Jack Tramiel dead

[Dr Manhattan]

Thank you Jack Tramiel. I'll be playing a C64 marathon in your honor.

[Satoshi Matrix]

This is very sad news indeed. My father bought a Commodore 64 shortly before I was born and throughout the late 80s when I was very young it was not only my first computer, but also my first game system. Thanks to BBSes and other kids, I had a huge amount of pirated C64 games including some of the best games even to this day including Ducks 'Ohoy, The Great Giana Sisters, Ultimate Wizard, Jumpman Jr., Boulderdash and so many more.

 

load "*",8, 1 jack.

RUN "Rest in peace".

[sack-c0s]

I'm lucky because I've never really needed to make a career choice because i was definitely one of the masses and with the C64 being as chap as it was I ended up with one and the fun somehow ended up evolving into a viable career path.

I've gone on from hammering VIC-II graphics registers for fun to hammering powerVR registers for profit and it wouldn't have been possible without his attitude.

 

Regardless of the minor details and the 'who got screwed by Jack' debates my life is a lot better for his work.

 

So thanks for everything.

[roberto]

I highly recommend "Commodore: A Company on the Edge." Fascinating read. Not all about Jack, of course, but he's obviously a prominent figure in the book and it gives a little bit of insight. Truly a legend in the industry. His company's products certainly shaped my life.

 

I think Tramiel's figure comes out even more prominently in Tomczyk's "The Home Computer Wars", a 1984 book and a fantastic read even today. Anyway, I really hope someone will start making a (good) biographical movie on his life and achievements soon: there's really so much to say!

 

Thanks, Jack!

Edited April 10, 2012 by roberto

[Retrofan]

Thanks for everything. Rest in peace!

[ccc---]

A very important person from the most fascinating time in my life is gone.

 

RIP Jack.

[Marc Oberhäuser]

What a sad day.RIP, Mr. Tramiel.

[Rex Dart]

I will keep my 7800 packed away in his honor.

[Retro Rogue]

I will keep my 7800 packed away in his honor.

 

?

[RevEng]

[RUN/STOP]

 

Rest in peace, Jack.

[BillyHW]

I will keep my 7800 packed away in his honor.

 

?

 

I think he's referring to the great Tramiel Atari innovation of keeping a warehouse of 7800s locked away from 1984 to 1986.

[Retro Rogue]

I will keep my 7800 packed away in his honor.

 

?

 

I think he's referring to the great Tramiel Atari innovation of keeping a warehouse of 7800s locked away from 1984 to 1986.

 

Which he didn't do, hence my question mark. As has been discussed previously here at AA, the 7800 didn't come as part of the purchase deal (GCC's contract was actually through Warner, who forced it's involvement on Atari). Warner wanted him to pay off GCC for the money still owed, and he felt it should have been part of the original deal. Jack was in on and off again negotiations with Warner Communications from the Summer of '84 to the Spring of '85, at which point he finally relinquished. Then he had to negotiate for the money owed on the 10 launch tiles (which GCC had all programmed). By August '85 he was looking to start up a formal video game division again and wound up tapping Mike Katz, who then came aboard started the 7800 relaunch process in that Sept./Oct. while looking for more titles that could be licensed for the relaunch. The formal relaunch occured in January '86.

[Austin]

RIP.

[cobracon]

RIP Jack. You will be missed.

[jaybird3rd]

This may be inappropriate to say in a memorial thread, but Tramiel's passing only makes me more eager than ever to see Curt's and Marty's upcoming book. So much of what we have always thought we knew about the Tramiels, and particularly about their years at Atari, has been based on incomplete or incorrect information. It will be wonderful to see a serious, scholarly account of those years, although I regret that Tramiel himself did not live to contribute his own first-person testimony.

 

I am profoundly grateful to Jack Tramiel, and to all the other technological pioneers who were responsible for providing us with the first affordable home computers. I was about six years old when I got my first computer in 1982, and my early experiences with it allowed me to discover and develop an aptitude for technology that has served me very well in my adult life. If that computer hadn't been there for me during my most formative years, and at a price my family could afford, those talents might have gone undiscovered, and my life today would be completely different. In my case, the computer in question was a TI 99/4A, so I didn't directly benefit from any Tramiel products until years later. But for those millions of us who can share similar stories, the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 and the Atari XE and the Atari ST computers were just as much of a gift to them as the 99/4A was to me, and they were all made possible through the leadership of Jack Tramiel. May he rest in peace.

