Jack Tramiel

He was born Jacek Trzmiel in Lodz, Poland, on Dec. 13, 1928. After the Germans invaded on Sept. 1, 1939, his family was confined to Lodz’s Jewish ghetto, where they lived in a single room while his father scratched out a living repairing shoes. In August 1944, the Nazis deported the family to the Auschwitz death camp, where Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS officer notorious for conducting heinous experiments on inmates, selected Jacek and his father for work detail at a nearby camp. His mother remained behind in Auschwitz and survived; his father did not. Mr. Tramiel was told that his father had died of typhus but believed that he had actually been injected with gasoline. After being liberated by American troops, Mr. Tramiel scrounged around Europe for two years, picking up odd jobs. He had himself admitted to a psychiatric sanitarium just so he could eat. In 1947 he married Helen Goldgrub, whom he had met in a concentration camp, then left for the United States, where his wife joined him in 1948 and his mother in 1949. Joining the Army, he learned to repair typewriters. After his discharge, he drove a cab, used a G.I. loan of $25,000 to buy a typewriter store in the Bronx, and changed the spelling of his surname. In the 1950s he moved his business to Toronto, where he had family and where the laws made it easier to import typewriters from Europe. By then his business had grown into an office-machine company. He chose the name Commodore, he said, after glancing at an Opel Commodore while riding in a cab. In the 1960s, Mr. Tramiel became the subject of a widely publicized insider-trading investigation involving loans to his company. Though he was not indicted, the publicity made it difficult for him to continue to do business in Canada, so he moved the company to the emerging Silicon Valley area of California in the late 1960s. Mr. Tramiel introduced the Commodore 64 in 1982. It offered 64 kilobytes of memory compared with the 46 offered by the Apple II, and sold for half as much. The 64 had color graphics and was the first personal computer with an audio synthesizer chip. In January 1984 Mr. Tramiel resigned as president, chief executive and director. Months later Mr. Tramiel bought the home video-game division of the Atari Corporation. After Atari lost ground to Nintendo and other competitors, he sold it and retired in the mid-1990s, then became involved in venture capital and real estate.Eventually Gateway 2000 Computers Purchases the Technologies of Commodore/Amiga and Tulip of Holland purchase the Commodore Trademark. In addition to his wife, Mr. Tramiel, who lived in Monte Sereno, Calif., is survived by his sons, Leonard, Sam and Garry, and five grandchildren. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington was among the many recipients of his philanthropy.