Made in Chester County: The Commodore 64

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Auschwitz survivor and founder of Commodore International and Atari Jack Tramiel.--via 8bitlegends.com
The Commodore 64--via PCWorld.com
The Commodore 64–via PCWorld.com

Every month since December, we here at VISTA Today have rolled out stories on companies that manufacture in Chester County. We’ve profiled Schramm, Acero Precision, Victory Brewing Company, and Unipak. This next installment in our series is a throwback feature on a company that, although it has been defunct for more than 20 years, revolutionized the computer industry and left a lasting impact on the world.

It’s amazing, really, when you consider that the founder of the company that gave the world the best-selling computer of all time was not only uneducated, but perhaps living on borrowed time.

Born in Poland, Jack Tramiel was captured by the Nazis as a child and sent to Auschwitz, where his father and most of his family died at the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele. Of the 10,000 people who were still living in the concentration camp by 1944, Tramiel was one of approximately 60 who survived after being rescued by the United States Army.

Nothing in his life, he would later tell people, could be difficult after his experience at Auschwitz.

Tramiel immigrated to America with $10 in his pocket and joined the Army, which gave him the opportunity to learn how to repair office equipment like typewriters.

After marrying another Holocaust survivor, he and his wife moved to Toronto, where a lot of her relatives were living. In Canada, Tramiel began assembling and selling typewriters, then calculators.

Wanting his company to have a military ring, he named it Commodore, because General (Electric and Motors) was already taken. By 1962, Commodore was ready for its first public offering.

The company flourished with its production of portable, pocket calculators. However, Texas Instruments – which had been supplying Commodore with the key ingredient (integrated circuits, also known as chips) – began making its own calculators in 1972.

Three years later, after more than a decade of turning a profit, Commodore reported losses in the millions.

A MOS poster advertises circuit capabilities.--photo via Wikipedia.org
A MOS poster advertises circuit capabilities.–photo via Wikipedia.org

Tramiel responded in 1976 by purchasing a small chip foundry, with the help of investor Irving Gould, in Norristown named MOS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) Technology. Commodore quickly reorganized, moving its financial headquarters to the Bahamas to take advantage of the island nation’s lack of a corporate tax. The company moved its operational headquarters to Wilson Drive in West Chester, where the research and development of new products occurred in close proximity to the MOS Technology site.

Chuck Peddle, an engineer who left Motorola to take over the engineering at MOS and Commodore, convinced Tramiel that calculators were a dead end, and that they should turn their attention to home computers.

They did, and the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) debuted in 1977. From that moment on, Commodore was known as a computer company.

In 1982, it introduced the Commodore 64 to the market. The Guinness Book of World Records still lists it as the highest-selling single computer model of all time. Fueled by the Commodore 64’s popularity, the company reached its peak in 1984, shipping 3.4 million desktop computers and controlling nearly a quarter of the market.

Such success prompted Tramiel to by full-page newspaper advertisements that stated “Commodore Ate the Apple.”

However, the aforementioned competitor introduced Macintosh in 1984, and it was around that time when computer firms the world over began marketing inexpensive clones of the IBM PC.

That year also marked the beginning of an internal power struggle between Tramiel and Gould, the chairman of the board, and it set the stage for the problems that resulted in Commodore’s downfall.

Jack Tramiel and the first Commodore.
Jack Tramiel and the first Commodore.

Tramiel, whom Knight-Ridder Newspapers once said had a management style whereby he’d “hand out bonuses and pink slips with equanimity,” resigned in 1984. The company then went through a revolving door of executives before reporting $356.5 million in losses in 1993 alone.

In April 1994, Commodore declared bankruptcy and quietly laid off the remaining 47 employees in the West Chester office, which once was home to more than 400 workers.

What contributed to such a steady decline at Commodore? Most experts agree that it was not a failure of technology but of leadership and marketing.

The computer-oriented middle-managers abandoned the company when it failed to adopt more common operating standards. The market for its older models eventually faded, and Commodore, which was said to treat its dealers poorly, introduced new computers that were incompatible with the existent ones.

Tramiel’s successors at the throne were said to know how to read a balance sheet, but not understand technology. They didn’t go the extra mile to support the people who were writing software for the system.

IMG_4956
The 64 alongside its original packaging.–photo via TechCrunch.com

“Commodore was just so nuts,” Brian Jackson, a former engineer at the company, told the Philadelphia Inquirer one year before Commodore was liquidated. “If it appeared nuts from the outside, it really appeared nuts from the inside.

“You didn’t really have a computer company. Commodore was a widgets company. They wanted anything we could hack together real quick from existing technology and sell a zillion of them like we did with the Commodore 64. And with that mentality, you can never really support customers.”

Despite its unraveling, Commodore left quite a legacy, with its personal computers having spawned the world’s first generation of computer experts.

Chester County and its workforce played a big role in that.

“This is a company that briefly captured the attention of the American market and didn’t go where the market was going,” said David Coursey, the editor of an industry newsletter in California. “They just never managed to change with the marketplace.”

Gould, who has since been credited with both saving and sinking Commodore, died in 2004. Tramiel, meanwhile, passed away in 2012. In his obituary, the New York Times described him as “a hard-charging, cigar-chomping tycoon whose inexpensive, immensely popular computers helped ignite the personal computer industry the way Henry Ford’s Model T kick-started the mass production of automobiles.”

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