Becoming Commodorian
by Neil Harris
They say that life begins at 40, but for me it really began at 25.
It was January, 1981. My mother called me up to tell me that she heard on the radio that Commodore was holding an open house hiring event in the Philadelphia suburbs. That was exciting news, with a few reservations. My former boss and mentor, Gene Beals at AB Computers, had told many stories of Jack Tramiel terrorizing Commodore’s employees, firing people at random, and that no one lasted as long as a year. And my current boss, George Willbanks of Computerland, sneered at the idea of leaving a small company for what he termed “the corporate umbrella.”
I had never worked for a large company, and being a manager in a computer store did not seem like the greatest career. And lasting more than a year seemed like an interesting challenge.
I arrived at the open house and met one of Commodore’s human resources team members. She asked what I was looking to do.
“I am a programmer, worked in stores selling computers including PETs, taught BASIC programming, and wrote articles for computer magazines. And, by the way, I’ve read that you are coming out with a $300 color computer and would love to learn more.”
Her eyes got wider and wider as I spoke. In 1981, there were not many people with a background like that.
“Let me introduce you to Mike Tomczyk.”
Mike was the U.S. product manager for the VIC-20 and we hit it off right away. He had an opening for a writer but he told me that I’d be doing a bit of everything. He offered me about 30% more than I was making at Computerland.
Life was about to begin!
For my first day on the job, Mike showed me a draft of the VIC-20 user manual that had been written by a contract team at Redgate Communications (which was led by Ted Leonsis and later acquired by AOL, where he became one of the senior execs and a billionaire). Mike was not at all happy because the book was very weak, and he told me to write a new draft. What a wonderful opportunity – I had always found Commodore’s manuals to be very weak and had hoped to have the chance to do better.
There was one snag – it would be 2 weeks before I would get my computer and the deadline was tight to complete the manual. You see, at that time the VIC-20 was not being taken seriously by the Commodore US operation, which was focused on the PET line. The head of PET software, Dieter Ammon, used to joke that the VIC would be given away for free with the purchase of a “real computer.” It was hard to get the resources we needed to do our jobs. We were a small team – Mike, Sue Mittnacht (our admin), Duane Later (a programmer), and John Stockman (a marketing assistant).
So, I brought in my trusty Smith Corona electric typewriter and got to work.
My goal was to provide a tutorial and reference. The older PET manuals covered the BASIC commands, but not how to use them together. It would be like describing a forest by listing all the trees but not showing how the ecosystem worked -- I wanted to show the forest and the trees. I had taught BASIC and knew how to walk people through the beginner levels of coding.
Two weeks later the draft manual was ready for Mike to edit and add the “friendly computer” illustrations.
Shortly after this, I had a call at home from an old friend I knew from a neighboring high school – we had both learned computer programming in our high school computer clubs and had shared notes over the years. Andy Finkel had recently graduated from Cornell’s engineering school. One of his projects there was creating a virtual expanded memory system for the PET by swapping memory in and out using the cassette tape. Brilliant, but unbelievably slow. Andy was (and still is) brilliant and unbelievably quick.
“Mike,” I said the next day, “you need to interview a friend of mine, and then you need to hire him right away. He listened to me.
Life had begun… and for me and for Andy, too!
