Tramiel himself had little computer knowledge, but his super aggressive business tenets and ability to hire great talent made him essential to Commodore.
@@SteveLeicht1 I started out on Commodores in the late 70's. Trammel aggressive marketing of low cost computers was a major reason i was able to afford. 40 years later I am finishing my career as a software engineer. Thanks Jack, RIP
Tramiel was a business person who branched up from calculators, but he really had no vision beyond simplistic measures such as “how much RAM,” and “how many bytes on a floppy.” PCs and clones soon put his type out of business, because they gave all those decisions back to the consumer. You buy whatever RAM you need and snap it in place. You also choose whatever sound card you want, whatever video card you want, whatever modem or networking card, etc. The modular PC knocked him out, and video game consoles took away his toy market too. He thought he could keep foreigners out, meanwhile guys like Dell just got started assembling modular PCs…
It's remarkable the episodes of The Computer Chronicles survived to this day, as back in their day, analog video tape was VERY expensive, so most TV station operations would reuse video tape from past TV productions for current projects. TV stations weren't known to be video archivists, as doing so would just add to the expense of operating a TV station, so scant videos of past TV shows were ever kept on the local levels.
I didn't appreciate this series enough "back in the day." This is such a rare treasure: intelligent conversation with no obnoxious talking heads asking the questions. And as so many have said before me "Hell Yeah! Gary Kildall!" Thank you so much for maintaining this very important channel!
Jack Trammel was a true visionary. He took the Atari brand from video gaming into true computing. At 10, I was lucky enough to have an Atari 800XL with the cassette tape drive thanks to my beloved grandparents, and it opened my eyes up to a much more broad world of computing that expanded over the years into experience with many low end, and midrange systems including Sun Sparc, DEC VAX, IBM AS/400, TANDEM to name a few. That would probably not have been possible without his vision, and my grandparents support. Thank you so much for preserving this priceless time capsule into the golden years of computing, before it became mainstream....
"A few years ago, the low end computer was promoted more for it's price than it's flexibility, more for entertainment than as a serious tool...but many owners of TWO THOUSAND DOLLAR computers might be surprised to see the inventive ways in which these INEXPENSIVE machines are used today" - 1985
It's a lot more true today than it was back then. Look at the specs of the latest Macbook, you can easily get a more capable Windows laptop for a fraction of the price.
The part that gets me know is"live!"..... What, other locations offer DEAD strippers???? I know..... It means live/in person instead of via video or some other non-in-person mode. But that line has made me laugh for decades.
@@raven4k998 in fact a friend of my did the very same to his sons 15 and 12 two weeks ago with C64, and the outcome was.... well, very like what you described... 😆
I remember a time when they didn't accept computer printed reports in my school. Eventually though they relented which was good for me cause my handwriting was (and still is) abysmal. I wrote a lot of reports on the C64 using Easyscript. (But that was a couple of years after this episode. In 1985 a C64 and printer was still out of my budget. (To put it into perspective a C64 starter package with cassette drive in 1985 cost more (taking inflation into account. Then a budget range gaming computer would set you back now. Especially since I'm from europe so C64's were priced a lot higher due to the customs import fees. When I finally saved enough to buy a C64 (either in 86 or 87) it cost me 600 dutch guilders and $1 was about 3,31 guilders back then, around $181 and by then it was priced a fair bit cheaper then it had been in 85)
Socialism high inflation, too much high Tax across the board always always contributes into higher inflation and lower productive economy.... Too bad Europe went that route but it's good for the Governments
@@Rickswars Socialism in the Netherlands? WTF are you talking about. At the time the Cristian party and the Liberal party had a joined government. Socialist parties were in the opposition. Even though they had more votes.
@Bruce S I'm not even sure he actually won the election in 2016 let alone the most recent one. Besides now the whole world thinks of America as being a joke of a democracy since he came to power.
I really love this show, and we owe much to Mr. Tramiel. I feel lucky I lived those years as a young boy..you could really understand and put your hands on these stuff, tinkering and play. Now tech seems so out of human comprehension. We mainly are just users of black boxes..Signed: an old chap :D
It was too slow because it was at half the speed of the z80 in the 128 to hold compatibility for the rest of the timings in the circuitry. Cpm was really just a last minute add-on, i.e. it's using a z80 for booting, so why not add something that will make use of this boot cpu.
I find it ironic, to see that Commodore LCD laptop. I didn't remember it at the time. To hear Bil Herd speak of it now (VCS shows et al) that the development of the 128 cost CBM that other device. Even with his role in the 128 he regrets his project killed the LCD portable.
@@robwebnoid5763 I think it was the other way around. They wanted CP/M capability as a selling point (Commodore was always looking for a way into the "serious" market, business computing, etc.) and then the presence of the Z80 turned out to be of great help in implementing C128's complicated boot-up scheme.
