Deus ex machina

Commodore

The company that rescued Amiga in 1984 was the creation of a single man. Born in Poland in 1928 as Idek Tramielski, he was imprisoned in the Nazi work camps after his country was invaded in World War II. Rescued from the camps by the US Army, he married a fellow concentration camp survivor named Helen Goldgrub, and the two emigrated to the United States. Upon arrival, he changed his name to Jack Tramiel.



Jack Tramiel

Jack enlisted in the US Army in 1948 and served in the Equipment Repair Office. He served two tours of duty in Korea, then left the Army to work at a small typewriter repair company. In 1955, Jack and his wife left for Canada to start their own typewriter manufacturing firm. Jack wanted a military-sounding name for the company, but General and Admiral were already taken, so he settled on Commodore after seeing a car on the street with that name.

The little firm grew quickly, going public in 1962, but it became enveloped in a financial scandal that threatened to consume the company. Jack was a survivor, however, and would not give up. He found a financier named Irving Gould who purchased a large chunk of Commodore and moved it into new directions. Inexpensive Japanese typewriters were eating into Commodore's profits, so the company got into selling calculators instead. Then cheap calculators from Japan and from US firms like Texas Instruments threatened to take that business away as well. Jack realized that in order to survive the price wars, he needed to control the chips that went into the calculators. In 1976 he bought MOS Technologies, the same company that split off from Motorola to produce the legendary 6502 chip that ended up in the Apple ][, various game consoles, and the Atari 400/800 series.

The MOS purchase got Commodore into the computer business, starting with the PET, then the low-cost VIC 20, and finally in 1982 the company released the best-selling personal computer model of all time: the Commodore 64.

The 64 was a huge hit, selling over 22 million machines over its life span and firmly cementing Commodore as one of the major players in the burgeoning personal computer industry. However, things were not all rosy at the company.

Jack was determined not just to compete with other computer companies, but to destroy them. "Business is war," was his motto, and while the price war he initiated did take out some competitors—including getting revenge against TI, which withdrew from the computer business in October 1983—it also strained Commodore's profits. Tramiel often fought with Gould over matters of money: the financier wanted Jack to grow the business without any extra capital, but Jack wanted more cash in order to lower costs and thus wipe out the rest of his competitors. "We sell computers to the masses, not the classes," he once said, reflecting the price difference between a $199 Commodore 64 and machines from Apple and IBM that cost thousands of dollars.

In the end, as is often the case when battling your financiers, the money people won. Jack Tramiel was forced out of his own company by the board of directors in late 1983.

This ouster would have a huge effect on the fledgling Amiga company, because Tramiel did not go quietly.

Jack Tramiel was a study in conflicts and contradictions, like any human being, but more so. His hardheaded management style made him enemies, but also made him steadfast friends—many key employees quit Commodore when he left to join him in his new ventures. His tendency to jump from project to project paid huge dividends when the company moved from the PET to the VIC-20 to the Commodore 64, but that same line of thinking hurt the company when ill-conceived successors such as the Plus/4 failed in the marketplace.

So it should come as no surprise that Tramiel's departure from Commodore both saved and doomed the Amiga at the same time.

Before Tramiel had left, Commodore had already engaged in halfhearted talks to purchase the struggling Amiga, Inc., but nothing had come from them. Atari was developing a new personal computer and game console and wanted access to the Amiga chipset. The initial offer was for $3 a share and kept getting lower. When it hit 98¢ per share, both sides walked away from the table. It was at this point that Atari "loaned" Amiga $500,000 to continue operations for a few more months.

This poisonous deal was put together by none other than Jack Tramiel, who had managed to purchase Atari's computer division after being kicked out of Commodore. Due to the video game crash of 1983, Atari's parent company Warner Communications had been looking to dump the computer and home console video game portions of Atari (they would retain the arcade division, which was still doing well), and Tramiel managed to work out a spectacular deal that gave him ownership of Atari's computer division for no money down.

When Jack left Commodore for Atari, the former company's stock fell while the latter's rose, as public opinion still considered (and rightly so) Jack to have been the driving force that built Commodore's success. A steady flow of engineers followed Tramiel to Atari, which prompted Commodore to sue Atari for theft of trade secrets. (Tramiel, in his inimitable style, would later countersue; both lawsuits were eventually settled out of court.) To compete with Tramiel and regain the engineering talent they had lost, Commodore decided to purchase Amiga wholesale. Keeping the original Amiga team intact saved the computer as Jay Miner and the others had originally envisioned it.

However, it also made Tramiel more determined than ever to get his revenge on Commodore. That revenge would come in the form of the Atari ST—sometimes called the Jackintosh—which was rushed into production to compete against the Amiga. Had Jack never been kicked out of Commodore, the Atari line of computers might have just faded into oblivion after Warner had dumped the company. The competition between Amiga and Atari would wind up hurting both platforms as they focused their resources on fighting each other rather than making sure they had a place in a world increasingly dominated by the IBM PC.

Still, all that was in the future, and the Amiga team, now a fully-owned subsidiary of Commodore, had but one thing on their minds: finishing the computer.