5 ms·

Jack Tramiel never gave us a shiny, white telephone or mp3 player but he was very much the same conniving, non-technical pitch-man that Jobs was, less the prese

by skeeter2020 5y ago

Jack Tramiel never gave us a shiny, white telephone or mp3 player but he was very much the same conniving, non-technical pitch-man that Jobs was, less the presentation polish and boyish good looks. If you look at Commodore during and after his reign there is a marked difference. They're also both very interesting people who should be respected for what the accomplished and often vilified for how the accomplished it. Neither should be your role model IMO.

sumtechguy 5y ago
I remember one of the documentaries he was openly talking about how he locked out competitors when at atari. He did it by buying up fab space in any company that could make something for a competitor.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
In some ways though Jobs and Tramiel are polar opposites: Tramiel was interested "in computers for the masses, not the classes" so it was all about "rock bottom pricing" and undercutting competitors; Jobs especially in his later days was interested in premium products and eventually luxury products. Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals. At Atari Corp they did seem to learn a bit more on this front, with a series of models all compatible with each other... but innovation and development on the operating system basically stalled from 1985 until about 1990. TOS 1.04 was really only small incremental improvements and bug fixes over the original (quite fantastic for its time) release and it came out in 1989, 4 years after the initial launch. And I get the impression that the early 90s push at Atari towards multitasking and major improvements in the OS might have come at the behest of his sons taking over and their attempt to try to get into the workstation and DTP market. By 1991/92 it was too late. The Atari Falcon was an awesome computer, and the final versions of TOS/MultiTOS were respectable for their time, about equivalent on paper with Apple's MultiFinder and with Windows 3.11. But there wasn't a community of devs or a broad enough audience for the product, and Motorola had marked the 68k line for death.
- sillyquiet 5y ago
  > Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals. But, iirc, very very very few computer manufacturers prioritized compatibility in that way in those days though, and for good reason, it would have be stupid expensive. Some manufacturers got around the problem (Commodore did this as a matter of fact) by incorporating all or part of the previous line in the new machines and enabling compatibility modes.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Well, that's simply not true for the Atari 8-bit line (mostly compatible from 1979 right through to the XE series which continued right into the late 80s and even early 90s), the Apple II line (II, II+, IIe, IIc, IIgs, as well as cards that slotted into Macs), MSX and MSXII, and of course the 16-bit era with MS-DOS machines and Macintosh, Amiga and Atari ST lines. Honestly, Commodore and Sinclair 8-bits are the outliers here? C-128 came quite late in the game.
    - sillyquiet 5y ago
      ok, I stand corrected, but I will say that the Apple II line represented smaller iterations of the generally same architecture, right? i.e., Commodore I guess didn't iterate within the same architecture as much, breaking that compatibility more easily.
      - timbit42 5y ago
        There was a fair bit of compatibility within the PET/CBM line. Outside of that, every system had an incompatible memory map.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        One of the key difficulties of making a faster Apple II was the time-critical routines involved in reading/writing floppies. It was not sufficient to throttle back to 1 MHz when running time-critical loops, but one would need to emulate the timing of a 6502 doing that. Commodore made a better 6502 for the C65, but it'd wouldn't work on an Apple II because it wouldn't have the same cycle timings. The IIgs and the //c+ was faster and very compatible thanks to a crazy number of hacks in them to acommodate Woz's brilliance. In retrospect, Apple should have released a Disk II+ that isolated the timings from the CPU and let software break. Commodore should probably have done the same.

sumtechguy 5y ago

I remember one of the documentaries he was openly talking about how he locked out competitors when at atari. He did it by buying up fab space in any company that could make something for a competitor.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

In some ways though Jobs and Tramiel are polar opposites: Tramiel was interested "in computers for the masses, not the classes" so it was all about "rock bottom pricing" and undercutting competitors; Jobs especially in his later days was interested in premium products and eventually luxury products. Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals. At Atari Corp they did seem to learn a bit more on this front, with a series of models all compatible with each other... but innovation and development on the operating system basically stalled from 1985 until about 1990. TOS 1.04 was really only small incremental improvements and bug fixes over the original (quite fantastic for its time) release and it came out in 1989, 4 years after the initial launch. And I get the impression that the early 90s push at Atari towards multitasking and major improvements in the OS might have come at the behest of his sons taking over and their attempt to try to get into the workstation and DTP market. By 1991/92 it was too late. The Atari Falcon was an awesome computer, and the final versions of TOS/MultiTOS were respectable for their time, about equivalent on paper with Apple's MultiFinder and with Windows 3.11. But there wasn't a community of devs or a broad enough audience for the product, and Motorola had marked the 68k line for death.

sillyquiet 5y ago
> Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals. But, iirc, very very very few computer manufacturers prioritized compatibility in that way in those days though, and for good reason, it would have be stupid expensive. Some manufacturers got around the problem (Commodore did this as a matter of fact) by incorporating all or part of the previous line in the new machines and enabling compatibility modes.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Well, that's simply not true for the Atari 8-bit line (mostly compatible from 1979 right through to the XE series which continued right into the late 80s and even early 90s), the Apple II line (II, II+, IIe, IIc, IIgs, as well as cards that slotted into Macs), MSX and MSXII, and of course the 16-bit era with MS-DOS machines and Macintosh, Amiga and Atari ST lines. Honestly, Commodore and Sinclair 8-bits are the outliers here? C-128 came quite late in the game.
  - sillyquiet 5y ago
    ok, I stand corrected, but I will say that the Apple II line represented smaller iterations of the generally same architecture, right? i.e., Commodore I guess didn't iterate within the same architecture as much, breaking that compatibility more easily.
    - timbit42 5y ago
      There was a fair bit of compatibility within the PET/CBM line. Outside of that, every system had an incompatible memory map.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      One of the key difficulties of making a faster Apple II was the time-critical routines involved in reading/writing floppies. It was not sufficient to throttle back to 1 MHz when running time-critical loops, but one would need to emulate the timing of a 6502 doing that. Commodore made a better 6502 for the C65, but it'd wouldn't work on an Apple II because it wouldn't have the same cycle timings. The IIgs and the //c+ was faster and very compatible thanks to a crazy number of hacks in them to acommodate Woz's brilliance. In retrospect, Apple should have released a Disk II+ that isolated the timings from the CPU and let software break. Commodore should probably have done the same.