@@vcv6560 I believe it was also the technology and patents that Commodore sold off before any of it took off in any way. The justification was that the technology was ridiculous and never going to gain traction in the consumer industry.
Atari ST 520 user interface is called GEM (Graphical Environment Manager). GEM was purchased from Digital Resource, that means from Gary Kildall himself, sitting on the other side of the table,
@@rabidbigdogThere’s even more to it than that! GEM already existed prior to the ST. Around the time the ST was being developed, DR was about to be sued by Apple for copying their work, so DR had to modify (and somewhat strip down) GEM to placate Apple. A team of programmers from Atari were separately working with DR on the version of GEM for the ST, and my understanding is that the ST version avoided the changes required by Apple.
The Atari ST was a good solid games machine- but the only serious alternative to IBM/ Compaq etc. and Apple at that point was the Amiga. The fact it all fell apart in 92-93 was the real tragedy. I suppose Windows 95 would have killed it off anyway, just as WinNT and then XP nearly killed off Apple until they refocused onto iPads and iPhones.
The ST and Amiga didn't have enough expansion potential, and video was baked onto the motherboard, instead of being on a card allowing for upgrades. For example, the ST's graphic resolution was no better than CGA, and stayed that way the whole time, even though PCs were at EGA (640×350) a year earlier, *and stayed there,* even though PCs moved to 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, etc, etc.
@@RonJohn63 Yea, the great graphics of the original Amiga is ironically largely responsible for what killed it, spec wise at least. Tech grew fast and the Amigas poor flicker free resolution modes were shameful. Users wanted crisp sharp fonts, and 24 bit colors without trickery employed. Commodore didnt keep the amiga current and kept peddling what then became garbage specs. It's like if Apple still tried to sell the original ipad as hot new technology against everything else out there today - nobody would be fooled by such outlandish claims. Yet somehow Commodore was doing just that in the later years.
@@anonUK you must be a Amiga fanboy. In reality it was other way around, Amiga is not even close to ST in terms of general computing. ST is 10-20% faster, the workflow on ST is light years faster then on Amiga WB, ST having inexpensive 640x400 rock stable 72Hz razor sharp SM124 monitor for productivity apps which is Amiga lacking completely, and having floppy compatibility to DOS, while Amiga standing alone in the dark without means of communication to other business systems except the zero modem.
It should blow everybody's mind with what could be done with 64k of total memory (and a few custom chips). The C64 was truly the real star of 80's computing. Sidenote: Geos was some brilliant pre-MS office software in 64k if you thought the 64 was all games. (Have to also mention at the end of the decade, the Amiga ran circles around anything Apple or IBM had to offer). He labels himself unwittingly a computing dinosaur by his admission of focusing on Apple and IBM. Lucky for modern computing, the younger GenX computer nerds had a different vision.
Jack Tramiel was 30-40 years ahead of his time by trying to get Ataris in schools to hook the kids on his ecosystem. Google took a page from his playbook.
Interesting how Jack didn't have his crystal ball out to see how the Japanese would circumvent the home low-end PC market by taking the home gaming market directly. Ironic since Nintendo already had their 8 bit machine selling wildly in Japan during this time of filming and they would enter the US market with the same machine, just repackaged, not long after. Lost opportunity for an otherwise very good businessman of his time.
The console division was for several years in a legal limbo after the takeover, when things settled Nintendo already had cornered the market worldwide.
Interestingly, Jack Tramiel knew next to nothing about computers, but did know a lot about aggressively running his business. Chuck Peddle designed the 6502 MOS chip. Also, Tramiel's son was an engineering whiz.
@@oldtwinsna8347 he had a mac briefly and praised it as the first computer he could use but he also got rid of it because they were a competitor. I've often wondered if that's how we ended up with the ST being so Macintosh like (the Jackintosh, as it was nick named).
I had admired how Jack Tramiel worked to make a more affordable powerful personal computer system. However I couldn't afford to buy an Atari 520ST at the time that Jack Tramiel's Atari was making the Atari 520ST. The Japanese computer business wanted to license their MSX format which most Americans had rejected during that time.
The MSX didn't have a chance against low-cost C64s - so in spite of his 'curtness' he wasn't wrong. At least I'm still running on an Atari Computer in 2022 with the VCS on Ubuntu (it can run Windows too, I got it specifically to jump into Linux for a quarter the price of a Mac Mini with Ryzen CPUs - it's served me fine for a year - similar to the Steam Deck which I'm looking forward to).
6:26 It is at this moment that Kildall probes for a supply chain weakness to exploit. Jack cluelessly falls for it - or, perhaps being one step ahead fabricates his response.
