Thread: Commodore Computer Founder Jack Tramiel Passes, at 83

Another one of our personal computer forefathers has passed.



Jack Tramiel did what no one had done before. He brought truly affordable personal computers into the homes of millions of people in the late 70's and early 80's. I personally owned one of his Commodore 64 computers and even though it was frustrating at times, it was the first time that you could actually put a small form factor computer into your home or business, without having NASA's federally backed budget to bank roll you.

His company introduced the Commodore PET, in 1977, selling for $595 and $795. It was soon followed by the Commodore VIC-20 in 1980. In 1982 the Commodore 64 was a game changer. It was a best-seller that initially sold for $595 and quickly dropped to $199. The Commodore 64, sometimes called the C64, featured 64 kilobytes of RAM, hence the name, and had integrated sound and color graphics. It sold an estimated 17 million units, making it still the most popular single computer ever sold.

If you were like me, in middle school and with a lot of free time on your hands, you spent hours with your C64. The text based adventure games like Zork, were really popular at that time. I stayed up late many nights playing those games or painstakingly typing in code to some game that came in the latest computing magazines. I actually took it to college as a gaming computer since it had a slot for use with ROM based cartridge games.



The Commodore 64, and thus its founder, will always have a special place in my heart.

When me and my old lady hooked up - 25 years ago this year - she had her ex's 64.
He worked in one of the computer labs for Babcox and Wilcox, who used to be a big nuclear fuel company, and all they did was bust the codes of all the current arcade games out at the time!
We had all the old games for it!

Sure beat the hell out of loading text-based adventures on the TRS-80 via cassette tape!!
That totally sucked!
It literally took an hour to load the equivelent of an average JPEG!

Damn, computers have come a looooong way!

I used to have an Ohio Scientific computer, cannot remember the model but ity was maxed out at 48k RAM and dual single sided floppies so I could copy discs!!!! Whew! Remember you used to buy the dual sided discs and cut out the little piece so you could flip them? Like the text we were using in those days needed more than one anyway!

I always remember the C-64 with the microwave like buttons on the keyboard! What were they thinking???

I had the computer, tape drive, floppy drive and printer. We used a color TV for the monitor. My Uncle had a Commodore 64 and he was the person who convinced my parents that we had to have one too. He used to say that the C64 is like a race car. She runs pretty good but there are times you have to poke around under the hood. I'm not sure what the youth of today would think about the C64 with no graphical user interface.

Oh, DOS - you my only friend!

COS\RUN!

-C: DOS\RUN!! (the space in there is NOT good code!)

If we ever have to go back to that just shoot me in the face now!

edit: HA! It thinks it's HTML!

LOAD"*",8,1

"L" shift "O", the short form for LOAD!

I think I may still have the C64 somewhere in my parents basement. I never did get the tape drive for it though, only had the floppy.

Please tell me that I wasn't the only one who stayed up all hours typing in game code, only to have it fail due to a syntax error that you could never figure out.

C:GOTO\PREVIOUS_POST