Founder / CEO · Commodore International / Atari Corp. · b. 1928 · 1954–1996
Jack Tramiel founded Commodore, produced the Commodore 64 — the best-selling personal computer of all time — then acquired and relaunched Atari, shaping the home computer and console market on both sides of the Atlantic through relentless cost-cutting and mass-market pricing.
Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor who had been liberated from a Nazi labour camp, founded Commodore Business Machines in Toronto in 1954 as a typewriter repair service before pivoting through calculators and personal computers. His guiding philosophy — "computers for the masses, not the classes" — drove every hardware decision he made: find the lowest viable price point, vertically integrate component production, and undercut every competitor. The Commodore 64, released in 1982 at $595 (quickly falling to under $300), used custom-designed chips — the VIC-II, SID, and CIA — that no other manufacturer had and that gave it sound and graphics capabilities far beyond what its price suggested. It became the best-selling personal computer model of all time, with estimates ranging from 12 to 17 million units. Tramiel's fractious relationship with Commodore's board led to his resignation in January 1984. Within months he had acquired Atari's consumer division from Warner Communications for almost no money, renaming it Atari Corporation and launching the Atari ST range — 16/32-bit personal computers built around the Motorola 68000 CPU, competing directly with the Amiga (which Tramiel had previously tried to acquire for Commodore). The ST became particularly successful in Europe as a music production computer, thanks to its built-in MIDI ports, and in desktop publishing. Tramiel ran Atari Corporation until 1996, overseeing the Atari Lynx handheld and the Atari Jaguar console before the company's operations wound down. His approach to hardware pricing shaped the economics of the home computer market more directly than any other individual executive of the era.