Jack Tramiel and Mike Tomczyk

 by Leonard Tramiel

Much of the impetus for this blog is the deluge of misinformation that is “out there”. One of the best defined, single instances, is Michael Tomczyk’s story of a Commodore management meeting near London, England. He characterizes it as a marketing meeting. Given my father’s complete disdain for the term “marketing”, and everything that goes with it, I can confidently dismiss the idea that this is how it was referred to, at least in Dad’s presence.


There was an extremely informative exchange during the visit to my Dad’s home by the crew for The 8-bit Generation: The Commodore Wars documentary. There was a break and the film makers, I think looking for extra material, asked about “the famous London marketing meeting”. My father responded with a look of confusion. I knew what they were talking about. Despite my Dad’s prediction that Tomczyk’s book wouldn’t reach many readers (see below), it did. The story in it of a marketing meeting near London where a large group of Commodore’s international management got together to plan out Commodore’s product(s) was well known among Commodore fans and has been repeated many times by many people but all of it has this single source. The story was explained to my father and some of the details were given. With an exasperated sigh, and a look of complete dismissal, he brushed it aside saying, as close as I can remember, “Nothing like that ever happened”.


There was one evening where my mom and dad, my fiance and I, and Tomcyzk went to see an off Broadway presentation of Little Shop of Horrors. Tomcyzk has asserted that during this evening he discussed joining my father at Atari. This is nearly impossible. I don’t remember the exact date that this happened. I think it was, as indicated above, before my wedding. That would mean it predates my dad’s decision to quit his job at Commodore. In any event, it wasn’t until after I had left New York that the deal for Atari was finalized. So his memory of the topic of discussion is somewhere between impossible and highly unlikely. I have no memory of any discussion on any related topic. If it had happened after dad had quit there is little doubt that the future plans would have dominated the discussion. There is even less doubt that no non-famly member, like Tomczyk, would have been included.


The other only other time that I can remember Dad mentioning Tomczyk is when he sent a draft of the beginning of the book to my Dad. I think there was a request for feedback but I’m not sure. Dad and I read what had been sent although I think I managed to slog through more of it than he did. I remember being struck by a piece of *really* sloppy terminology. The highway that someone would take from the airport to Commodore’s offices in Palo Alto is US 101. He referred to it as “the Santa Monica Freeway”. This is absurd. Santa Monica is 100s of miles away. It is *never* called that in the area in question. I wondered what else he had gotten wrong. Lots of the details didn’t sit right. The person described in this book had little resemblance to the man I had grown up with and the workplace was nothing like the company I had worked in.


After a few days we talked about the book and Dad said he couldn’t read much of it because so much was nonsense. As near as I can remember, he asked “Why do people lie like this?” I asked him if he wanted to contact Mike to try to set the record straight. He said no. People are allowed to lie and since Tomczyk had such a tiny role in the company his book wouldn’t get much exposure. Sadly this turned out to be wrong. But on the plus side, for those that think it belongs on the plus side, it was instrumental in the creation of this blog.

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