In the death of Jack Tramiel, the man behind the Commodore 64 computer, it’s not that hard to see the life of Silicon Valley.

This is a place where companies come out of nowhere, rock the world and then disappear again. Same with people. Tramiel, who died at 84 at Stanford Hospital on Sunday, was a Silicon Valley A-lister in the early personal computing days. His Commodore computers — in addition to the 64 there was the VIC-20 and the PET — helped open a new digital world to enthusiasts beyond the hobbyists who could build their own machines. The 64, which ranks as one of the best-selling personal computer models ever, still induces nostalgic rhapsody in its legion of onetime owners.

But by the time of his death, Tramiel, the founder of Commodore with a granite-hard nose for business, had faded from the valley scene and even valley lore.

“He helped pioneer the game industry and the personal computer industry, but at a certain point the world blew past him,” says author and valley historian Michael S. Malone. “It came down to the big battle of who was going to have the industry standard.”

It’s the way it goes here, isn’t it? There was Fairchild and then there wasn’t. Netscape, then not. Tandem, SGI, Sun Microsystems. World changers all — and now gone.

In the valley, legacy is not always about building companies to last. Here, companies madly push technology forward. Upstart startups maneuver to get out in front of the old guard, and sometimes overtake them at their own game. There was Yahoo (YHOO), then Google (GOOG) and now Facebook.

But those who started the now-faded giants have nothing to apologize for. It’s how the future is built. Though I never met Tramiel, he doesn’t strike me as the sort to apologize much, anyway.

“Boy, he was a tough nut,” says David Laws, a curator at the Computer History Museum and a guy who once worked for a Commodore supplier. “He drove a hard bargain.”

But Tramiel, who lived in Monte Sereno, had a soft side, as well, says his son Leonard, who remembers “an incredibly strong people person.”

Born in Poland, Tramiel survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Leonard Tramiel says his father didn’t talk about how the experience shaped him, but he did talk about Auschwitz — at high schools and universities in the area.

“It was very, very important to him that people knew the story and that they would, to use that tired phrase, never forget,” Leonard Tramiel said.

Tramiel eventually moved to the United States, where he enlisted in the Army. He later drove a cab, worked for a typewriter repair company and eventually started his own repair shop in the Bronx, N.Y. From there he embarked on the classic American dream journey.

Malone’s “The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley” tells how Tramiel progressed from typewriters to adding machines to calculators and Commodore, which he moved from Canada to Silicon Valley just before the dawn of the PC revolution.

“He tried to stuff the maximum amount of power into the least expensive package and then marketed the hell out of it,” Malone tells me. In 1977, Tramiel introduced the PET, which was one of the earliest sub-$1,000 PCs..

Tramiel followed that in 1980 with the VIC-20, which was less than $300 and which pioneered another Silicon Valley practice: the celebrity endorser. In the case of the VIC, it was Capt. Kirk. Yes, in a sense Tramiel launched William Shatner’s alternate career as a quirky celebrity pitchman.

“Up until then,” Malone tells me, “Shatner was a ‘Star Trek’ guy and a ‘T.J. Hooker’ guy.”

But the ad was not trotting out celebrity for celebrity’s sake. As Malone points out in “The Big Score,” the ads took a bold shot at Atari and asked parents why they should be spending money on video games when they could get their kids a computer that would help them learn math and other concepts.

Though Tramiel skewered Atari at the time, he would go on to buy the company in 1984.

“He really has provided a lesson to everybody of what a traditional entrepreneur was — independent, absolutely fearless,” Malone says.

And though his high-tech fame faded and he left some competitors bruised, it is inevitable that he will be remembered, and warmly, for the computers he put into people’s hands. In December 2007, Tramiel appeared at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64.

The room was full. The laughter genuine. And the applause sustained.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.