My very first computer was a Commodore 64. My grandfather, the day before he died, said to me that I needed to get into computers as they are the future. He gave me some money that day and that evening he passed away peacefully in his sleep. I bought a C64 with this money and I still have it now.
My grandfather had a similar influence - bought me a Vic 20 as my first computer (optical/laser engineer, programmed in C). At 6 years old I did my very first programming in BASIC on that thing, wrote out a typing tutor from a book called Parrot - had a crudely animated parrot head that made noises when you typed wrong. Couple years back tried to find the Vic 20 in my parent's storage and sadly only the box remains :(
Wonderful. My grandfather likewise bought me my first computer - also a Commodore 64. That was truly my entry into the world of IT. Jack Tramiel really made a difference to the world I think by speeding up affordable home computing!
My first computer was also a Commodore 64. We had Commodore 64s in our school and my grade 3 teacher called my parents in for a meeting and told them they need to buy me a computer. My family pooled together and I got one for Christmas -- best present event.
I used it for many many years and I wish I still had it.
My first computer was a C64 also. It cost A$699, plus $99 for the tape drive. In 1982 money. My father's salary was about $40,000 per year then. Can't think of money better spent.
We had to go on a waiting list in Norway to get ours because Commodore had a hard time ramping up to meet demand and so availability depended a lot on market. Probably went on the waiting list end of 1982, and got it spring of '83. Until then we'd been borrowing a VIC-20 for some time.
It's people like Jack Tramiel, Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others that remind you that individuals, even within powerful teams, can be extremely innovative and important. When that carries from company to company and industries it validates it further: Commodore, Atari, Apple, Pixar etc.
I spent about 2 summers at my friends house playing Summer Games on C64 and wrote my first lines of BASIC there, at school I used an Apple II.
We need more people like these guys for the next wave.
No matter if it is 3583 BYTES FREE or 38911 BYTES FREE or some other number - the start-up text was an important message to all users: There's this language (BASIC) available right here at the prompt, ready for you, just type away. And there are N bytes free, available for you to do whatever you want to do.
I was raised on the ]█ (later the ]▒) prompt, but I agree with you. We lost a lot when computers started greeting people with OS prompts and mouse pointers.
I agree, but people commonly argue that there is so much more available today. However, the one thing we lost is the focus to turn the machine into something more.
I think the kinds of media being produced shifted. Machines like the Apple II or the VIC-20 were machines to produce computer programs (and to play games). Then computers became machines to produce spreadsheets, reports and memos, then machines to share photos and comments. It was an unavoidable transition, as those who are interested in producing programs are no longer the majority of computer users.
Like many here, Jack Tramiel's vision of an affordable yet versatile computer certainly had a huge impact on my life. I keep my old C64 set up in my office to remind me that I have to live up to the expectations of the 10-year-old kid who would stay up late at night trying to make that machine do something amazing.
Jack did some amazing things while owner of Atari Corporation too (his son, Sam, was CEO). They helped bring the Lynx to market, developed by Epyx, which was "miles" ahead of other consoles at the time. It had amazing sound, color graphics, and 3D graphics, on a portable in 1989!
With regards to PCs / desktop computers he had a similar influence.
Still remember when we got our first ST520 to try out that was seemingly rushed from their labs (still had hand-soldered cables on the board) - this small machine was revolutionary for that time when we were making the screens of IBM PCs the price of a car glow green in the night. It had most of the things you could wish for, but at a fraction of the price.
What followed where long development nights / weekends first with Basic then digging deep into Motorola's 68000 assembler and C. Not to forget endless hours of playing Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (yes that was a text adventure).
With his C64 and the ST520 Jack has strongly contributed to spreading knowledge on computing and providing many a possibility and access to learn, practice and excel in this field of technology. All major computer companies that directly or indirectly are drawing talent and profiting from this till today should thank him greatly.
(For those who have never touched any of those machines - most likely those who you learned from or who thought you courses at University have and learned / discovered many things they are now able to pass on.)
One neat thing they were developing, but never came to light, was Jaguar VR. It was a virtual reality headset, using IR-tracking, which let you play VR games. Only a few working prototypes exists:
Yeah, but they did an awful job marketing the Lynx, that's why RJ Mical and Dave Needle left to form a new startup, which would become the next platform for the 3DO.
The Commodore 64 is what inspired my career in tech. Many firsts including machine language, pascal and game/utility programming.
The first software I ever created and sold was Disk Ease, which brought low level control of the 1541 to the normal person. Sold it through ads in the back of Computer Shopper magazine; I was 14. Let me tell you, there is nothing more inspirational than people sending money to your post office box from all around the country for something you built.
It wasn't a big seller by any means, but it laid the groundwork for my future.
I'd like to hear more about this story. I know personally at 14 while I was doing programming, it would have been super scary to call a magazine to place an ad or have the money for such an ad. How did you end up doing that?
