The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back
filfre.net
filfre.net
(about 7-8 mins, but for Amiga-vets it is an interesting interview in whole).
- 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...
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.
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.