Jack Tramiel

Tramiel was born as Idek Trzmiel, but some sources also list the name Jacek Trzmiel (the word trzmiel in Polish means bumblebee) into a Jewish family, the son of Abram Josef Trzmiel and Rifka Bentkowska. The whole family lived on A. Napiórkowskiego Street (today S. Przybyszewskiego Street) in Górniak district in Łódź.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, his family was transported by Nazi occupiers to the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, where he worked in a garment factory. When the ghettos were liquidated, his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was examined by Josef Mengele and selected for a work party, after which he and his father were sent to the labor camp Ahlem, a satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp near Hanover, while his mother remained at Auschwitz. Like many other inmates, his father was reported to have died of typhus in the work camp; however, Tramiel believed he was killed by an injection of gasoline. Tramiel was rescued from the labor camp in April 1945 by the 84th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army.

On November 10, 1947, Tramiel immigrated to the United States. He soon joined the U.S. Army, where he learned how to repair office equipment, including typewriters.

Home computers

Peddle responded with the Commodore PET, based on his company's MOS Technology 6502 processor. It was first shown, privately, at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show in 1977, and soon the company was receiving 50 calls a day from dealers wanting to sell the computer. The PET became a success—especially in the education field, where its all-in-one design was a major advantage. Much of their success with the PET came from the business decision to sell directly to large customers, instead of selling to them through a dealer network. The first PET computers were sold primarily in Europe, where Commodore had also introduced the first wave of digital handheld calculators.

As prices dropped and the market matured, the PET's monochrome monitor (green text on black screen) was at a disadvantage in the market when compared to machines like the Apple II and Atari 8-bit computers, which offered color graphics and could be hooked to a television as an inexpensive display. Commodore responded with the VIC-20, and then the Commodore 64, which became the best-selling home computer of all time. The VIC-20 was the first computer to sell one million units. The Commodore 64 sold several million units. It was during this time that Tramiel coined the phrase, "We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes." An industry executive attributed to Tramiel the discontinuation of the TI-99/4A home computer in 1983, after the company had lost hundreds of millions of dollars, stating that "TI got suckered by Jack". By 1983 Commodore had $1 billion in annual revenue.