Commodore 64—25th Anniversary Celebration

ladies and gentlemen I think as we pack people in that there's more people coming all the standbys are coming in it was more than a sellout it's certainly a testament to the evenings events for the 25th anniversary of Commodore 64 I'm John tool I'm the executive director and CEO here and this is a very special special event for me how many people here for the first time the very first time Wow phenomenal well welcome to you all thank you for coming I want to take a few minutes to tell you a little bit about the museum I also want to tell you how our special Commodore is to me personally in the tool family and I think it highlights a little bit of what we are all about I have two boys right now they're 29 31 the younger one works for a startup company in Boston but when in the 70s I was in the Air Force I was an air force officer and you know we have a lot of money we tried to find if you want to buy an Apple Steve but we couldn't afford it at the time so guess what and I and the kids wanted games and I said no I'm not gonna buy you games that's gonna destroy your mind you know what what a fool I was at the time but I saw this vic-20 come on the market so guess what I bought this vic-20 and I gave it the Patrick and my son Tim and they loved it and of course you know what they did they programmed games perfect they're their career began in fact in fact I gave Patrick a call today and and he he amazed me because he said the vic-20 and Commodore was the person he's a computer scientists and business person himself and working for start a company and all kinds of things and my other sons in networking working for Sandia laboratory so they turned out ok from an engineer computer science dad point of view but I think what was really cool he said gee I learned what multiply was before I was able to multiply before I even knew what it was and then he said yeah did you realize if you look around today everybody's doing all this training stuff you know streaming based processing is the end thing and he said you know back then and the 64 and the 20 they were doing that they were doing this all foggy oh ok so the whole concept they are back in those days was something that was very learned at the time and and kind of what we're all about here at the Computer History Museum is wife to preserve the artifacts and stories of the Information Age we have the artifacts you've seen a few of those and I know money if you haven't seen many but there's a lot lot more and you'll hear tonight about the stories of really what I consider to be a very phenomenal event and assemblage of people that have really made it happen and for those of you that are new to the museum there's a few things of where we came from you know we've been collecting for over thirty years one of the few institutions in the world that is a collecting Museum we came from the Boston era in fact many of you think gee Boston is still alive no it's not people like when you stick our chairman of the board who is here somewhere Lin ah they got to you in the back they're very very good Len was the guy who had the vision to bring this stuff East and West scuse me from the east with Gordon Bell and Gwen Bell and they cooked this game of movie artifacts which they did in 1996 I joined in the year 2000 oh we had about four employees then we have about 50 now we were about 600 K or about 4.1 million now and we have so much so much more to do for those of you who saw our back room and it's really an important because if you look around anymore more museums are not collecting they're not preserving and we think it's really important to preserve something that is really changing people's lives in the world around us and our collecting duct you know collecting really has spanned four decades it is not just those Hardware artifacts its software ephemera those coffee mugs t-shirts things that are kind of cool to look at when you put exhibits together documents personal recollections we have a tremendous oral history program that is really making a difference in fact you know we have collected over a hundred and forty-two personal stories for pioneers and key individuals in the industry and is probably thousands more that we have to prioritize and selectively go after in in a very systematic way restoration projects it's fun to bring these things alive isn't it see the like the the c64 working downstairs what we've done a pdp-1 restoration we've got a group that's doing a ram act restoration an IBM 1401 things that'll bring things alive for the general populace that come here to show your children their grandchildren and more may be fundamentally learn about what it really meant to live through those times and how it can be used today and how it can be used tomorrow a dynamic speaker series myself excluded of course but this could see hm presents series I'll put together by Karen Tucker who is now president of Churchill club Karen where are you and help put this event together there she is let's get Karen and applause and that's my advertisement for the turkey club Karen who is a great great Valley institution and institution all in this area and we're really happy that the people that are working together so closely to make something very special to us all a volunteer program many of the people you see in the cameras and downstairs the visible storage are all volunteers we got about 275 active volunteers about 400 it was really funny I was I'm another nonprofit board and I said why don't you guys have a goal of you know 10x your staff okay should be your goal at least to have that many you know volunteers and it may be half of that certainly active volunteers and I think we've been able to do that because of the dedication the motivation so that's a call for all of you to become a volunteer and to help us we have an annual fellows awards program which publicly recognizes individuals all standing merit who have significantly contributed to development of computing you can see the wall of our fellows outside and we've have over 200 rental events special anniversary celebrations and other special events and they're important for a number of reasons one they bring people to an institution that they can see what it's all about secondly like this evening is a special reunion of people that worked here that made the difference that have really worked with each other and those stories are important to be recorded and and put in our archives for things that are really important a cyber museum Bob sang with ulcers here so we're building all of this in cyberspace as well and our physical exhibits are now parlayed out there that we have a goal just for fun you might know wouldn't know about how we get about go of what half a million ish hits you know in a given year and visits I should say don't nail me for the technology here or the definitions because that changes too but we're basically going to double that and that's probably easy with some very simple ways in which we're going to do it to make this available why because not only are we a international museum in fact we just saved you know seven shipping containers shipping containers worth of stuff from from Germany to brought back to the United States and is now in our off-site warehouse but the International part of this is really important and we think bringing computing history in all that our representatives to other people is a way we can do that through our website and through our physical exhibits into a public programs and of course we have an exceptional board of trustees and advisors their work with several industry groups and experts to help us succeed whether it be two groups and software semiconductors storage and many many other things we're going to be doing more in the future and of course if I didn't mention maybe our most significant project right now and which are dedicated to is to open our timeline of computing history exhibit so those of you that saw our back room which has documents and little artifacts and big artifacts is going to be cleared out in the next several months and it going to be built out to about a fourteen thousand square foot exhibit which will be our signature exhibit for the museum led in part by many of the people that have been contributing worldwide but but Doron Swade who's a curator that can't come as a guest curator leading the team of several the curators Dave Spicer and Alix by henyk here to really put all the pieces together along with our exhibits committee is something that I think will really make a difference for for posterity and then our plan future plans you can go beyond that five themed rooms of some of the technology someone mentioned to me tonight I introduced or introduced a woman there just south to this evening that forgive name I apologize but but she was really excited she'd worked the park and she wanted to be associated with engineers because of the innovation and an opportunity and I think what we're trying to do is stimulate the same innovation