then the US. He started a typewriter repair business which over time turned into a company making pocket calculators and then into computers.
In 1977 he introduced the Commodore PET, or Personal Electronic Transactor. One person recently described it as looking like a 1990 point-of-sale cash register, which is a pretty good description. It was clunky, it was clumsy, it didn't do much - but then again, few things short of mainframes at the time did.
In 1980 he followed that up with the VIC-20. Two years later, in 1982, came what's pictured above: the Commodore 64, so called because it had a whopping 64K of RAM. It was the first truly mass market personal computer and became (and remains) the best-selling personal computer of all time. Production ran for 10 years, from 1982 to 1992, and during that time something approaching 20 million were sold.In 1985, I bought my first computer because I wanted to organize the newspaper clippings that were overrunning my filing cabinet. It was a Commodore 64. I loved that machine.
RIP, Jack.
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/04/09/computer-legend-and-gaming-pioneer-jack-tramiel-dies-at-age-83/
http://gizmodo.com/commodore-64/
http://www.commodore.ca/products/c64/commodore_64.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC-20
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