Jack Tramiel - Jack Tramiel Jack Tramiel was born in 1929 in Lodz, Poland, as Idek Tramielski. He survived the Holocaust. First he worked in the Jewish ghetto in a pants factory only to be transported to Auschwitz. He was separated from his mother who survived the camp. He was examined by Dr. Mengele and sent to Hanover to build another concentration camp (his father died of a gasoline injection when he got sick). Tramiel was rescued in April 1945 by the US liberation army. In 1947, Tramiel emigrated to the United States and soon joined the American Army. In the army he learned how to repair office equipment. In 1953, he bought a shop in Bronx to repair office machinery, and named it Commodore Portable Typewriter. Then he.
Jay Miner - creative freedom. There, they started to create a new 68000-based games console, codenamed Lorraine, that could be upgraded to a full-fledged computer. To raise money for the Lorraine project, Amiga designed and sold joysticks and game cartridges for popular game consoles such as the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision, as well as an odd input device called the Joyboard, essentially a joystick the player stood on. In 1984 Warner Brothers grew tired of Atari, and sold the company off to the only person interested, Jack Tramiel, formerly head of Commodore International. Tramiel invested $500,000 in the Lorraine project, hoping to use the results in an upcoming series of 32-bit machines that would replace Atari's existing home computer line. When Amiga was going to run out of money, Commodore bought the entire Amiga.
Atari ST - 16-bit external busses. Other theories say that ST really stood for "Sam Tramiel", the son of Atari owner Jack Tramiel. The Atari ST was a competitor to the Commodore Amiga systems. This platform rivalry was often reflected by the owners and was most prominent in the Demo Scene. Where the Amiga had custom hardware which gave it the edge in the games market, the ST was generally cheaper, and thanks to its built-in MIDI ports enjoyed success as a sequencer and controller of musical instruments. In some markets, particularly Germany, the machine gained a strong foothold as a small business machine for CAD and Desktop publishing work. Since Atari pulled out of the computer market there has been a market for powerful TOS based machines (clones). Like most retro computers the.
Atari - took Japan by storm, and Nintendo began to look to other markets. They approached Atari and offered a licensing deal - Atari would build and sell the system, paying Nintendo a royalty. The deal was all but done, and the two companies decided to formally sign the agreement at the 1983 Summer CES. Unfortunately, at that same show Coleco was showing their new Adam computer, and the display unit was running Donkey Kong. But Atari owned the rights to publish Donkey Kong for computers. Atari CEO Ray Kassar had a fit, accusing Nintendo of double dealing with the Donkey Kong license. Nintendo in turn tore into Coleco. In the coming month, Ray Kassar was forced to leave Atari, and executives involved in the Famicom deal were forced to start over again.
Atari 7800 - from the Atari 8-bit line's SIO port) for the addition of peripherals like disk drives and printers. GCC had also designed a 'high score cartridge', a battery-backed RAM cart designed for storing game scores. Unfortunately, Atari manufactured none of these accessories, and after the initial production run they also eliminated the expansion port. The 7800 was launched in test market (southern California) in June of 1984. One month later, Warner Communications sold Atari to Jack Tramiel, who believed (along with most of the country) that the video game fad was over. He pulled the plug on all projects related to video games and Atari's existing computer line to concentrate all efforts on development of the new 16-bit line (Atari ST). The 7800 was re-introduced in 1986 after the success of the.
Atari 8-bit family - respectively, making the naming somewhat superfluous. In addition the 800's expansion system was not very usable, and the market seemed skeptical of the machines in general. The 800 was rather complex and expensive to build, while the 400 didn't compete technically with some of the newer machines appearing in the early 1980s, so in 1982 Atari started the "Sweet 16" project to address these issues. The result was an upgraded set of machines otherwise similar to the 400 and 800, but much cheaper to produce due to the use of custom chips that replaced a number of chips from the earlier designs. Sweet 16 also looked to address problems with the 800 by adding a new expansion chassis as well. Like the earlier machines, the Sweet 16 would be released as.