capture it and bring it to other groups of people as inspiration both from the past the present and the future will be planned down the road down the road to be a world-class research center we have all this material now we want to be able to mine it for the things that are the most important to it and moved to the future and of course our education program really has just formally started we just hired our educational director Tim Dirk's who is really going to be leading the charge to make make our educational program not only spectacular but but unique if you think about it a museum has unique opportunity for education we're not just doing curricula we're not just following orders from on high the government and everything else we can sort of break those some of those Gordian knots of education and get people and experience unique and hopefully to facilitate teachers that can can really do spectacular things the people that need the kind of material we prototype some of those stuff in the past and I think that's going to be very very successful so before we get started this evening I want to take a few moments to acknowledge the organizations that have really made tonight possible you noticed and I've had many many comments as even about what a wonderful reception we had well our lead sponsor really in catalyst for this event was Brian Hurley CEO of liquid computing Brian would you stand up please Brian we thank you so much liquid computing has really an innovator in so many different ways and I'm sure just get hold of Brian and he'll tell you all of those ways but my my friends from all the laboratories jump on me and they say boy this this is a really cool set of people have you met him I'm really proud to be here and thank you so much for taking the sponsorship and lead sponsorship role that really has made a difference here and it's also made possible this evening by a number of contributing sponsors which include several different people ata ventures and Pete Thomas a managing partner of the firm which is a prominent capital investment firm with a focus on information technology then growth asset management and Paddy DiPietro another managing partner really helped make all this happen which provides Canadians access to specialized investment strategies save and we're international by the way so it's a good thing to have people outside the US Sage Communications has done a phenomenal job in advertising public relations and marketing for this event and it's been a real pleasure to work with all of them can we give them a round of applause oops I had another one here that I missed view stream view stream let's get right back you can cool so it takes a lot of different kinds of expertise to put these kind of events on both from the creation the execution and what we hope you will believe in a few moments something really special from the from the internal and what it means to you so we thank all these terrific institutions for the support tonight and we hope that they will begin to support us and and work in the future for many many more in the future and what a program we really have tonight for you I mean it's really a well-deserved celebration that has spanned the purposes of time with a very strong foundation and I want to thank each and every one of you for being part of it and particularly participating and the only little bit of housekeeping to take care of here before we get started is you'd please turn your cellphone's or trios or smartphones off the last time I said that I said that to a mobile computing panel and he said that can't be we're always on and hope you'll stick around after the program to the very end because we have a special anniversary cake that we're going to cut and pick up a commemorative poster on your way out which is created by Sage Communications exclusively for this event now I am pleased to really turn the podium over to the main event this evening to a noted New York Times journalist lecturer and author and of course a wonderful friend of the museum John Markoff John hi everyone so we're gonna do this in three parts tonight I'm gonna talk with Jack initially and then we're gonna bring on this amazing group of panelists we have which sort of represents the entire personal computer industry and then finally we're gonna open it up to you hopefully as quickly as possible because actually I'm totally sort of awestruck by who's here not only do we have a lot of the personal computer industry on the panel we have a lot of it in the audience I'm trying to figure out who's missing I see at Ari and the person of a lalcorn here I see Osborne and Saul and processor tech and the person of leaf Elton Stein is there anyone from ti anyone from RadioShack so we're missing a few time X I guess if we if we had those three we'd have the entire early personal computer industry so if I can ask you just for a moment to sort of think of yourselves as being in mr. Peabody's wayback machine which you kind of are already so it should be really easy and so dial things back for 25 years quarter of a century I just wanted to sort of give you a couple of sort of data points to set the context and then I'll ask Jack to come up and we'll talk for a few minutes so the IBM was PC was introduced in 1981 the s100 bus was still very much of a reality in 1982 and we were using computers like my Northstar that were s100 based machines in 1983 if you'll remember Time magazine named the personal computer the man of the year what you probably don't know is the reason it was the personal computer and not Steve Jobs is because there had been this time reporter by the name of Michael Moritz that had had a spat with Stephen in a fit of pique time snub Steve so he wasn't the man of the year in 1983 and there were magazines like byte and newspapers like infoworld that still thought of this as a hobbyist industry and not a business industry there's a very different world that we were in and you know one thing that still for me you just can't even with all the excitement of the hype around the iPhone you know we went through a half a year of iPhone hype it didn't touch the kind of excitement and passion that I remember around the West Coast computer fair and Comdex it was just more authentic and it was much more exciting and the future seemed to rushing at us in a real way so then in August of 1982 the Commodore 64 arrived it was the third generation of machines from Commodore and had 64 kilobytes of memory had eight Hardware sprites and you can get more in software and I think they sold somewhere like 20 between 22 and 30 Jack Tramiel Jack so I wanted to start with sort of a Silicon Valley question to a guy who wasn't originally of Silicon Valley guy one of the things I've seen that's been written about you is that when you came to America you didn't go to work for a big company like Sears and Roebuck although I think it might have been possible which one was that okay so why did you join the army when you first came to United States no why what what what yeah yeah I'm sure that most of the people here maybe know that I am a Holocaust survivor and when I came to the United States I definitely felt that I owe something to this country and I believe always in paying back and I lived in the East Side of New York City the first three months and I almost felt like I'm Rebecca in Poland with the smell of the herring and the onions and everything else so I felt that it's more that I have to learn what this country is all about and by joining the army serves the country in payback that's the reason I did and where does the army take you it took me to Fort Dix and from Fort Dix I got orders to go to Alaska and I was already married and my wife was still in Germany and I wanted to go back to Germany as a soldier but the army if you want to go into a that's on your disease but I had the chance to meet the commanding general I told him my problem which I have in he has rewritten the orders and I was stationed in Manhattan and there you were introduced to repairing typewriters in the Army I was introduced to repairing typewriters netting machines but still when you got out of the army you then you didn't go did you had enough of big organizations I definitely did went to work for a small typewriter company to do the same thing so I was working during the day and at night because I already had the little boy the name of sandwich is sitting here and I also had to drive a cab during the night to make money and after a few months it came a day like Friday but he's supposed to get paid and my boss didn't have sufficient money to pay his employees so I was very surprised and that went over this talk to him and I tell him look if he touch bad shape because you haven't got enough business I might get some business for you he said how I said well I was in charge of the repairing of typewriters in the first army and they make one to outsource some products to you remember that was in 1952 and he says you can do that yes so I been to my friends in the army and I get