New York – Jack
Tramiel, founder of Commodore International, which introduced home computers to
the mass market with its Commodore 64 in the early 1980s, died at the age of
83, according to reports by
and other media outlets.
was born in Poland
in December 1928 and, after the German invasion of the country during World War
II, was eventually was sent to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. He
was rescued from the camp in April 1945 by the U.S. Army.
In November 1947,
Tramiel emigrated to the U.S. He soon joined the army, where he learned how to
repair office equipment, including typewriters and eventually founded Commodore
Portable Typewriter, which eventually became Commodore Business Machines and
went public in 1955.
Commodore showed
the Commodore PET at the
1977
Summer Consumer Electronics Show
. This eventually led to the Commodore VIC
20 and Commodore 64, which competed at the time against the Apple II and
computers by Atari, the pioneering game company that branched out into
computers in the early 1980s.
Tramiel left
Commodore in 1984, eventually buying the Atari’s consumer division that was severely
hurt by the crash of that era’s video game industry. The company was named
Atari Corporation.
He is survived by his
wife Helen; their three sons,
,
Sam and Leonard; and their families.
