Jack Tramiel (, ; born Idek Trzmiel, ; December 13, 1928 – April 8, 2012) was a Polish-American businessman and Holocaust survivor, best known for founding Commodore International.[3] The PET, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 are some home computers produced while he was running the company. Tramiel later formed Atari Corporation after he purchased the remnants of the original Atari, Inc. from its parent company. He was one of six people spotlighted when the computer was denoted "Machine of the Year" by Time magazine in 1982.
Early years
Tramiel was born as Idek Trzmiel, but some sources also list the name Jacek Trzmiel[4][5] (the word trzmiel in Polish means bumblebee) into a Jewish family, the son of Abram Josef Trzmiel and Rifka Bentkowska.[4] The whole family lived on A. Napiórkowskiego Street (today S. Przybyszewskiego Street) in Górniak district in Łódź.[6]
After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, his family was transported by Nazi occupiers to the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, where he worked in a garment factory. When the ghettos were liquidated, his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was examined by Josef Mengele and selected for a work party, after which he and his father were sent to the labor camp Ahlem near Hanover,[7] while his mother remained at Auschwitz. Like many other inmates, his father was reported to have died of typhus in the work camp; however, Tramiel believed he was killed by an injection of gasoline. Tramiel was rescued from the labor camp in April 1945 by the 84th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army.[8]
On November 10, 1947,[9] Tramiel immigrated to the United States. He soon joined the U.S. Army, where he learned how to repair office equipment, including typewriters.[7]
Commodore
Typewriters and calculators
In 1953, while working as a taxi driver, Tramiel bought a shop in the Bronx to repair office machinery,[10] securing a $25,000 loan for the business from a U.S. Army entitlement.[11] He named it Commodore Portable Typewriter. Tramiel wanted a military-style name for his company, but names such as Admiral and General were already taken, so he settled on the Commodore name.[12]
In 1956, Tramiel signed a deal with Czechoslovak typewriter manufacturer Zbrojovka Brno NP to assemble and sell their typewriters in North America. However, as Czechoslovakia was part of the Warsaw Pact, they could not be imported directly into the U.S., so Tramiel used parts from Zbrojovka's Consul typewriters and set up Commodore Business Machines in Toronto, Canada.[10]
Atari
After a short break from the computer industry, he formed a new company named Tramel Technology, Ltd., in order to design and sell a next-generation home computer.[31] The company was named "Tramel" to help ensure that it would be pronounced correctly (i.e., "tra – mel" instead of "tra – meal").[32]
In July 1984, Tramel Technology bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications.[31] The division had fallen on hard times due to the video game crash of 1983.[33] TTL was then renamed Atari Corporation, and went on to produce the 16-bit Atari ST computer line based on Motorola's 68000 CPU, directly competing with Apple's
Later years
Michael Tomczyk recalled that when Tramiel asked the German government for financial incentives for Commodore to take over a factory,[41]
"The Germans said, 'Why should we give you concessions?' to which Jack replied, 'You owe it to me – I’m an Auschwitz survivor' – then he added – “Besides, it will be great PR for you.' They accepted his logic and gave us the plant which was in Braunschweig, West Germany. I asked Jack if he held resentment toward the Germans to which he replied, 'The German people didn’t kill the Jews. The rules killed the Jews. Germans always follow the rules and if the rules are made by madmen, they still follow the rules.' Another time I asked him how he dealt with the memories of Auschwitz and he immediately replied, 'I live in the future.'"
Tramiel was a co-founder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which was opened in 1993. He was among many other survivors of the Ahlem labor camp who tracked down U.S. Army veteran Vernon Tott, who was among the 84th Division which rescued survivors from the camp and had taken and stored photographs of at least 16 of the survivors. Tott, who died of cancer in 2005, was personally commemorated by Tramiel with an inscription on one of the Holocaust Museum's walls saying "To Vernon W. Tott, My Liberator and Hero".[42]
Tramiel retired in 1996 and moved to Monte Sereno, California.[43]
Further reading
- The Home Computer Wars: An Insider's Account of Commodore and Jack Tramiel by Michael Tomczyk, Compute, 1984, ISBN 0-942386-75-2
- On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall, Variant Press, 2005, ISBN 0-9738649-0-7
External links
- 1985 episode of The Computer Chronicles featuring an extended interview with Tramiel
- You Don't Know Jack at a Commodore history site
- Biography about Jack Tramiel at History Corner (in German)
- The story of Commodore and the 8-bit generation | Leonard Tramiel | TEDxMidAtlantic via YouTube
References
- Computer Legend and Gaming Pioneer Jack Tramiel Dies at Age 83, 2012/04/09, By Dave Thier, Forbes^
- "Commodore founder Jack Tramiel dead at 83 from Computerworld^
- Daniel Terdiman. Woz, meet Jack Tramiel CNET Networks, Inc., retrieved September 28, 2008