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    Commodore founder Jack Tramiel dies

    Commodore founder Jack Tramiel dies

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    Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore International and its iconic computers, died on Sunday, April 8th at the age of 83, Forbes reports.

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    C64 Jack Tramiel
    C64 Jack Tramiel

    Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore International and its iconic computers, died on Sunday, April 8th at the age of 83, Forbes reports. Tramiel was born in Poland in 1928, and survived his family's imprisonment at Auschwitz and a German labor camp during World War 2. After emigrating to the US in 1947, he joined the army and learned how to repair typewriters — and later founded a typewriter business named Commodore Portable Typewriter. After years of innovation in the market for business machines, Commodore evolved from selling typewriters, to adding machines, to digital calculators, and finally to home computers — including the legendary Commodore 64, which dominated the PC market for years in the 1980s.

    After leaving Commodore in 1984, Tramiel bought the consumer division of Atari, and oversaw development of the Atari 2600jr, the Atari 7800, Atari Lynx, and the 64-bit Jaguar console. Tramiel's aggressive business practices are said to have been responsible for driving down prices in the home computer market in the 1980s, which made PCs more accessible to more people.