[bradjewell]

rip

[BioForceApe]

R.I.P. Jack. He was fond of our commondore community and was a special Polish man. :3

 

(PS: We have a polish part of our family)

[H.E.R.O.]

I've read in several places that Steve Jobs tried to sell Apple to Commodore for 100K once. Imagine that. We could have been on our cPhones. I really would have loved it if Commodore lived and there was no Apple.

[atarian63]

firing up my ST as we speak! I really think more of him with Atari, I never was a commodore guy. I do appreciate all the extra time a fun provided by him in the good old Atari days! Thanks Jack!

 

I still have my ST! But my floppy drive was getting flaky even in its heyday. Plus, I assume those floppy disks wouldn't work after 20 years of sitting there. So the ST just sits in a box, all lonely...

 

I still have a pair of SC1224 monitors for my Jaguars with a pair of Catboxes for network play but no games to play on it except for Doom which is way too buggy to have much fun. I so wished for the impossible Battlesphere but that's a pipe dream that I can't afford.

 

You can get an Ultra SATAN and DL the images. no floppy necessary. I do see what you mean, some of my floppies are dying.

[atarian63]

I am kind of amazed this has not had more press. God, they beat the Jobs passing to "death" . Tramiel was Huge!

[GameGirl420]

One of the pioneers indeed... RIP...

[atarian1]

This may be inappropriate to say in a memorial thread, but Tramiel's passing only makes me more eager than ever to see Curt's and Marty's upcoming book. So much of what we have always thought we knew about the Tramiels, and particularly about their years at Atari, has been based on incomplete or incorrect information. It will be wonderful to see a serious, scholarly account of those years, although I regret that Tramiel himself did not live to contribute his own first-person testimony.

Same here. There is so many books, articles, etc. on the pre-Tramiel era Atari that I pretty much yawn reading the same information again. It will be interesting reading new information that is not recycled in Curt/Marty's book. I am more anxiously waiting for volume 2 since I started following Atari more closely after the ST came out.

 

RIP Jack.

Edited April 11, 2012 by atarian1

[mike99mccarthy]

Hopefully the swordquest goodies show up at his estate sale

[+wood_jl]

I'm glad for what he did. He created 2 of my favorite home computers (ST, C64) and literally added years to the life of another (A8) favorite that I love. So, of course I'm saddened to hear of his passing. It also marks the passing of another milestone into antiquity for this retro-computing hobby that celebrates the very era of Mr. Tramiel's greatest successes.

 

 

I am wondering about the accuracy of this story.....

 

Improbable PC Pioneer: Commodore’s Jack Tramiel, 1928-2012

 

It says:

 

It’s tempting to theorize that Commodore made an idiotic, self-destructive mistake when it sacked Tramiel, akin to Apple firing Steve Jobs. Well…probably not. In his own rough-edged way, Tramiel was a visionary of sorts back in the 1980s, but his visions of things to come weren’t terribly reliable. He was famous, for instance, for gloomily predicting a takeover of the PC market by “the Japanese.” The prospect clearly motivated Tramiel to work his brains out to keep Commodore competitive, but it never happened.

 

I figured that perhaps Tramiel's aggressive cost-cutting and marketing of VIC and 64 staved off the Japanese, rather than that writer's opinion that "it never happened." How sad that he didn't get interviewed for Marty's book.

[roberto]

I am wondering about the accuracy of this story.....

 

Improbable PC Pioneer: Commodore’s Jack Tramiel, 1928-2012

 

It says:

It’s tempting to theorize that Commodore made an idiotic, self-destructive mistake when it sacked Tramiel, akin to Apple firing Steve Jobs. Well…probably not. In his own rough-edged way, Tramiel was a visionary of sorts back in the 1980s, but his visions of things to come weren’t terribly reliable. He was famous, for instance, for gloomily predicting a takeover of the PC market by “the Japanese.” The prospect clearly motivated Tramiel to work his brains out to keep Commodore competitive, but it never happened.

 

I figured that perhaps Tramiel's aggressive cost-cutting and marketing of VIC and 64 staved off the Japanese, rather than that writer's opinion that "it never happened." How sad that he didn't get interviewed for Marty's book.

 

I read that article too and, like you, I found it very poorly written and badly informed.

Besides the point you quoted, it also states in the following paragraph that Jack's vertical integration actually hurt Commodore because in doing so they were forced to use MOS CPUs instead of Intel!

That's really the most stupid comment I have ever read about Commodore....