The Commodore 64
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=The Commodore behind the Commodore 64= | =The Commodore behind the Commodore 64= | ||
| − | [Brief Corporate History Goes Here] | + | The roots of the Commodore 64 lie in the history of a Canadian company called Commodore, founded in Toronto in 1958 by Jack Tramiel. A survivor of the concentration camps in Poland, Tramiel was born Idek Tramielski, but changed his name after World War II, when he emigrated to the United States. After serving in Korea, Tramiel worked as a typewriter repair technician, eventually opening a repair company of his own, along with a business partner. Commodore was the company he and his partner formed next, and this company wouldn't repair typewriters, it would manufacture them (Bagnall xiii). Once again, the history of 10 PRINT is intertwined with earlier technologies, leaving the impression -- wholly inaccurate and technologically deterministic as it may be -- that personal computers were a natural progression from typewriters, which in turn emulated printing presses. |
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| + | In the mid-sixties Commodore shifted its focus from producing typewriters to producing calculators, a move made purely for financial considerations, but which in hindsight seems to evoke the same tension between text and numbers, between poetics and algorithms that underwrites the aesthetic and procedural dimensions of 10 PRINT. Caught in a price war with Texas Instruments and Japanese manufacturers in the seventies, Tramiel sought the cheapest calculator components he could find, eventually buying parts from MOS Technology, a semiconductor company comprised of many former Motorola engineers (Bagnall 55). | ||
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| + | Bagnall, Brian. ''Commodore: A Company on the Edge''. Winnipeg: Variant Press, 2010. | ||
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=Learning Through Play= | =Learning Through Play= | ||
