Jack Tramiel was every bit as keen as Steve Jobs to introduce personal computers to the general public, and he did all he could to stoke the rivalry with his competitor in Cupertino, Calif. The founder of Commodore, whose inelegant and inexpensive computers earned him the nickname “the anti–Steve Jobs,” bought a full-page newspaper ad in 1983, when his company was at the height of its success, announcing that “Commodore Ate the Apple.”
Tramiel was born Jacek Trzmiel in Lodz, Poland, and as a teenager was sent to Auschwitz with his family, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Tramiel and his father were selected for work detail by Josef Mengele, the infamous SS doctor, and later transferred to another camp. His father was murdered, most likely by being injected with gasoline, before Tramiel was freed by U.S. troops in April 1945; his mother survived. Tramiel stayed in Germany before immigrating to the U.S. in 1947. “He arrived in New York City with $10.”
After a stint in the U.S. Army, where he learned how to repair typewriters, Tramiel bought a typewriter store in New York City and expanded it into a firm that developed office machines, said The New York Times. He named his company Commodore “after glancing at an Opel Commodore while riding in a cab.” Tramiel moved his firm to Silicon Valley in the 1960s, went public, and began developing digital watches and calculators. In 1977, he oversaw the creation of a microprocessor strong enough to power “the prototype of a personal computer”—the Commodore PET.
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That early model helped turn computers “from a nerdy hobbyist gizmo into a consumer product,” said Time.com, but its successor, the Commodore 64, “helped to define what a PC was.” The cheaply produced utilitarian device became one of the biggest-selling PCs in history, sacrificing elegance for a low price that made it “accessible to ordinary people.” The legacy-defining ethos of this “rough-edged” visionary was summed up in a single, oft-repeated remark he made to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in the early 1980s: “You built computers for the classes—I built them for the masses.”
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