How Commodore Invented the Mass Market Computer

I have vivid memories of my family's first computer: a blocky Commodore 64 parked in a corner of our basement, its cursor blinking on a royal blue screen. It was just one of the more than 12 million units sold, an astonishing business success pioneered by a Holocaust survivor and Polish immigrant named Jack Tramiel. In his latest piece for The Crazy Ones, Gareth Edwards recounts Tramiel’s journey from Auschwitz to founding Commodore, and later reviving Atari. His ruthless approach to vertical integration and relentless cost-cutting made computers accessible to millions of families who could never have afforded them otherwise—launching a generation of tech careers and helping shape our digital present. Plus: Listen to an audio version of this piece on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.—Kate Lee

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In 1980, Commodore opened its first computer factory in Germany. In just three years, the company had become the third-largest computer manufacturer in the world. With annual revenue of $680 million (more than $2.2 billion today), its success was largely due to its Polish-American founder, Jack Tramiel. As he ascended to the front of the 2,000-employee crowd at the new factory, he was advised to avoid mentioning his past. Specifically, to omit that he’d been a prisoner in Nazi slave camps and at Auschwitz during the war. Tramiel listened to the advice and took to the stage.

“I told them I was Jewish and that I was a survivor of the concentration camps. And then I said that I wanted anyone who was in the SS in my office in the next two days.”

Nobody—nobody—told Jack Tramiel what he could or couldn’t do.

Over the next few days, six men resigned saying that they would never work for a Jew. Over 15 others presented themselves to Tramiel and confessed that they had served in the SS. Tramiel thanked each man for his honesty, offered his forgiveness, and then told them to get back to work. He was determined to make Commodore a business of the future, not the past. He just wanted them to know who he was. And that they worked for him now.

This is the story of Jack Tramiel, one of the most explosive and ruthless founders the computer industry has ever seen. It is the story of four machines—the PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Atari ST—and of the man who ruled home computing for over 20 years.

This account is based on contemporary accounts in Time, Fortune, and the New York Times, as well as books such as Back into the Storm by Bil Herd, Retro Tech by Peter Leigh, and The Home Computer Wars by Michael Tomczyk. I am particularly indebted to Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall, and to both the Computer History Museum and the Commodore archive for their considerable archive of material. It is also based on the words of former Commodore executive and computer designer Leonard Tramiel, creator of the PET computer Chuck Peddle, and former editor of Commodore’s print publications Neil Harris. Also, on the words and testimony of Jack Tramiel himself.

Coming to America

When Idek Trzmiel was an adolescent, he worked as a tailor’s apprentice in Łódź, Poland. In 1939, at the start of World War Two, Trzmiel, who was Jewish, was sent to the Łódź Ghetto with his family. He would spend the next five years there fighting to survive and to avoid being deported to Nazi Germany’s extermination camps. In 1944, the Łódź Ghetto was finally liquidated and its remaining occupants were marked for death. Alongside his father, Trzmiel was sent to Auschwitz. During the process of liquidation, they lost touch with Trzmiel’s mother.

By that time, Trzmiel was 16. He was saved by his ability to work. At Auschwitz, he and his father were among the small number of Łódź deportees selected by the camp authorities for survival. For almost a month, they were used as slave labor within Auschwitz itself, witnessing some of the worst horrors of the Nazi regime.

Trzmiel escaped death at Auschwitz by the narrowest of margins. In August 1944, Germany’s desperate need for slave labor at home meant that approximately 10,000 people were relocated from Auschwitz to a new work camp in Hanover. The Trzmiels were among them. They were saved from death, but this salvation would prove only temporary for many. As slaves, they were treated brutally. Once they were no longer able to work, they were killed. 

In early 1945, this fate befell Idek’s father. Because he was no longer able to work, he was murdered with an injection of gasoline. By April 1945, only 250 of the original slave laborers sent to the camp from Auschwitz were still alive. This number included Idek. They were emaciated and unable to work. The Nazis ordered them to start digging their own graves. Right at that time, American forces finally reached the camp and liberated it.

Idek spent three months recovering in an Allied hospital in 1945. Amid the chaos of liberation and immediate post-war Germany, Idek, like many others, struggled to come to terms with what they had just survived. 

“I came out like a wild tiger,” he remembered later. “I wanted to get back everything I had lost.”

Like many survivors, Idek struggled to understand his experience. Over the next two years, he took odd jobs in Germany wherever he could find them. He also became fixated on revenge. When a German police officer disparaged his Jewish background, he beat him, which led to Idek’s arrest and trial for assault. A sympathetic American lieutenant helped him escape jail by telling Idek the exact statutes he needed to cite to be sentenced as a Polish combatant, rather than as a civilian survivor. As a result, he was sentenced to only 30 days of confinement in a military stockade operated by American occupation forces, rather than in a German prison. 