him a contract for a couple of thousand typewriters to repair and he came back in he was shocked that he could get this as I did for him but after bar a month the man never gave me a raise so I felt very bad and I told a guy that I'm quitting the following week he was trying to give me a raise and everything else but this would made me go into business for myself and when you did go into business for yourself did you start in United States or did you start in Canada no I started on Fordham Road in the Bronx across the street from Fordham University I know where that is yeah and there was my first customer of service in typewriters now I think as you alluded to I think many people you've had more challenges in your life than many Americans I think most of us here one of them which I just learned about I which I think most people don't know about is you almost died in a jet crash did you hear that I was reading a little bit of background it's a remarkable story I mean I think I mean that's true would you tell that story I mean it was a literal jet crash no hella we in Canada we had a plane which was called a pet jet and we Helen and I and six other members of Commodore went from New York to California we made a stop to pick up some dealers in Chicago in from Chicago to San Jose the plane starts smoking and all of a sudden there were no brakes there was that there was no radio and the smoke started to get very black and a frontier airline heard the signal of some kind and we landed in Des Moines Iowa and when we get out after a few minutes the plane blew up and you didn't you landed up after the runway from what I heard to it explained what plane went off the runway on yes yeah yeah so it was yeah I have nine lives and which one are you on now Oh another story I was hoping you could clear up for us tonight is the is the story behind shoes in the name Commodore because I heard different I read different explanations how did you come to the name army again I wanted to call my company general but there are so many generals in the United States General Electric General Motors all kinds of journals then I went to Admiral that was second wind up in Berlin Germany and we were in a cab and the cab made a short stop in front of it was an opel commodore in that's good now another in my little bit of background research you're well known for for the for the statement that business is like war yes but when I discovered you also are well known for saying that business is like sex so which is it it's book let's focus on businesses war right where did that come from well you know I quite a bit around the world and I found out that their most successful countries right approaching business like war especially like Japan you dare to win soon as you you you you have you wings down right you lose the important thing in business many young people which are here all right you have to be your biggest competitor not somebody else to compete with you but you have to compete with yourself if you have a product that which is very successful you have to think immediately what is the next one how can I do it better and this to a certain extent was a successive camera now that that inter interacts very well with sort of the nature of Silicon Valley which is all driven by Moore's law you bought MOS technology very early reasonably early on as you made this transition when did you sort of did you it was there a point at which you got the connection between sort of the falling costs of device devices because of Moore's law and your own business strategy I mean they were sort of it was strictly helped from Texas Instrument in the form of they started it is that wrong no I was buying I got into D I sold my adding machine company and I got into the electronic calculators and then to handheld calculators and I was buying my chips from Texas Instrument yeah I was doing extremely well the texas amos instrument decided that this is too good of a business to leave it only to one guy and they went into it also and they slowed down the shipments to me really almost cut me off in believing that this is war right so i decide i have to find a way how I can get back enough depend on the outside and be vertically integrated so I used to do business with a company called Atmos technology they were supplying me some chips a very small percentage but I called him we met there were a very bad financial shape they were losing a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a month and they needed help and I decided to buy this company and turn it over to become strictly a Commodore supplier except some companies like Apple he will supply them a little bit and you never you never also I wanted to ask you about that now so there's a period when you were supplying what fraction of apples 6502 process we don't know but I know that we gave him a few for free but you never played the game the tea I played with you know interesting I don't please yeah but in buying MOS technology you met this guy remember Chuck kettle yes and he came to you with this idea of the microprocessor yes what happened there is they were losing a lot of money because they had about a hundred and two hundred jobs from different companies to develop product and they did not get paid in advance and that's the reason they were more interested in the engineering then they make money they thought it comes from from heaven with something so when the item came into my office every half hour to explain to me what they're doing almost the last one which came in it was Chuck metal and he showed me a product called the Kim the Kim was a board a PC board if you attach the keyboard and the television it was actually a computer and he told me that the idea what he has to integrate these three pieces into one box in the timbi computer he says that i would like to continue do this but she have to move me to california and i did not know that much about computers but my son leonard which was going to graduate school in colombia master physics he knew something about computers so i asked him to come to Valley Forge he looked at the product you tell me how fantastic it is so I gave mr. Pettle six months to come up with a prototype and if he does right he's you can say on nothing goodbye and six months later we went to a Chicago winter electronic bear and we showed the product it was an unbelievable success since the personal electronic trans actor was ever yes where did that name come from from petal ah okay and at that point did you have the vision of home computing where did you what did you think the pet would be a product was that can sell but but but I was not sure you know how many to who how and when there was always what even was Leonard was telling me it's Gerald it's good for everybody yeah yeah so the question when we came back from Chicago was how many of those computers should we produce and nobody really had the answer but the idea was to go to our 2d little which is a research company and if you pay him a certain amount of money they will research and tell you what the future is so I went there oh I called them and they gave me a price of 5 million dollars to do the job for me and they will be ready in 12 months well I I read something about that that IBM did give five or ten million dollars the research if they should buy Xerox enough in our today little column no it's bad letting me do so I definitely felt it is this another right thing so what I have done and they came up with an idea to reach the public and we had some ads in the Wall Street Journal in The New York Times and after two weeks time I think it was we had an ad that people can send in five hundred ninety nine dollars and they will get the Machine between a day in a hundred and twenty days how did you pick that price I just felt that I can afford to pay for this no I definitely believe that if you can afford it you should always sell a product for no more than a hundred percent of the cost okay okay because if you sell it for - hi you invite competition if you have a decent price competition will not try to have you now from the success of the pet you were on a rocket ship tell us a little bit of did you spend time trying to create a corporate culture there are lots of stories about how tough a manager you were did you think about sort of there was this term Commodore ian's for example the people who worked for you did you did you think about sort of what was in the same ways I was trying to produce good computers for low prices I was also tried to produce millionaires I think I produced moment in there is not company that anybody else I won't appear should be a family everyone should work together in my personal job was not to tell him how good they are but to tell them what they're doing wrong so they can improve you know we live today in a different world or you did such a good job my god well this is this is interesting I mean what's your what's your view of a company like Google fur for example this seems to Google is not making a product that's