When Jack left Commodore, that was the beginning of the end of the company. They lost their visionary leadership direction and went into a downward spiral. They had a few milestone successes especially with the Amiga product range, but they were never the same. The same applies to Jack. When he took over at Atari, he never had the same level of control he once had at commodore. At Commodore, he was like a third world dictator in charge of everything. The brand was stuck in the past and was dying. The ST brought some life into the organization, but it prolonged the inevitable. By the 90's, Dos/Windows destroyed all competition in the market and combined the PC consumer and business sector into one big market. Apart from apple who were shrewd business people and IBM heavily funded by the US government on special projects, computer hardware became reliant on Microsoft. Jack deserves his place in history supplying computers to the masses, not the classes. As a result, he helped the poor to the working class children transform into today's coders and software developers.
So many on-point questions posed in this interview. Poor marketing and availability of the Atari ST in the US absolutely resulted in a low adoption rate compared to the Amiga or other systems. The inclusion of MIDI spread by word of mouth to music creators. I only saw one at the time at a near-to-college campus computer retailer.
The US market was much different from the European at the time. Around '86 in the US the "low cost" PC and PC clones started to be dominant. In Europe the PC revolution really picked up the pace after the year 1990...That's why Tramiel was still selling tons of home computers in the late 80s in Europe.
see how gary was keen to chat with jack from the eager point of view of having his GEM os in the Atari ST being its selling point as a GUI ... listen to gary! to me it sounded like gary's hero was people like Jack, after all jack founded C= and then went to Atari.. and now Atari is still heard off compared to C= ... Jack Trammel was ahead of his time
My older brother, (13 mothes), Had a c64... so I had to one up him...so i bought a c 128. I never ran a c128 program on it. but i always ran it in the c64 mode. (it was actually a killer computer). But as a C64 it rocked!. a few months later.. they had the Amiga..... what the hell was that????
Tramiel's sons are geniuses. Jack was fired from Commodore because he challenged Irving Gould, the financier behind the company, who was using Commodore like a personal ATM.
It was probably just that the rest of the computer industry was going by so fast with better machines. People were too wary of buying machines from Atari because of the company's legacy of being just an electronics toy maker, people want serious business machines.
Jack left Commodore under bitter circumstances; it was run by the man who financed the business (Irving Gould), and Jack had major disagreements with him; Gould had no vision for the computer business. I’m pretty sure that one of Jack’s goals, when building the the Atari computer business, was to kill Commodore.
Any comments here how the GUI of the Atari ST TOS is derived from GEM which was developed by Digital Research.... which was Gary Kildall’s company? Or was he not working there during these years at Computer Chronicles?
Atari sent a team of programmers (around a dozen, I think) to work at DR, so they could work with the DR developers on customising GEM for the ST. It’s not so much a derivation as a customised version. Gary Kildare was still running the DR business at that time.
Paul Schindler should be rather disappointed at all of his predictions that came wrong. Atari the one to upset IBM? Problem is that because the IBM PC was basically built from off-the-shelf parts, it was easy to copy. Just couldn't copy the BIOS chip. Atari's ST never had that same boost. Only one to get close was Apple's Macs and that only lasted a few years before Steve Jobs shut them down and focused on what he thought people wanted, which was the Internet.
The Japanese came in with the NES and Sega Genesis....Both were successful....not Atari Corp’s Atari 7800 or Atari XEGS......Still I think the 7800 and XEGS are great.....They have good games and good hardware....The XEGS was the Atari 5200 done right....
"What can I do with my 32K Z80 based glorified calculator?" Not a great deal... Pacman? Space Invaders? Give it to kids to play around with? At least the C64 was a decent enough machine to hang on for a couple more years- but 1985 was basically the end of the 8 bit and the beginning of the 16 bit era.
It depends on how you look at it. Like on the one hand, yes, the Amiga and Atari ST came out in 1985, Macintosh was already on the market, and the IIgs was coming up in '86, so comparing the 8-bit machines to what was available on the home market, the 8-bit machines looked very dated and under-performing by comparison. But on the other hand, I still used 8-bit machines. My school still used 8-bit machines (Apple IIs and a few Commodore 64s). My friends all still used 8-bit machines, up through about 1991 or so. There was better stuff out there but the old 8-bit platforms were still alive and well and processing words and running games and so on. The machines could keep doing the jobs they'd already been doing, as long as they didn't completely break down or something, and for a lot of us it was no small thing to think about moving to a completely different machine. So from my perspective the 8-bit machines weren't just "still around" they were pretty alive and well and still relevant. And for that matter, I owned a Commodore 128 - an 8-bit machine that didn't even come out until 1985. (My family also owned several Commodore 64s, including a 64C - a model that came out in 1986) In retrospect it probably wasn't a great idea to get the C-128, for what that machine cost, I could have got an Atari ST or an Amiga. Such is life... Consider - one of the most iconic games of the 8-bit era, Prince of Persia, didn't even come out until 1989. It got ported to just about everything but it started on the Apple II, well after the IIgs had come out.
