JACK TRAMIEL

Jack was CEO of two of the computer industry's earliest pioneer companies back in the late 70's and early to mid 80's: Commodore Computer, which he founded in 1955 (and left in 1984), and Atari Corporation, the consumer division of Atari which he aquired in 1984 for no cash down and a promissory note. In the mid 80's under Tramiel, Atari Corp. developed a new computer architecture that was similar to the Macintosh, it was called the Atari ST. Some people referred to it as the "Jackintosh". The Atari ST ran the GEM operating system from Digital Research. It was a GUI for MS-DOS PCs and Atari called their proprietary operating system TOS. The Atari ST computer line got very popular in the mid 80's, that is until Atari wilted under the strong competition from Windows 3.0 and cheaper PC clone companies. In 1996 Atari officially merged with JTS and is now a subdivision of JTS.