strictly innovation and they need to tell people are good data that's a total different kind of product than hardware I wanted to ask you about I did you use Microsoft basic ever or did you use your own basic know we had we used Microsoft basic you did what was it like to do business with Bill Gates he was he came to see me to try to sell me the basic uh-huh and he told me that um I don't have to give him any money I only have to give him $3 $3 per unit and I told him that I'm already married so what did you settle on I told him that the highest price I'm willing to pay $25,000 in about six weeks later he came he took the $25,000 there since then he does want to speak when did you do it was that was that what the patter was that after that was the pet from the beginning yeah yeah so he did not make a deal with IBM yet yeah this was pre free idea though so it was probably good money for him did you did you ever go through a period where you know I thought I saw that you had sort of become aware of the sort of the importance of the electronic calculator market by visiting Japan and I was wondering if you ever in the you know the period that you were at comedy or felt threatened by the Japanese in the way the personal computer industry as a whole did did you did you ever feel like you were competing against Japan Inc no you're the competing that's too late okay that's the reason why I was aiming to sell a computer for $199 and I know the Japanese they can not turn on a dime it takes them a year or two or three they come up with the product in their plan that the product will last for a certain amount of years so I felt that the product was low enough in good the chapter Japan can be even a good market and they will not come to Japan so I did that and I introduced the pets in Japan I could not deliver sufficient products to Japan and I was selling them there for $120 more than in the United States and then after two years after selling I don't know how many years per month NEC made an announcement that they are coming up with a personal computer the following day our sales dropped by 99 percent 99 percent because we Japanese will wait till we get a Japanese computer I see I see yeah yeah now I've also seen that you were you were seen as a typewriter guy that's a to mean a hardware guy and that you've sort of opposed the idea of bundling and at a certain point that came back to hurt you yes you is that something you feel you would have done different I recognized it is okay how would you plate it differently if you could have now if you could do it over again now know that that's the software just as important or more important in the hardware which comes first the chicken or the egg yeah yeah maybe you could have bought a little company like Microsoft at that point Apple was the sales opportunity well on that note let's let's get everybody up here and continue the conversation is a thank you very much you and let's see if if Bill Lowe and Steve Wozniak and Adam Chobani that could come out now and move over very good yeah so all right let's do it but I wanted to ask each one of our panelists to sort of give their triangulation of their view of Commodore from where session before and each one talked about sir what surprised them in the in the computing and the personal computing era was interesting was first to start with was yes well first of all thank you for clearing some things up right I'm part was from Commodore but I was really scared back then you know because I'm most scared now but I was so shy and I could never approach the implications of a company businessmen and stuff like that and I just wanted to design the neatest stuff in the world and you know be one of those guys creating this crazy stuff the Steve Jobs would do more of the like business dealings what was our relationship to Commodore was one of those Atari was another and so I only got little bits and pieces of the story when I got included in here I was an engineer at Hewlett Packard with a $24,000 a year salary Steve and I had zero money zero savings account we didn't own our cars were in our young 20s neither one of us has had any business experience or any business school so people who have companies it's like a very scary world that you're in and and we have this hot product you know we've been selling the epi' juan and getting noted and we had this Apple 2 that we thought was gonna was so far beyond the rest in its features color graphics you know paddles sound games coming to computers the whole deal it was going to be a big thing and Steve said well why don't we try it we gotta we gotta get enough money to build a thousand of them there's no way we could ever get the money so we went the first place we went or a Chuck peddle from call Murray we've just moved out to join Commodore came to the garage and he was one of only about three people that we showed the working Apple to prototype ever on a color screen I typed in some programs and they ran and and Chuck went off and then we went down for a meeting at Commodore we met with laundry suits on there never met Jack himself and Jack owned this company and what's gonna happen Steve the businessman scared me to death sitting in a chair talking about what chips we used and how fast they go and what the features of the machine aren't you can type in hexadecimal and Steve starts saying what we want to do is offer this to you for like a few hundred thousand dollars and we'll get jobs at Commodore and we'll get some stock and we'll be in running you know in charge this program and I am so scared in my chair you know how can he talk this big amount of money a few hundred thousand dollars myself you know I've only worked on these machines sort of on my own time for a year and it was yeah so here he was taking the big step and we got turned down basically we were told that pomodoro decided to basically build a simpler lower-cost black-and-white only machine without a lot of the pizzazz of the Apple - and they would do their own if they could do their own in a short enough time and that was a better course for them to take and that was our near encounter with you we hit and Atari tari we also tried to sell it - went over to Al Alcorn's home and I see him there he is and went over to his home and showed him the Apple - on his projection TV but app Atari had their hands full with the first home pong game that was going to be a big deal for Atari big money big move forward and so they had their hands full and they also took their time and waited to get into the the nice little color home game machine but it's nice to be in all this company tonight and that's a starting story bilbo was known as the father of the IBM PC tell us about the PC at that juncture it was Commodore on your radar at all when you were thinking through bringing the PC to the market not when we were thinking about bringing it to the market I think that at IBM it's a different story than being in the garage we were we were part of a of a big corporation who had been fighting the Justice Department in the US and fighting legal battles overseas to make sure that they didn't publish their interface so that their interfaces so that other people could build the hardware or software to make sure that nobody else got to service their product and one of my jobs back in the middle 1970s was to decide when we were going to get into the microcomputer business and you know those kinds of terms and conditions didn't really weren't very compatible with getting into that business so frankly the thing that my team was able to accomplish with Frank Kerry's support was to put together a very different business within IBM but then I would say when you were bringing the Commodore 64 out probably my biggest management challenge was managing IBM because when that product took off the IBM sales force wanted to sell it the the IBM one of those to use their technology and we had started by using you know Intel technology and other people's memory in order to get some affordable technology and so we we had a lot of challenges one of the challenges with Bill Gates was when IBM changed the design point for os/2 and wanted to bring all the dependent displays into the os/2 business which you know bill had 110 programmers we had 13,000 working on migrating those dependent displays into os/2 and it didn't make for the best of relationships one of the things that when we were talking earlier downstairs a story that I always like to tell though they came out of that period in the late 1970s when I was trying to convince IBM that we should do a micro based machine fellow on my team by the name of Bob Wolfson introduced me to Ted Nelson who was the son of Celeste Holmes and Ted had this view of the world which I thought was remarkable and that IBM should understand so you know I brought him to a meeting in Atlanta we had about a dozen IBM errs all wearing ties I'm the only one here wearing a tie of course but but Ted did the most amazing thing he showed up without a tie and he made a presentation