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TechRepublic: Commodore Pioneer Jack Tramiel Dies, Wozniak, Industry React

Below is the 1982 American advertisement for the Commodore 1982. A piece of tech history.

Commodore pioneer Jack Tramiel dies: Wozniak, industry and tech pros react

By Gina Smith

April 10, 2012, 12:42 PM PDT

Takeaway: Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, remembers tech pioneer and Commodore founder Jack Tramiel in an interview with Gina Smith. Tech pros who cut their teeth on early systems like the Commodore 64 and the Atari Series computers weigh in on how those early systems got them in the biz. Tramiel, 83, has died.

Jack Tramiel, the tech revolutionary and Holocaust Auschwitz concentration camp survivor who brought the Commodore 64 and Amiga Series computers to the world in the early and mid 1980s, has died at 83.

Those two computing lines were prescient in that, unlike efforts from Apple and IBM at the time, Tramiel wanted a computer for the “masses” and targeted home rather than business users. The systems were far ahead of their time in many ways.

Tramiel’s death is a huge loss, Apple co-founder and inventor Steve Wozniak told me in an interview today. (Disclosure: I co-wrote Wozniak’s memoir, iWoz: How I invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Doing It — WW Norton, 2005).

In 1975, Wozniak and the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs tried to get a few thousand dollars from Commodore as Wozniak was designing the Apple II, which he said was ... MORE at Tech Republic ... and here's our coverage at aNewDomain.net

Steve Wozniak; Talking iWoz at Google

 

Sometimes it does take a rocket scientist (true story from woz' list)

Scientists at NASA built a gun specifically to launch standard 3 pound dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea is to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl to test the strength of the windshields. British engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on the windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were made, and a gun was sent to the British engineers.

When the gun was fired, the engineers stood shocked as the chicken hurled out of the barrel, crashed into the shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens, blasted through the control console, snapped the engineer's back-rest in two, and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin, like an arrow shot from a bow. The horrified Brits sent NASA the disastrous results of the experiment, along with the designs of the windshield and begged the US scientists for suggestions.

NASA responded with a one-line memo --

"Defrost the chicken." (True Story)

from iWOZ to Dancing with the Stars -- first photo!

He invented the personal computer. Without him, no Apple, no nada. Won't you please vote for him on Dancing with the Stars? (And maybe buy his autobiography, cowritten by moi, while you're at it!) A plug, I know, but to know him is to love him! And pink is his color.