I wonder if growing up with a computer where you can poke bytes directly to its memory and video hardware makes you fundamentally less afraid or mystifyed by the technology
I wasn't a Commodore user, but as I was heavily into home / hobbyist computing at that time, they had a huge influence on me. At the time, we mostly used TRS-80s and the like, but my school had C64s and I vaguely remember trying to make sure that BASIC code from a book for C64 users would work for me.
And only today did I find out that Tramiel was a Holocaust survivor who became one of the most influential figures in the computer revolution of the 80s.
My thoughts are with his family and those who knew & loved him.
I learned BASIC on the Vic 20. I had no storage device, so I would get magazines from the library, type in the code, play the game as much as I could, then turn my machine off and lose everything.
Those were the days!
My first program was on the C64 when I was very young. Had it not been available to my parents and me at that time, I'm not sure I would have the same passion for technology and programming I have today. Thanks Jack, for helping bring it to the masses.
My first job was to demo Vic-20s in department stores around the SF Bay Area at age 13. Funny that just yesterday I was at my Mom's looking for my "I'm a Commodore Kid - Ask me!" polo shirt.
A cutthroat businessman, but a brilliant mind nevertheless.
It was only because of Jack Tramiel, and geniuses like Chuck Peddle and Bob Russel, that easy to use computers were cheap enough to be affordable by almost everyone. At least for me, his influence on modern home computing was greater than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined.
Now, I hope he did tell somebody where the Magic Sword and the Philosopher's Stone are...
No, it didn't. It stood for "The Operating System".
[I worked on it, and Leonard Tramiel, who was in charge of the software team, named it. I think you can attribute the lack of a creative name to the fact that we were all very tired: The software was started in September 1984, and we shipped the 1.0 ROMs in May].
Ah, the ST. My first major purchase with my own money, made from working a billion godawful hours of overtime at my summer construction work job in college. And worth every damn penny of it.
Which came about also after Jay Miner took the Amiga away. I believe Tramiel acquired Atari hoping to get the Amiga chipset, which Miner then took to Commodore.
In the end, I liked the STs better. The Amigas were, of course, more capable and more in line with Commodore and 8-bit Atari tradition, but the minimalism of the ST is refreshing to the point of reminding me of the simple elegance of the Apple II.
Without him, the world would be a different place. The Commodore computers inspired so many people (adults now) and made all "our" business world, start-up world and hacker world what it is now. By bringing home computers to a huge number of houses, a lot of kids got the chance to experience first-hand what it is like to be in control of a "personal" computer.
I found a "lost" article I wrote about Jack from 2007. He was an Auschvitz survivor, almost died in a plane accident, and was an unsung visionary that, perhaps, was the first to truly commoditize compute power.
In Europe the difference was staggering - in many countries Apple was pretty much a total unknown until the Mac. I don't remember ever seeing an Apple computer in any of my local computer stores in Norway, for example, while VIC 20 and C-64, and even some PET's were all over the place.
I started with a VIC 20, then got a C-64. Pretty much all my friends had C-64's at some point or other in the '83-'88 time frame. Nobody I knew had an Apple computer...
The C=64 began at US$595 -- which was still a bargain for that time -- and you had to go to a computer store to buy one. in NYC, those were generally snooty places that catered to Suits. So the price drop to US$199 within a short time was an even bigger shock.
According to "Commodore - A company on the edge" it was a snap decision by Tramiel to get back at Texas Instrument (who nearly caused Commodore to go bankrupt during the "calculator wars") while they had the chance, because he realized TI was essentially bleeding money on their computers to build a software market - at one point TI was losing $100m a quarter on the home computer business .
So he slashed the price of their hardware and cut the price of all Commodore's software titled in half, preventing TI from raising their hardware prices again, and cutting off their air-supply by making it near impossible for them to make back their losses through software sales.
While Commodore could afford it, thanks to ownership of MOS etc. that pushed their manufacturing cost extremely low and meant they'd still make a profit on every machine sold, they shafted their retailers massively by not giving them any time to shift existing stock before announcing the price drop, and it ended up costing them a lot and apparently infuriating Irving Gould and contributing to Tramiel getting ousted (the other big factor was his ongoing attempts to get his sons into high level positions at Commodore).
But it made TI announce plans to exit the home computer business pretty much immediately...
here in ireland most schools and libraries has an apple ii. but they were expensive fragile things that nobody understood or touched. when the c64 came out our school got 6 linked to one floppy drive. we went nuts over them. but when it came to a my first computer i went with a zx spectrum as most of my friends had one as it was slightly cheaper.
in my class of 24 or so. 3-4 spectrums, 1-2 c64s and 1 amstrad (poor sod, great computer, few users so few software swaps available)
Outside of the UK and Ireland I think the Spectrum gets most love for being to a large extent responsible for the hard push Commodore made for low price. Tramiel wanted a ZX-81 killer early on, so we got the VIC 20, etc...
Sinclair Research were really impressive in managing to get something out that cheaply, and outside of the UK I don't think they get enough credit for the impact they had on the computing industry through the competitive pressure they created.