with the overhead projector there were no PCs obviously then but that Purdue the presentation were pictures of him at retrieving data from computers in the middle of the jungle retrieving data from computers on a beach and his message was that where the industry was going was to a point where everyone could get any information they wanted her needed anywhere they were in the world at any time and I'll tell you that's natural today but think of that back in 1978 and what he was saying was you should use that as a technique for evaluating any new developments to determine how important those developments are by just judging their contribution for that overall direction and I thought that that's that's something that really struck me then that I've always valued things with since then who came to Commodore before Jack Kamil left stayed afterwards and was crucial and leading the design of the Amiga which was the 4th generation machine I joined Commodore about a year after the 64 was launched and as the 64 was telling in the millions and the tens of millions they then gave me the task of the next product and we didn't have a processor roadmap we didn't have any operating system that was extensible we didn't have anything we have to start the machine from scratch and we had 18 months to do it so we put together a small team we acquired some technology from the Amiga Corporation when we acquired that company here in Los Gatos we acquired a UNIX operating system from the UK and we actually pulled it off in 18 months we built the whole machine including the custom chips to go in it and launched it for the Christmas of 85 and the surprise to me is that even a decade and maybe longer after that that technology is - still stood up to anything that was in the marketplace there are tale to tell about well the the Amiga company as it was then was was going round the computer show displaying its technology and the heart of the technology was the graphics chipset and the sound chipset that they had and that's really what attracted us because that would cut a lot of time off our development process so we went out there and finally saw these guys and the chips had actually consisted of suitcase size breadboards in two big suitcases and the challenge was to actually take those suitcases and convert them into something that was real silicon and we did that with the help of the team at Amiga and the guys at Commodore so Jack and Sarah is there a right answer to the number of 64's that were sold well I remember selling about 480 to 500 thousand computers per month and when I left in 84 definitely everything slowed down because I left but it's true right well they understand that we sold about between 22 million in 30 million units and some people suggest that it may be is it is it the best-selling computer it was it was it was is anybody's I'm I I think it's about half of that part 83 is I remember but there's no question that they made much more money the computer cheaper lower cost to manufacture than Commodore like the pet but sell it for three times more business when they build a company that would be around a while but no actually actually the the Commodore 64 I totally admire that machine and all them since the Amiga so were there as a designer did you ever take apart or look we really didn't think that much about it we we had our own marketing so we took apart the first pad and just looked at the chips inside okay they use dynamic RAM good thing they didn't do what all these hobby computers didn't use static RAM and just look at the parts and pretty much came up with them but the chip cost should be about the same as what ours is but we don't have to supply a TV is your own first machine yeah the pet was built in TV we didn't have to build one in so it we saved a little money that way except the customer did yeah but but we you know we got similar thinking you the cost for the user down your home TV is free was one way we did it also precipitate drives you should use your own cassette tape drive from home everyone can get one cheaply and that was mass storage in the early days Jack there was a there was also I heard that you guys considered using CPM in the 64 and then discarded that idea do you think that if you had used the cp/m operating system it might have made it sold really well but would it on a business direction that it didn't go and could have but we decided I'm sitting into it they have it out that fast because to me the most important thing is to be the first get the market and when you have the machines out there sucker will follow the works before you left to do the media was nothing to work for I left to talk about operating systems because the starting machines didn't really even have a floppy disk yet you know about a year later Apple to being expandable we could add one and it was very difficult for Commodore I think it was our president might startle always boast about how he they had one single source part he tied it up worldwide so they delayed him a half a year or something I'm getting there for me when I was 19 believe in 1984 and I took Helen my wife on a trip around the world and I was interrupted in Sri Lanka in Colombo and by a fella by the name of Steve Ross which was the chairman of Time Warner the time the owners of Atari and the SP please you the only person that she can help me he get out of this mess and my wife was losing a hundred thousand dollars of Hoonah god he was losing a million or two million dollars a day and I cut my trip short came back a month later and I made a deal with Steve taking over Tori at that time Atari was funding the amiga chip so all of a sudden I was in control of the mica chip not Commodore I've always wanted to ask you I mean you'd had this bad situation with Irving Gould who had been the chairman was was revenge one of your motivation did this give you this this is where I lost my killer killer instinct you know instead of a good get to revenge I just told him to pay but the cost was and in some profits and I gave him the chips build which was the timing and the PC Junior I know you weren't the PG junior person but how did that play out versus Commodore 64 did that unwind the PC junior I I don't believe it I think the PC wound itself I I think there was a basic flaw in in trying to artificially limit the performance in a product and and and bring it to market at a different price and and it was a big mistake and frankly it just the the original plan had been to have a second generation PC within two and a half to three years and that isn't the direction that the that the PC group took it talk a little bit about the interplay between the the 64 and the Amiga and you know that have been handled in a cleaner way and would have made a difference for the Amiga if there had been a better roadmap there was really no interplay there were two two completely different technology directions so as I said we had to stop the Amiga essentially from scratch we couldn't do that on our own in the time frame so the attraction was the the chipset of j minor had designed that at amiga and bringing that in-house with everything else that we had was our was our way forward and even then I mean one of the things we struggled with is is getting the application software written for the machine that was a really really tough task and in the long run it was probably the thing that worked least well for for the amiga history about about the price was in the personal computer industry and you know if you could have gone about it again you know you took the low road it was incredibly successful ultimately it wasn't would you you know would you have managed the price stuff differently I don't think so it'll come I don't think so can you hear me yeah but today the world is totally different we have a company called Taiwan semiconductors that anybody can go there right with the design and make the chips for a very decent price when we were manufacturing the 6502 right yeah we would only once there was one more other company which was making if I would have bought these chips from someone else right I could never come up with a price of $199 because I had to plan what kind of yield I will get from that waver in time to come in take a loss from the beginning you say so I had to plan being such a good engineer as I am and knowing that the product is gonna be able to give us the following yield and because the more you produce the better faster you get the yield and that's exactly the way it worked out so without MOS technology Commodore wouldn't be as successful as it was about vertical integration right yeah you know I'd like to open it up to the audience I wonder now if you'd like to say Alcorn if you'd like to say anything about your view of Commodore from that period you would you would you stand up and say a couple things now there's a mic yeah we were in Atari we were really focused on video games as was said and so we were really late we really didn't see this we originally came up with a project of the Atari