14 DAY TRIAL // The younger generation may not recognize the name Commodore, but the company, founded in 1953, actually established the idea of home computing.
We now learn that the founder, Jack Tramiel, husband and father of three sons, has died (April 8, 2012) at the age of 83, as one of the people to have the greatest roles in shaping the industry as it is today.
Granted, the man didn't really have any influence on the most recent developments. He's been retired since 1997 after all.
Still, he did essentially start the chain reaction that led to computers, and consumer electronics in general, becoming an intrinsic part of life.
Tramiel was born in 1928, in Poland. As people who shared his generation may or may not know, he was Jewish.
That means that he had to live through the Holocaust and, indeed, while his mother was sent to Auschwitz, he spent time at the Ahlem concentration camp near Hanover (along with his father, who was later reported dead by Typhus but may have been killed by a gasoline injection) before being rescued by the 84th infantry division (April 1945) and immigrating to the US in 1947.
It was in 1953 that he formed Commodore Business Machines, which he led until 1984, when a disagreement with a stockholder eventually forced him to leave.
That was after the release of the Commodore 64 (1982), which actually acquainted the masses with the idea of having home computers.
A new Commodore 64 was in fact released last year, as a sort of nostalgic callback.
Tramiel's last attempt at pushing forward on the electronic industry was his creation of Tramel Technology, Ltd. (spelled that way to force people into pronouncing the name properly, tra-mel not tra-meal).
After that came the acquisition of Atari in 1984, but subsequent successes were owed to already existing devices and the man eventually had to sell it off in 1996, after which he retired with his wife in Monte Sereno, California.