The interesting thing is Commodore made or almost made almost all the mistakes Sinclair made with the Spectrum models. Often more than once - they only got away with it because they were totally schizophrenic and had multiple competing teams and were so chaotic that eventually winning solutions came out of it.
E.g. the crappy keyboards on the early ZX / Spectrum machines, which was a big part of making them perform so poorly outside of the UK and Ireland. Commodore did that with the first PET, then again with one of their later home machines, as cost cutting measures - they didn't learn the first time. But they often confined their worst mistakes to a single market, and so quicker saw the cost of their mistakes and fixed them.
I know, which is why I mentioned Spectrum as the mistake, not ZX-80 and ZX-81.
The bad keyboards did undoubtably impact sales of the ZX-80 and ZX-81 too, as it was facing competition from "cheap enough" machines with proper keyboards pretty quickly, but it's hard to say it was a mistake to build them that way when they were released.
The Spectrum is a different story, which is why I called it out as a mistake. Sinclair continued their tradition of crappy keyboards with that as well, and by then that was a deal-breaker for a large part of the market. Their machines were - together with the Oric 1 - often derisively referred to as "doorstops" even in the press, even though the Oric had a slightly better keyboard.
By the time the Spectrum+ came out, they (and Oric...) had fixed that mistake and it was clear what a difference it could be: The new model outsold the old 48K model (which was identical apart from the case) 2:1.
But the Spectrum+ had atrocious failure rates (the Spectrum had failure rates of 5%-6% - there are reports of failure rates of 30% for the Spectrum+). As a result I don't think I even ever saw one of them. Many dealers internationally never carried them.
When the Spectrum 128 came out, it was too late. I remember my friends and I were impressed with it - it was great "for a Spectrum", but by then "everyone" had already picked camps, and Spectrum was largely dead in the water outside of the UK and Ireland. Not even the subsequent +2 and +3 after Amstrad acquired the Spectrum could make up for that - by then the C64 was too cemented as the dominant 8-bit machine pretty much everywhere but the US and UK, only the UK of which the Spectrum had an established presence of note.
Commodore on their hand made their second attempt at a crappy keyboard with the Commodore MAX Machine (Ultimax/VC-10) in 1982, as a cost cutting measure.
That's what I was referring to by repeating mistakes - the MAX Machine was quickly cancelled after poor sales.
Commodore knew better, but tried again anyway, but because they always had a ton of different projects and different models, and different models were released in different markets, they saw the failure in Japan, and never invested much in getting it sold elsewhere, and cancelled it quickly to focus on the C-64. So unlike Sinclair, a failing model (or three) didn't affect them all that much - they had other models that sold well in most markets.
There's a long range of variations of the C16/C264/Plus4 range, for example, that were pretty much ignored by many Commodore subsidiaries, because they saw them underperform in other markets and didn't really want them.
Sinclair on the other hand didn't have better alternatives until it was too late to get a bigger international foothold.
I still have my Atari 400 (pre-Tramiel) and my 130XE (Tramiel era). We were pretty poor financially as a family when I got them. Without cheap, programmable machines like the Commodores and the Ataris, I doubt I would have been a programmer. I cannot imagine what I would have used these days in the sub $200 market.
I remember I would beg my dad to drive me around on the weekends looking for garage sales to find Commodore 64 software. Sometimes we would get them by the box full, on unlabeled floppies, and spend the whole weekend trying each one. Every once in a while you found a disk filled with a bunch of games. Good memories.
RIP Jack Tramiel! Here is Computer History Museum 25th Anniversary Celebration of Commodore 64 with him on the panel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk Micro computers were a startup movement in a true sense of the word.
I learned BASIC in the early 80's on a VIC 20. Luckily we had the tape drive so I could save my 'work'. We also had the extra RAM cartridge that was needed for some of the larger games.
I really wanted an Apple II though. That's what the rich kids had.
It's interesting that Amiga isn't being talked about more in this thread. Also by Commodore, though a bit later than the C64. The Amiga was a powerful little machine for it's time, especially for games and "multi-media" as the state of the art existed then. And it had personality. Personality goes a long way.
So sad to hear! This dates me I had to get my C64 from a trucker who went on a rare trip to the UK (I lived in a rural area of Spain). I went into software thanks to a C64.
RIP Mr. Tramiel. The C64 and Amiga were both machines that helped define their era. Lots of veteran professional programmers working today got their start on them.
Like many others here, my first computer was a Commodore (VIC20 in my case). Whether I owe my career to this man I couldn't say, but I owe him my gratitude. RIP.
Wow, what memories, the very first line of assembler code I ever wrote was on a C64. Had one for years! Now it's going to be super hard to get another one.
To my eternal shame, I had to look up the kernel vector at $FFD2. (it outputs a character to the current device, usually the screen, on the C64). At least I can redeem myself partially by having remembered the opcodes...
"We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes." Thanks for that, as one of the masses, my VIC-20 was crucial to developing my early passion for computers.