home computer to try to get Steve from stealing our employees and it took ha and then Jay miner did the chip for our thing I went on to do the do the Amiga ship one of the great greatest chip designers ever so we wanted to avoid competing with Commodore because there a price that's right I mean we just we just don't want to be down there at that market price at all we never really did very well with our made a lot of money off the personal computer was there a time where you could I think there's a show the show you referred to where the 64 was announced where the price was just sort of unbelievable to the industry do you remember that it wasn't yeah no that was that was something wanted to stay on it but I do remember the 6502 microprocessor was quite quite the thing and we use that in the original Atari game that was in the in the Apple 2 and and remember one of the West Coast computer fairs the guys from MLS technology were there handing out parts at a barrel of these things and that was really impressed I think everybody how how low-cost processors could be I mean they were the Commodore compared to the Intel with the high price stuff so yeah that was that was quite a show Jack do you remember that the the jar with the 6502 s in it at the West Coast computer field I wasn't there but I believe because I was just reading and apparently they wanted to make it it looked like they were getting a lot of yield and so they had a whole jar for him and the dirty secret was the ones down at the bottom didn't work and I remember when when mos def knowledge is up for play and I tried to get Atari to buy the plant and Manny Warner said no no no no you got enough trouble over here so that got it did very well with it yeah I'm gonna ask people to come to microphones in a second I wonder if leave cousin Stein is here too and we do you wanna before we open it to the could you talk about competing against it why don't you come up to the microphone Lee was designer of the song processor tech and Osbourne wine right all of which lived in the 8080 the Intel and z80 environment and the cultural divide there was a sort of self-protection we looked at the pet and said yeah 6502 machine him not important so 12,000 songs you know and in a way that really was a kind of way of burrowing your head in the sand you actually did they were very good at that as far as I never considered that that certainly suppressor technology was competing with Commodore because it seemed like you just couldn't do that you know the price point it was a it was we were selling sales for $2,000 right and that was in a tenth of that so the best he could do is to just sort of wave it away and say oh they'll just sell to their market we'll sell to our market and we'll pretend like it's not going to have any effect on us thank you you know between the Apple world and the Commodore world were the in terms of the user base did you guys see different cultures do you guys have a different answer to that question was there a Commodore culture of users and was there an Apple culture of users or was how would you describe the differences yes I only know that camera culture you know I used to travel around the world and go through computer clubs many many young people which could afford to buy the product and then there were these high-class people with whatever two computer clubs continually because that's where we came from and I love those people and yes so many of them especially the younger ones in high school had the Commodore 64's and spoke of Herman I said oh good important Apple well yeah they'd like that the bigger Apple which was expandable but they'd say but you can do this and that and that and a few things on the Commodore that we can't do yet on the Apple so it was they've been enthusiasm in the people is what was important they were very similar the same people that you know basically wanted him an Apple would love a Commodore 64 if they had to and vice versa to I mean they they loved their machines and I never saw anybody comparing oh you only have a Commodore never heard that once in my life I think they were actually much more similar they were two different groups of people maybe a little bit in terms of just how much money they could afford for the computers but they were similar otherwise with what they were trying to do and what they wanted loved he made machines for the masses they made machine for the classes I had a lunch with an early Apple software designer got me a Palmer sir today is now Paul at pom and Paul was one of those 12 year olds who talked his parents in then getting him an Apple 2 instead of a Commodore and the way he did it his parents took him to the bank and co-signed the bank loan to buy the Apple companies that talk about how they use apple juice when they were young and not that many that came up on the Commodore 64 so there might be a distinction I don't know jack were you alternately planning on going in a business direction there were two machines that were on the drawing boards yeah I was planning to go into business division so you didn't have a you saw that as a market different market yeah and you just didn't get to and I wasn't dead long enough yeah yeah did you ever patch things up with cool doors what did you ever think patch did you ever patch things up with her been cool no we we we just had different opinion happen on the business yeah and there's no question like sitting and I left and my culture stayed with me interviewing that he was trying to change it that didn't work out yeah he went through a series of CEOs very quickly I think after whatever it didn't work out please feel free to come to the microphone so this entrepreneur stuff you know kind of risky I thought maybe we'd ask each of the panelists to tell us a scary story when were you really scared maybe we were never scared I think probably the same it was just a revolution incredible how many of these machines were being bought and where were the world was going anything you designed plugged in your machine was a safe bet and you'd sell a ton of them and it was really further along when we decided to build newer machines and go into newer markets compete with IBM that we you know had some failures but really not scary this is the reason I'm talking about businesses war it constantly had to be worried when you satisfied flows up yeah more like Steve Jobs he was that way well you got to do something the next six months IBM's gonna be breathing down your neck all right at IBM being as much of an entrepreneur as you can be within that organization you you become you become terrified at different times I mean when we started we had an agreement that we could get all our technology outside by 1983 we were using more memory than the rest of IBM and so it was declared that we had to go inside and that that we had a mechanism to test outside prices and and be guaranteed the same price from the inside after a year that went away because IBM couldn't match the outside price we you know were part of a large corporation where you know we had sort of a nuclear submarine in the Navy of battleships and and the one of the biggest issues that IBM had with its large customers is we always told everybody we can do everything for you but the customer would look at us and say yeah but your different architectures don't work any better together than your products with other people's products and so the idea came up in nineteen eighty five or something called systems application architecture where IBM said it would put a PC and os/2 in front of every product in the product line and that that was going to solve the architectural crack problem in our overall offering all that did is take down os/2 and our relationship with Microsoft so I the problems that that you run into trying to be an entrepreneur within IBM are significantly different but just as terrible there were lots of tense moments I can remember in eighteen months but I've one that sticks most in my mind is that in the early days part of what we acquired was an operating system and the progress was not good and I didn't think we were gonna be able to make it on the time that we thought so I went to see the person writing the operating system so we flew out went to see this guy in his in his home where he was writing this software on a bunch of early Sun workstations and he had about four or five sons and a big cage with a rabbit in it and you spend a lot of time talking to the rabbit I knew I had a problem hi Joe Bardwell here and what a great collection of insight brings back memories but my question is in in the era when products like the Franklin Ace was a ripoff of the Apple system and and of course there was the gray market for all the IBM equipment did Commodore have any challenges in the in the knockoff market no we did not was there a reason because it was very inexpensive there was no margin very interesting is we I never knew of any so I want a little nugget very interesting hello didn't get replaced engineered by going back