I think all computers during this era is low end lol. . .I grew up on this stuff! I was 10 at the time! @3:51, I remember when I was a kid, I had to always run my 1541 floppy disk drive without the covers because it always overheated. The graphics capability and the SID 6581 MOS chip (Sound Interface Device) was this system's claim to fame in my opinion. But that 1541 drive sucked.
@@Arcsecant aha, so it wasnt under-powered and overpriced designer piece? Do you realize that in 1985 Apple was pretty much a soulless megacorp you describe? They even streamlined and outsourced their production, laying off 1200 employees closing 6 manufacturing sites in US. Atari combined with Commodore where much smaller then Apple back then... In 1985 there was nothing charming on Apple IIe, it was terribly outdated. For the price you could already have Amiga or for the half the ST from Atari, both much much better choice...
Over thirty years later, our era would call the content of this episode "jacked up", partly because the low-end rigs of 2019 (like this 4GB Chromebook I'm using) would prove somewhat workable software development and music composition platforms. Another reason is that Gary Kildall, inventor of an early x86 OS (which got squished), was Chiefet's wingman here.
I bought a Dale computer in 1996 for home use, games, internet, etc..it was sopposobly an high end but reality is it was junk. Freeze up often and wouldn't work even when I reboot it. I Called the rude Dale technician and everytime he would talk to me like I broke it. wasn't my fault. I was on the phone for over an hour sometimes trying to fix it. The disc player broke later on and I took it to the Dale store, and it took them 2 weeks to replace it lol. I had nothing but issues with that junk and so did all the other buyers I talked to. Its a miracle they are still in business.
Well it was sort of true for the next 5 years for these 16 bit Atari computers they were successful, until ibm/intel kept creeping up to the 486 in the early 1990s, with more 3rd party software for that platform. And Windows 3x also.
I'm in the US. People did buy these newer Atari machines (both 8 & 16 bit, post 400 & 800) for it was the hype of a "new Atari" when Tramiei stepped on board. Yes it was niche, but still a lot of people bought them compared to before, especially fans of the old Atari. Not as big as Wintel & Commodore perhaps. As I said somewhere else, Atari couldn't really shake their past notoriety as an electronics toy/games maker. The hype trickled when perhaps 1990 arrived, along with the Intel 486 & Windows. The only Atari machine, which I still have, is a VCS (2600).
@@robwebnoid5763 there's no denying that it never came close to being as popular as the Mac (in the US). This, it "was a spectacularly poor prognostication".
How a computer can be just a toy? Because you can play games? It reminds me the time I was saying that I was using the Internet and they thought I was just watching porn. Now most of them are using the Internet just for porn and social media, while I'm making money out of it for years.
Poor Gary, he blew off ibm cuz be and his wife had plans that day and Bill gates swooped in and took the deal instead. But gates did give Gary the chance in the first place but Gary didn't see the urgency of the situation so Bill did. The worst part is that Gary's wife divorced him after that and he got in a bar fight and later died from injuries ex
@Andrew Tarrant no. Well at least not Gary's murderer. I've heard some stories about Bill though (well when I say stories I mean conspiracy theories lol)
NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP 9000, Apollo Computer, Symbolics... those were the true high end personal computers and they were still relevant as the high-end until only 10 years ago.
@@toddc5619 exactly, while Apple was in thousands price point, the UNIX workstations where in tens of thousands price range at that time, and hundreds was ATARI and Commodore area.... Well, sound about right, midrange....
Hooo boy did Schindler get his prediction wrong about the Computer Wars. For starters, neither Atari or Commodore really won, and IBM's architecture remained the standard in both business and home. Same with "Big Guy stands unaffected while the Little Guys fight," IBM hasn't sold a consumer product in over a decade now, and that department was in decline since the AT came out, while Apple stands alone as the last independent PC maker. And nothing has changed in almost 40 years: Apple is still underpowered, and overpriced.
Jack is not a saint! He was a ruthless business man. But you know what? He is one of my Heroe's. (heros? Hero's?). Jack created the C64. When he was kicked out of Commodore , he bought Atari! By his force of will..... he made the Atari ST happen. Yes, it was developed in like 6 months. Despite the fan boies, it was not even close to the Amiga. but is was a great low cost computer.
of course the ST was not even close to Amiga, it was better.... Amiga had its advancement here and there, but in reality the ST was much better computer and Amiga was just a great toy. But what do you expect from Amiga fanboy? A gamer will never know the hardware same as the programmer...
