Microcomputers for the Masses. Jack Tramiel and Commodore

Jack Tramiel had good reason to tout his crystal ball (Figure 3.1).2 He led the com­ pany he founded, Commodore Business Machines, to a billion dollars in sales in 1984—the first personal computer company to achieve this milestone. A year later he was on the precipice of a dramatic reversal of fortunes at the helm of Atari Corp. Tramiel is one of several entrepreneurs mentioned in the introduction to this volume, each of whom took big risks when they imagined a new product could capture a market. The quick pivots that epitomized Tramiel’s 40 years of leader­ ship in the business of office machinery were underpinned by his commitment to low cost consumer pricing. Some products never took off, like the Commodore dry copiers, some were a passing trend, like the desktop adding machines with Nixie