for a second to the emotional connection and the cultural connection Jack you went over to Atari and all of a sudden almost overnight seemingly you have the company that you built in your crosshairs how did that feel emotionally to you I didn't feel good yeah I can imagine but I felt that the I cannot do it my way right then I athlete you have to leave right did you perhaps intent at some point not to completely destroy the company you built be a competition but maybe put them in a vulnerable position where you could come back maybe am i remember my aim and I won was to destroy Atari in there when I came in I realized a very good job thank you very much hi my name is Nate and I have a question for a jack I'm curious when you're gonna publish your memoirs since you've been kind of private about your life well I'm not dead yet and any other stories on Irving Gould any other stories about Irving Gould no like saying when we split I had my job for trying to build a new computer company called Atari and I found it's very very hard because the people who are game oriented in we didn't talk at all question-there hello i'm the founder of Montessori software.com and I heard you all address what what your lowest moments were and when you were scared and I know that to have a successful product you have to have a good product you have to know the right people people have to like you it has to be the right timing but I would like to know what role do you believe that dumbass luck plays what role in life elements in success in product design in business anybody yes if I can have new success or luck I'd take the lock it sounds a lot easier actually you know because I look at the stuff I was working on the building product that point in time I was gonna build some great products and the fact that they were gonna be worth so much and change the world and start companies that just was sort of lucky the timing was there what happened anyway if you feel it was your destiny or do you feel you were just lucky well I just feel my whole life had kind of gone in this direction right to that exact thing once I was able to do it so then the fact that it was worth a lot then was was luck I think that if it hadn't been worth a lot I would have done it anyway some point in time someone else would have done it and kicked off companies like Apple it would have would have happened just it was the most filling well like I says love love prefers the prepared mind or whatever like what prefers the prepared mind was it favors the prepared mind so you know so it was a combination you can't do it without skill you got to have a drive get up goals and you got to have the abilities that you can solve that goal even if you've never done it before you can build those devices or bring to the world you gotta have that kind of belief and as far as how much it's worth if small computers had still been too expensive nobody could ever afford them nobody ever wanted I mean I wouldn't be up there you'd never hear me so there were some some of that was just chance of history and time and other technologies and everything going on in the world to me it was very important to have respect for the customer but the consumer and they give him something what he might enjoy but as far as luck is concerned the harder you work the more luck you've life thank you and the more persistent you are I believe dedicate may hear from the rest of you I think the persistence word is vital I mean I don't know if it's luck but persistence is absolutely necessary and without that you can't win I agree i I have to reflect on people who I've worked with who have felt that they've had bad luck and I honestly think that the key is to deal with data and information I like persistence but I think there are a lot of using almost your phrase half-assed assumptions that are made that aren't based on information and and it gets interpreted as bad population no I'm really not saying intuition I'm really saying and just there's there's there's usually information about available to to substantiate or support or disprove what you think is though is is the right thing to do and just making sure that you gather that information is make sure luck and I could have a comment on the sudden bad luck on the luck side but I work for a company once that they had the most incredible talent and computer they had designed to build medium scale computer and and had the operating systems and the languages and the applications and the hardware and a recession came and they went bankrupt so they did you can do a lot of great stuff and have bad luck I'd rather do whatever and have good luck I understand that a lot of good products don't make it thank you sir thank you on this side yeah this question is for Jack I'm Jim Collins I once owned the Commodore P 128 and I don't know if anybody in the audience knows about it but I loved that computer and that you also had a P 256 yes and you came out with them in 1983 if I recall 1983 yes and I was wondering why weren't they successful why didn't because it looks to me like we were we were very much dedicated to the consumer not the business and that was more right a stronger and more capacity yeah yeah the 128 men 128 K right so we did not put that much emphasis on that particular machine yeah I had that in my office right and it was better than the IBM it was better than the Apple at the time and you know I mean and it was cheap if you would have more customers like you I just wondered it didn't seem to be pushed and I get I guess you've really answered that question you didn't think it was worthwhile it wasn't didn't fit all right right didn't fit your your business strategy model right I'm capacity of chips we only had so many right we could yeah that's true right yeah and that's the reason why yeah but it it really roared I'm sorry it looked like it looked like an apple and it happened it had it had curves and it was very stylish good evening I always like to compare the old and the new ideas and there's all this history going on here and there is you look back and there were these this excitement there was this great excitement about about all these computers that were coming out and people were kind of dividing themselves it was kind of like the religious classical religious war you had the Apple people the Commodore people the IBM PC people and today there's not that same kind of devotion to any specific platform I can accept the Macintosh of course but you know computers are much more powerful but they're also kind of more generic they're kind of you know I mean there's not any one brand that really prevails but computers can do much more and yet there's not that same kind of excitement that same attachment to them here the computer is not as personal as as it was 25 years ago so I just wanted to kind of ask all of you broadly how do you feel about the PC industry today do you feel it's better to have this sort of world we have now where everybody is kind of a player but there's not it's just kind of all scattered around or the to have her way it was back then just kind of your perspective on that well the what I think of when I listened to that question is what my kids are doing I have a 12 and a 14 year old who both have apples I mean my 14 year old did her her eighth grade speech that she won an award with on Steve and and and how he had taken calligraphy when he went to college and that added to the design of the fonts and on the Macintosh and you know it all that sort of stuff but the but that but the what I really am impressed with is how the kids are using the computers and it's not it's not every now and then I mean it's daily to do things that my older kids I have another set of kids about 20 years older than these we're not able to do when they were growing up and it makes a big difference and I think it's because of what all these people have done one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the demo scene that was started up by the Commodore 64 all right jack specifically you are you aware of the sort of artistic merit that the artistic potential it was embedded in that machine when you released it and what did you think do are you even aware of some of the visual and audio artistic works that were created for the c64 yes it was because that was troubling the different countries from different places for different organizations I've seen them and people came over to me at shows and told me how successful they are what happened I was very proud of it I have two quick questions I'm wondering if you could discuss why it took the IBM industry so long to catch up with the c64 when it came to you know games I mean I I grew up I think I got my first computer when I listen when I was in third grade maybe second grade and it was a c64 and we had all these amazing games and an IBM took years and years I think I think the c64 was still selling as of like 1988 89 even that's question 1 question 2 is apropos of those games I used to play including games on the Apple