Jack Tramiel Steps Out
| December 11th, 2007While I wouldn’t go as far as calling him a recluse, Jack Tramiel is probably the toughest 80’s computer mogul to find. jack and his sons built Commodore into a household name, thanks to the PET, the VIC-20 and finally the Commodore 64, the best selling personal computer of all time.
Quibble quibble: every type of Apple iBook is essentially different thanks to shifting specs and individually configured RAM and drives. Thus, the C64 remains the champ of single unit sales for PCs.
Anyway, Tramiel and his family came out for the 25th anniversary of the C64, held three months after the fact at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. For Jack, the patriarch of the family and an Auschwitz survivor, it was the first time he’d appeared in public to speak about Commodore in 15 years. many in attendance, I heard, thought he was dead, or had alzhiemers. Fortunately, these were rumors, and Jack was a joy to listen to all night.
He and Wozniak were exchanging jabs over computer price points all night long.
I was not thinking about demos when I walked into this event, but as the evening progressed, I found myself thinking about the whole Demo Scene more and more. This world began with the C64, really. But later in the night, I got a midnight demonstration of the PDP-1, which can play 4-channel square-wave music, and display mandalas on its oscilloscope screen. Wouldn’t that count as the first demo? I suppose the music and display would have to be going at once, a feat the PDP-1 was not powerful enough to do at the time. Sallem thinks it could be done with 2-channel sound…
Tramiel answered my question, at one point, by stating that he knew of the significance of the C64 for the demo scene and for the game world. After I asked my question, demo nerds swarmed me. It’s good to see people are still interested in these moving art works realized in code.
Also, special events at the CHS mean occasional trips into the back rooms! Note the cool Newton prototypes and the hardcore upskirt shot I got of a Xerox Alto. These are all in my Flickr stream.
Oodles of pictures, and my GameTap story linked here. Anyone want to stick one of my pictures in the Wikipedia entry on Jack?
