Jack Tramiel

Jack Tramiel was a businessman who founded Commodore International and Atari Corporation (based on the remants of the original Atari Inc, which he bought off parent company Warner Communications).

Tramiel was born in Poland in 1928 and survived the holocaust.He was liberated from Auschwitz by the US Army in 1945. He emigrated to the United States in 1947. He found work as a taxi driver and set up his own shop in New York where he repaired office equipment. The company eventually started to manufacture their own hardware beginning with typewriters. Electronic calculators followed, then a computer, the Commodore PET, which was launched in 1977.

Other popular computers followed including the VIC-20, the first to sell a million units. Tramiel left Commodore in 1984 and founded Atari Corporation in the same year. He oversaw the launch of the successful Atari ST. Tramiel sold the company to Jugi Tandon Storage in 1996 and retired.

In his final years he lived in Monte Sereno, California and he died in 2012.