Posted By
RobertB
on 2008-01-22
03:26:58
|  Re: Jack Tramiel at Computer History Museum - Dec. 10 !!!
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
From: "Bruce Thomas"
Date: Wed, January 16, 2008 9:17 pm
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Robert Bernardo wrote:
> In a follow-up to the CHM event, Computerworld has posted an interview with Amiga v.p. of technology, Adam Chowaniec.
> He talks a bit about the Commodore and a lot about Amiga.
Speaking of Adam Chowaniec, just this week I received the Dec 17 issue of eWeek magazine at the office. I don't recall seeing this article on their site and they don't seem to have a searchable archive to point to so I scanned it in.
Chowaniec relates a story I hadn't heard before. Wonder who the rabbit guy was?
Also this story below is contradicted by the Computerworld story Robert pointed to as the CW story says Chowaniec "joined Commodore Computer just a year after the popular Commodore 64 was launched" so how could he have been in on getting the C-64 OS finished? Perhaps the eWeek story is about the AmigaOS.
enGEOy!
Bruce
>From eWeek Magazine
Volume 24, Number 38
December 17, 2007
Page 8
IT Memory Lane
It isn't often that the pioneers of IT get together and swap stories in public about the old times - those long-ago days before iPods, Facebook, instant messaging, and all the quick and easy technology we enjoy and take for granted.
When these gatherings do happen, the de-facto home for them is the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The museum is located in what used to be a building belonging to SGI, just off the landmark Bayshore Freeway that zips straight down the middle of Silicon Valley.
On Dec.10, the museum played host to a panel discussion to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Commodore 64 personal computer. Sporting all of 64K of memory, the trusty desktop machine performed very well and garnered millions of fans during its decade-long run as the most popular (with the masses) PC.
If the IBM PC and the Apple II were expensive SUVs in 1982, the Commodore was a Volkswagen Beetle, and it was just as beloved.
At a mere $199, most people could afford it.
"We didn't make a lot of money on margin," company founder Jack Tramiel told a standing-room-only audience at the museum, "but we made a lot of friends. They loved our product. I just wish we could have continued to do what we did."
Panel members that night included Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and co-developer of the Apple I and II; Bill Lowe, whose division at IBM produced the first PC in 1981; Tramiel, who founded Commodore and later took over Atari; and Adam Chowaniec, former CEO of Amiga and a Commodore original.
There were many funny moments in an evening full of memories. But Chowaniec might have had the best story:
"When we were getting down to the wire on the Commodore launch, the operating system was our biggest concern because it wasn't finished yet," he recalled. "We were getting nervous. So we flew to the chief developer's home in some back-woods town and found him in his lab. He had all these computers in there, plus a big cage with a rabbit in it.
"When we found he was spending more time talking to his rabbit than writing code, we really got nervous. But, fortunately, it eventually all worked out."
-Chris Preimesberger
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