While serving his sentence, a brief encounter changed the course of his life. “There I met a priest, because there was no rabbi, and he opened my mind up, you know? He said: ‘If you are going to be killing them the same way that they did to you, then what’s the difference between you and them?’”

Once his sentence was complete, Idek decided that he needed to leave the past—and Germany—behind for good. In November 1947, Idek, who was in his early twenties, emigrated by ship to the United States with the help of a Jewish survivors’ charity. He had married fellow Holocaust survivor Helen Goldgrub a few months before but had to leave her behind. The couple agreed that she would follow once he had secured reliable work. By the time he arrived in New York City, Juda Idek Trzmiel had Americanized his name and become Jack Tramiel. He had no money, job, or connections but was determined to make his mark. He lived out of a shelter for Jewish emigrés, worked odd jobs, and learned English. Then, in 1948, he joined the U.S. Army.

"I felt I owed something to this country,” Tramiel explained later. “And I believed in paying it back."

The ‘Religion’

This idea—that a debt should always be repaid—became the first of a series of rules by which Tramiel decided to live his life. It was his philosophy that applied to everything from relationships to personal choices—and especially to business.

“Jack called his management philosophy ‘the Religion.’ ‘You have to believe in it, otherwise it doesn't work,’ he’d say,” Michael Tomczyk, who worked for Tramiel at Commodore and Atari, later remembered. 

At this stage, “the Religion” was still a work in progress. In many ways, so was Jack himself. He spent four years in the U.S. Army. While in uniform, he returned to Germany, where he discovered that his mother had also survived the war and was reunited with her. On his return to the U.S., he was accompanied by his wife Helen. Thanks to his army position, Tramiel had the paperwork—and financial security—to bring her back to the U.S.

By the time Tramiel left the Army in 1951, he’d also become a father to the first of three sons. The army had given him a new set of technical skills—typewriter maintenance—that he intended to put to good use. He took a job at a typewriter store in New York but wasn’t there long. Tramiel used his army connections to secure a lucrative repair contract for the store’s owner. In return, he expected to get a raise. When that didn’t happen, he quit on the spot.

“I have no intention of working for people who have no brains,” he told the man. Then, he walked out the door.

A second tenet of Jack Tramiel’s Religion had been laid down: Only work with smart people.

With the help of veteran grants, Tramiel set up his own typewriter repair shop in the Bronx. The shop was breaking even, but there wasn’t any real scope to expand. That was when another tenet of his Religion was laid down: Always look for opportunities. 

In 1955, Tramiel was selling mechanical adding machines, an early form of the calculator. They were sourced from a company known as Everest. During a conversation with one of its agents, Tramiel learned that the company wanted someone to be its exclusive importer in Ontario, Canada. Tramiel took on the contract and moved his family, including his first son, to Toronto.

In 1958, opportunity struck again. Sears was looking for a supplier for typewriters in Canada. Tramiel persuaded the company to issue him the contract, along with roughly $175,000 in advanced sales (about $2 million today). It was an extraordinary coup for Tramiel, but he faced one problem: Despite what he’d told the department store, he lacked the knowledge and manufacturing capacity to build typewriters himself.

Tramiel approached the leading U.S. manufacturers, including Royal and Smith-Corona, to see if they would help bring the typewriters over to Canada. Both firms refused to supply machines to Tramiel. They wanted him to fail so they could secure the Sears contract themselves. But Tramiel had no intention of failing. He flew to Europe to find the right manufacturing partner. In Prague, Czechoslovakia, he made a deal with a local typewriter manufacturer. Tramiel’s firm would import Czech typewriters to Canada, where they would alter them just enough to be able to rebadge the machines as domestically produced, exempting them from import tariffs.

All he needed now was a brand name for his rebadging operation. He wanted a word with a military connection, something that would sound authoritative to Canadian Sears customers, but also in the U.S. if he decided to expand there. All the good ones like “General” and “Admiral” seemed to be taken. One day, while in a taxi in Berlin, he saw a particularly stylish car in front. The name of its maker—Hudson Motor Company—was emblazoned on the trunk. So was the model. It gave Tramiel the word he was after.

Commodore.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

• "The Religion"—Tramiel's uncompromising management philosophy
• Vertical integration as competitive advantage
• Commodore 64: the most successful home computer ever built
• "Computers for the masses, not the classes"
• The Atari resurrection and final computing chapter