educational software back when I was a kid was fun and heaven forbid actually educational and I'm finding nowadays I don't want to sound like an old man but it seems like the games of today tend to be just you know two people you know shooting at each other and then there really it seems as if back in the day Commodore actually made a great amount of money or at least the software industry made a great deal of money on games that were very inventive and a lot of fun and they actually taught you something and it seems like that economy is kind of dried up quite a bit the first part on why did they take IBM so long I think they're two that are there two answers and and and I don't want to be too flippant with the second one but it played a big role the first is that we were focused on different types of applications we weren't really focused on the gaming industry back then the second is that I wasn't again trying to be too flippant when I said when we got to the 1984 85 86 timeframe the IBM that you know taught the elephant how to dance was taking it down to a waltz because it had become too important and it had to be it was it was being overtaking I mean Frank carrier wasn't there protecting it anymore and to keep it alive and vibrant you had that you had to play with the big boys and it was a lot of energy you know I I I have a small startup that I work with today and you know we're focused on making that company successful every day we're not focused on making our parent successful every day and it does really have a different result I'm told it's 8:30 so I'm going to take two more questions so we'll go to this side and then this side and then I'm informally we'll be able to talk after that so I'm sorry was go ahead before you yeah turns out that in the past computers were a kind of precious and special at certain points in our history and just to be able to use a computer made you feel like I'm doing something new in advance and therefore your attention on the educational software and the fun it brought you was greater and it is hard to keep duplicating that year after year decade after decade and get the excitement well of course every time I made the computer seem more like a person that students paid more attention and we're more attracted to it Wow things move on the screen the animation is better they'll watch it more the sound sounds like a real person talking plug a graphics card in they felt one in the houston school system in early years for apples and it spoke and it sounded like a real human voice and it lets you have graphics moving on the screen that attracted the kids but eventually you get used to that level and we've gotten to the point of about as realistic as we can make a two-dimensional screen and it's still not like a real person teacher that's looking at you watching your facial expression commenting on it knowing when it should change the subject knowing when it should ask a question about your family make it kind of joke now what kind of joke you'd like so right now we're kind of stymied because we've reached the limits and artificial intelligence sort of doesn't make the computer like a person it's not up there that high level yet thank you question here I've attended too strong research universities and EECS I didn't do any of the strong research but steeped and we all have in all the things that they did coming through the seventies in the eighties i TS and scheme and architectures and all this stuff and there's the the legendary story the Steve Jobs went down to park and came back to the holy crap we got to build one of these things but how where were you guys when it came to making products about research in computer science and in architecture well pretty what Apple we hired a lot of the finest people engineers out of college out of industry and they brought a lot of their know-how in these areas into us we weren't actually looking to design processors by this time we just analyzed that the world had a lot of chips were getting being produced by a lot of companies and that we were going to take it from the step vertical integration above the chip level before we started Apple company Sekulow Packard every single division hewlett-packard had its own chip making facility so it can make chips with a little bit of a specialness in the process that would give them a competitive advantage but those days were kind of by it's like all the chips we would use were being made by enough companies in the world now that you know exploring that type of research we didn't really need to do research on what was your view on on basic research and the computer company but we did spend them about 5% of our sales for research yeah and because we were in the semiconductor business and that's required research and the computer itself was always planned around the chip and we planned the chip what we wanted to do and how we want to make it were you aware of Xerox PARC you were out and so were you aware of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center during the late 70s after they invented the it was one last question yeah there was mention about this is weird hearing my voice over this thing but there was mentioned that a sort of attitude that computer clubs had has died off and I don't think that's true I think the open source movement has really encapsulated that and I'm a Linux kernel engineer I work from the real-time project inspired by you know originally by Commodore machines and originally born and raised on amplitudes and mcintoshes as well and explicitly to get real-time graphics from Silicon Graphics back in the day to get frame locked video and I want to I want to ask what folks what you folks collectively think that the current attitude of open-source at this particular state what's gonna happen to that what do you find interesting and what do you see of that coming out that is it has some kind of parallel to what you saw back in the settings with the Computer Club and what do you see the immediate future of and what do you think of it what's your attitude of it in general well the brightest most creative most innovative people are all going in the open source you know the ones that you look at they're the ones that are going to be doing things different in the future but and they're and they're doing it mostly because they're it's sort of a social good we're do we're creating things that really let people take their own knowledge and know-how a little further you aren't stuck with a product that you can't modify and add something you would have liked in it so it's like really motivated by we're gonna be good and that usually applies to you know young people who are more idealistic in the percentages and all that and we're those you know I don't know look at how many companies they're just building there and all their entire products all on everything open-source so it's you know it's had a huge influence on us it's took a lot of work people working very hard even some very strange people but it's really brought open source into an area of acceptability I'm sure again even in places like IBM maybe we're coming up on can I get some further comments from the other members I think I think computing has become very evolutionary over the last five to ten years processors are a bit faster as more memory but this computing paradigm is is completely parallel to another paradigm which is the communications paradigm and those two things haven't merged and I think the big opportunity in the next five to ten years is bringing those two things together and seeing what that's going to do to innovation in in no longer the computing domain but in the combined computing and communications domain anybody else well I know I talked to Nicholas Negroponte II and he basically was offered Apple's operating system for free and turned it down he wanted to keep the OLPC One Laptop Per child open-source so that the recipients of it aren't trapped you know and I really appreciate that's a really good thing to me so thank you I'd like to thank I think Brian Hurley of liquid computing is going to come up and thank our panel well you know it's a thicker than three really important innovations since the world's been born right I've had fire the wheel and personal computing I'm gonna say and I think it's a great honor that we've had these four founding fathers of the personal computing revolution come here and spend time it's really a great honor like to thank you for for taking the time I'd also like at this time to invite Jack and Adam to come down and cut tape see an anniversary cake celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64 I'd like to thank everybody for coming and we do have some commemorative posters up out on your way out if you'd like to pick one up thank you for taking the time you

Channel: Computer History Museum

Views: 138,236

Keywords: Computer, History, Commodore, 64, Jack, Tramiel, Steve, Wozniak, PC

Id: NBvbsPNBIyk

Length: 92min 16sec (5536 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2007