Tengen - 1983-1984 by Atari Games (Atari Games was formed when Warner Communications sold the consumer side of Atari Inc. to Jack Tramiel, resulting in two companies - Atari Games and Atari Corp.). After Nintendo nearly single-handedly revived the market, Atari Games realized that there was still money to be made in home videogames after all. Since Atari Corp. was already involved in the home video game market with the 2600 Jr., 7800, and XEGS consoles, Atari Games chose to create a new brand name to market their games under. They also chose to make games for the market-leading Nintendo NES rather than introduce a new home console of their own. The new subsidiary was dubbed "Tengen", which in the Japanese game Go refers to the center of the board. (The word "Atari".
Beny Alagem - largely disappeared from the marketplace after 1968. Hoping to cash in on old name recognition, Alagem bought the rights and launched a new company in 1986, selling inexpensive computers at retail much like Commodore president Jack Tramiel had earlier in the decade. In addition, his company became the first to offer toll-free technical support. In the mid-1990s, Packard Bell lost market share as Compaq started to undercut its prices. Alagem merged his company with NEC in 1996, staying on as president of the division. Alagem suffered a heart attack in September 1997. A year later, amid continuing price pressure and mounting losses, Alagem left the company. Official statements cited health concerns, but Alagem later cited disagreements with investors and other executives. In January 1999, Alagem tried to repeat history again, buying.
Commodore 64 - computer of the 1980s. Announced by Commodore Business Machines (founded and owned by Jack Tramiel) in January 1982 and released in September of that year at a price of US$595, it offered unprecedented value (sound and graphics performance) for the money. Its very aggressive pricing in comparison to its competitors quickly started a price war. With estimated sales between 17 and 25 million units by the time it was discontinued in 1993, the C64 became and remains the best-selling computer model of all time. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 History 2 Description 3 Peripherals and software 4 Technical Information 5 References 6 External Links History The cost of building each C64 was estimated at US$135 due to Commodore's vertical integration (Commodore owned MOS Technologies, who made most of the chips), leaving.
Commodore PET - cost more than what TI sold their entire calculators for, and the industry they had built up was frozen out of the market. Commodore responded by looking for a chip set of their own they could purchase outright, and quickly found MOS Technologies who were bringing their 6502 design to market. Along with the company came Chuck Peddle's KIM-1 design, a small computer kit based on the 6502. At Commodore, Peddle convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were a dead-end. Instead they should focus on making a "real" machine out of the KIM-1, and selling that for much higher profits. The result was the first all-in-one home computer, the PET. The first model was the PET 2001, including either 4KB (the 2001-4) or 8KB (2001-8) of RAM. It was essentially the KIM-1.
Commodore Plus/4 - undercutting the price of Commodore's PET line. The Commodore 64, the first 64KB computer to sell for under US$600, was another salvo in the price war but it was far more expensive to make than the VIC-20 because it used discrete chips for video, sound, and I/O. Commodore president Jack Tramiel wanted a new computer line that would use fewer chips and at the same time address some of the user complaints about the VIC and C64. Commodore's third salvo – which, as it turned out, was fired just as most of Commodore's competition was leaving the home computer market – was the C116, C16, and Plus/4. All three computers used a MOS 7501 CPU (6502 compatible) and a MOS 7360 "TED all-in-one video, sound, and I/O chip. The Plus/4's design.
Timeline of computing 1980-1989 - Turbo Pascal introduced by Borland (see PASCAL, 1967). 1984 Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT in order to start the GNU project, a free and improved replacement for Unix protected by a copyleft license. GNU will eventually produce an editor (emacs), a compiler and debugger (gcc and gdb) and a complete suite of system utilities, among many other things. Its own kernel, the Hurd, is delayed and Linux is later adopted. 1984 Hewlett-Packard release the immensely popular LaserJet printer, by 1993 they had sold over 10 million LaserJet printers and over 20 million printers overall. HP were also pioneering inkjet technology. 1984 - January Apple Macintosh released. Based on the 8 MHz version of the Motorola 68000 processor. The 68000 can address 16 Mb of RAM, a noticeable improvement over.
