Jack Tramiel died recently. That name may not mean much to you but there was a time when he was as well-known as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates in the computer world — and his computers outsold the machines offered by his rivals.
It was Tramiel’s company, Commodore International, that made the fantastic Commodore 64 — the machine that taught me and thousands of other people about personal computing. The Commodore 64 was the second computer I owned, after a Timex-Sinclair TS-1000 that really was a glorified calculator. It was the 64, along with an achingly slow modem and a CompuServe subscription, that let me see all the way back in the mid-1980s that there was going to be a digital news medium.
“We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes,” Tramiel was fond of saying. I was certainly the masses: an Apple or IBM PC was out of my reach in that era. At a time when I made about $13,000 a year, both of those machines were priced well north of $1,000. The 64, on the other hand, eventually cost less than $200 and you could use a TV set as a monitor. A commercial from the era:
It also was a great gaming machine — far superior to an Apple II or an IBM PC (heck, a lot of PCs didn’t even have graphic cards then). I spent hour upon hour playing Jumpman or Zork II on my Commodore 64.
The 64 also hosted a part-time computer bulletin board system for me and I burned through a scary amount of money in CompuServe’s online chat rooms. Yes, there was social media, even back in 1983.
The popularity of the Commodore 64 faded as the 1980s moved on. Commodore came up with the Amiga, a great computer that got squeezed by competitors. Tramiel got forced out of Commodore International and went over to Atari, where he released the Atari ST, another great machine that never quite got over the commercial hump. Apple and (seemingly) a million clone PC makers started carving up the market, and I went down the PC road because I could build a cheaper machine out of parts. I’m still building my own PCs today, even though it’s no longer really less expensive to do that.
Thirty years later, my Nook Color e-reader has far more power and memory than the 64, but there was a ‘fun’ factor in the old machine that remains hard to beat. And I owe most of my professional career to the curiosity that bloomed from using this computer.
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