The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back

http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-2-jack-is-back/

by mgunes • 11 years ago

106 7 11 years ago

cognivore• 11 years ago

Is it just me, or is Shiraz Shivji the spitting image of a young Steve Jobs?! Separated at birth?

abdias• 11 years ago

Additional details in this interview with Dave Haynie (raise both arms who remember Dave!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSyF_2OwN3I

(about 7-8 mins, but for Amiga-vets it is an interesting interview in whole).

twsted• 11 years ago

I remember following Dave Haynie on Usenet, in the pre-web era. A wonderful guy, enthusiastically sharing his knowledge about the Amiga.

bane• 11 years ago

Jack Tramiel is a fascinating businessman to learn about. I think he should be required study in any business curriculum.

- Huge Personality

- Ruthless

- Hated

- Loved

- Constant Drama around him

He had a definite business plan, and followed it with a kind of madness. He's famously quoted saying "business is war" and truly ran his businesses this way. There's a lot to hate about him, but a lot to learn from -- his weaknesses were as big as his strengths. He was more important in terms of popularizing home computers in his time than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs combined and has often been called the "anti-jobs" for his virtually opposite position on computers from Steve Jobs.

He also deeply alienated third parties and towards the end of Atari, they found it virtually impossible to get anybody to work with them. Stories of him and his sons tearing contracts to shreds and shouting "go ahead and sue me" are legendary.

Here's some articles on him for anybody interested

http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/jack_tramiel_starting...

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n10/JackTramiel.html

http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/11/the-jack-tramiel-we-didnt...

http://gizmodo.com/5900742/the-anti-steve-jobs-dies

http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/jack_tramiel_starting...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMD2nF7meDI

csixty4• 11 years ago

Bil Herd's talk at a LUCKI expo gives some good insight into how Commodore (and Jack) worked. The page says 1991, but it was probably 2001-2004. I was there for this one, and I didn't start going to Commodore conventions until 1999.

http://c128.com/commodore-expo-1991

digi_owl• 11 years ago

Calling him the anti-jobs because he didn't obsess over design is a bit out there, as the impression i am left with is they operated in a very similar way.

Both would set some arbitrary target for the engineers and designers, and ruthlessly hold them to it.

For instant i think Tramiel insisted on the C64 using no more than 80 chips. Eventually the first production run shipped with 81 because of a issue with the power regulator.

Interestingly, the original Woz design was probably very in the spirit of Tramiel. This because Woz was designing for personal use, and so tried to keep cost down by using as much of the components as he could manage.

But note that the component count reduction did not affect the utility of either computer.

But the Jobs style design focus seems to more often than not produce an appliance, by restricting what the user can do.

cmrdporcupine• 11 years ago

Jobs was a tyrant just like Tramiel. Working under either of them was apparently not pleasant, though sharing in their success when they had it must have been.

The big qualitative difference between the two is one was an aesthete and the other was not. Tramiel didn't care about elegance, he just wanted to sell.

That doesn't mean the people under him didn't care about such things, and the Atari ST actually is an elegant machine, but an incomplete elegant machine.

For example GEM (a Digital Research creation licensed by Atari) was incomplete. The API is elegant for the 80s. The AES in it was clearly designed for a multitasking system, and one with potentially more finesse than the Amiga had. But it wasn't truly finished -- while the API reflected concerns of multitasking the actual implementation was non-reentrant and the OS it was layered over was a crude DOS/CP/M-like OS.

The key designer on the GEM AES @ Digital Research apparently came from the Xerox Star project. He was obviously smart. The execution was flawed -- both at DR and at Atari.

But this did not concern Tramiel, he just wanted to ship.

The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back

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