Kangaroo Jack - Kangaroo Jack Kangaroo Jack is a high-grossing buddy-action movie produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, starring Jerry O'Connell and Christopher Walken. It premiered in the United States on January 11, 2003. The advertising campaign had made many parents think that the movie was a family-friendly film with a talking kangaroo. Once they took their children to see the movie, many parents were angry that they had been deceived by the campaign. After a successful opening week, the movie did considerably worse business once its eroticism and violence were revealed. Users of the Internet Movie Database have voted the film a position on the site's list of the 100 worst films ever made..
Jack Lemmon - Jack Lemmon Jack Uhler Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 - June 27, 2001) was a consummate Hollywood actor. Lemmon's father was a successful businessman in the Boston area. Lemmon attended Harvard. Though divorced, he was a devoted father, and one of the best-liked actors in Hollywood. Lemmon was a favorite of director Billy Wilder, and did a series of films with Wilder, including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Irma La Douce. In 2001, he died suddenly during a battle with cancer, and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, Los Angeles, California. Jack Lemmon films: Some Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis Glengarry Glen Ross, with Al Pacino, based on the play by David Mamet The Apartment.
Jack Kerouac - Jack Kerouac Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 - October 21, 1969) was a novelist, writer and one of the most prominent members of the beat movement in literature. Born Jean-Louis Kerouac to a French-Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts. At an early age, he was heartbroken when his elder brother Gerard died, later prompting him to write the book Visions of Gerard. His athletic prowess led him to be a star on his local football team, and this achievement earned him a scholarship to Columbia University in New York. It was in New York that Kerouac met the people whom he was to journey around the world with, and return to write about: the so-called Beat Generation, which included people like Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William.
Jack L. Chalker - Jack L. Chalker Jack L. Chalker (born December 17, 1944) is a science fiction author. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he has a graduate degree in English and history from Towson University and has taught history at the high school and college levels. He's been a lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution, The National Institutes of Health and numerous colleges and universities, mostly on science fiction and technology subjects; Chalker married Eva C. Whitley in 1978 and has 2 sons. Chalker's awards include the Dedalus Award (1983), The Gold Medal of the West Coast Review of Books (1984), Skylark Award (1985), Hamilton-Brackett Memorial Award (1979), as well as others of varying prestige, and has been a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award nominee twice and for the.
Jack Butler Yeats - Jack Butler Yeats Jack Butler Yeats was an Irish artist who wrote and illustrated for books and magazines. Later in life he became known as a landscapist and expressionist. He was the youngest son of irish portraitist John Butler Yeats, and the brother of the poet William Butler Yeats..
Jackie Robinson - Jackie Robinson Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 - October 24, 1972) became the first black Major League baseball player of the modern era in 1947. The significance of this event in U.S history is such that every major league baseball team has retired his number, 42. Born in Cairo, Georgia, USA, Jackie Robinson was a football and baseball star at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he played with Kenny Washington, who would become one of the first black players in the National Football League. After serving in the military during World War II, Robinson played baseball for a while for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. There, he was noticed by a scout working for Branch Rickey. Rickey was the club president.
Jack Kemp - Jack Kemp Jack French Kemp (born July 13, 1935) is an American politician and former professional football player. He was the Republican candidate for the Vice Presidency in the 1996 Presidential election. Kemp was born, raised and educated in Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of Occidental College. Kemp won two American Football League Western Division championships with the Los Angeles - San Diego Chargers before being picked up by the Buffalo Bills. He led Buffalo to three straight Eastern Division titles and two American Football League championsips, in 1964 and 1965, throwing to Hall of Fame receivers Elbert Dubenion and Ernie Warlick. Kemp was the first 3,000 yard passer in the American Football League (1960, 14-game schedule)and the league's Most Valuable Player in 1965..
Jack Ruby - Jack Ruby Jacob L. Rubenstein, known as Jack Ruby (March 25?, 1911 - January 3, 1967), a Dallas nightclub owner, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President Kennedy. Jack Ruby was born to Polish immigrant parents in Chicago in 1911. Various conflicting birth dates, from March to June of that year, are quoted in various sources and were given by Ruby at various times. The fifth of his parents' eight living children, he had a troubled childhood and adolescence, marked by juvenile deliquency and times in foster homes. Young Ruby worked selling horse-racing tip sheets, then for a scrap-iron collectors union; he was rumored to have minor links to organized crime. He.
