RIP Jack Tramiel - Founder of Commodore & Atari Corporation

The founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel passed away on April 8 at the age of 83. Commodore of course brought us the MOS 6581 SID chip used in various synths including the Elektron Sidstation, MIDIBox SID and of course numerous DIY synths including modded C64s. He also formed Atari Corporation in 1984.

via Wikipedia: "Jack Tramiel (Polish: Jacek Trzmiel, Trzmiel means "bumblebee"; December 13, 1928 – April 8, 2012) was a Polish-born American businessman, best known for founding Commodore International,[3] the manufacturer of the Commodore PET, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga, and other Commodore models of home computers.

Peddle responded with the Commodore PET, based on his company's MOS Technology 6502 processor. It was first shown publicly at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show in 1977, and soon the company was receiving 50 calls a day from dealers wanting to sell the computer.[8] The PET would go on to be a success — especially in the education field, where its all-in-one design was a major advantage. Much of their success with the PET came from the business decision to sell directly to large customers, instead of selling to them through a dealer network. The first PET computers were sold primarily in Europe, where Commodore had also introduced the first wave of digital handheld calculators.[8]

As prices dropped and the market matured, the monochrome (green text on black screen) PET was at a disadvantage in the market when compared to machines like the Apple II and Atari 800, which offered color graphics, and could be hooked to a television as an inexpensive display. Commodore responded with the VIC-20, and then the Commodore 64, which would go on to be the best-selling home computer of all time [citation needed]. The Commodore VIC-20 was the first microcomputer to sell one million units. The Commodore 64 sold several million units. It was during this time period that Tramiel coined the famous phrase, "We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes."[9]...

In January 1984, Tramiel resigned from Commodore. After a short break from the computer industry, he formed a new company named Tramel Technology, Ltd., in order to design and sell a next-generation home computer.[10] The company was named "Tramel" to help ensure that it would be pronounced correctly (i.e., "tra - mel" instead of "tra - meal").[11]

In July 1984, Tramel Technology bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications.[10] The division had fallen on hard times, due to the video game crash of 1983. TTL was then renamed Atari Corporation.

In the late 1980s, Tramiel decided to step away from day-to-day operations at Atari, naming his son, Sam, President and CEO. In 1995, Sam had a heart attack, and his father returned to oversee operations. In 1996, Tramiel sold Atari to disk-drive manufacturer Jugi Tandon Storage in a reverse merger deal. The newly merged company was named JTS Corporation, and Tramiel joined the JTS board."

The Atari ST was released in 1985. "The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two",[1] which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals. Due to its graphical user inferface, it was known as the “Jackintosh”, a reference to Jack Tramiel."