Posts from @jlsw.dev

Atari: the man who got revenge by buying the company that nearly destroyed him | Atari: el hombre que se vengó comprando la empresa que casi le hundió

jlsw.dev — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:08:06 GMT

Cover photo: taylorhatmaker, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. English version translated with AI. Original article (Spanish) written by the author.

🇬🇧 English

In the previous article I told the story of how Jack Tramiel built Commodore, the company that gave half the world its first computer. I left out the best part: what he did next.

Because in 1984 Tramiel fell out with the chairman of Commodore and walked away. And instead of retiring to a country house, he did what a general who has been relieved of command does: he bought the enemy. Months later he turned up as the owner of Atari, the company he had been fighting to the death for the previous two years.

This is the story of that revenge, of two years of euphoria, and of a landfill in New Mexico where 700,000 cartridges are buried.
To understand Tramiel's move you have to understand the wreckage he had left behind. In July 1984 The New York Times published the news of the sale with a sentence that today reads like an epitaph:

"Warner Communications Inc., giving up its 18-month effort to rebuild a business that once flourished with Pac-Man video games and the boom in home computers, yesterday sold nearly all of its troubled Atari unit."[1]

The same article had no doubt about where the disaster came from:

"It was Mr. Tramiel, the aggressive, cost-cutting former chief executive of Commodore International Ltd., who led the price-cutting war that buried Atari last year, many industry experts said."[1]

In other words: the man who was about to buy Atari was the one who had sunk Atari. Industry experts were saying so openly in the most serious newspaper in the United States. And it was not only Atari: the same piece reports that three other major competitors (Texas Instruments, Mattel and Timex) had left the business since October.[1]

The business was so bad that Warner did not collect a single dollar in cash: it received 240 million in long-term notes plus guarantees over 32% of Tramiel's new company.[1] A Paine Webber analyst summed it up better than anyone: "Warner essentially gave away the company, in hopes Tramiel could make something happen".[1] And along the way Warner kept the two divisions that were actually worth something and were not in the package: the arcade business and Ataritel, the telecommunications arm.[1] 20% of the company was left out.

That sale left a hole of 425 million dollars in Warner's accounts that quarter.[1]

Now that we know how it ended, it is worth remembering why Atari was worth anything. Its flagship console, the Atari 2600, sold 30 million units.[3] It launched in 1977 at 189.95 dollars and stayed on the market until 1992, fifteen years.[3]

Thirty million consoles in the eighties, back when a house had one television and that was it.[3] It was the most popular console in the world until the crash arrived, and the disaster of '83 took it down along with the whole market.[6]

One detail that makes me smile: inside that console which sold 30 million units there was a MOS 6507, a cousin of Commodore's 6502.[3] In other words, Atari was selling machines that carried a chip from the house of the man who would later buy them. The hardware world of the eighties was a village.

Almost everyone has heard the legend: that Atari, sunk by the failure of its E.T. game, loaded millions of cartridges into trucks and buried them in a landfill. For thirty years it was told as an urban legend.

It turned out to be true, and now we know how many.

The verified figures: in 1983 Atari buried cartridges, consoles and unsold computers in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.[4] For decades the story was doubted and dismissed as a myth, but Atari's people eventually confirmed the number: about 700,000 cartridges from several games, E.T. included.[4] They were not "millions", as people said, but it was still seven hundred thousand toys in a hole.

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The Spectrum: the computer that brought computing into British homes | El Spectrum: el ordenador que trajo la informática a casa de los británicos

jlsw.dev — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:14:24 GMT

Cover photo: Bill Bertram, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. English version translated with AI. Original article (Spanish) written by the author.

🇬🇧 English

This blog has a bias, and I would rather say so before you notice it: I owe it to a Commodore. But the story of the home computers of the 1980s cannot be understood only from the United States. On the other side of the Atlantic something just as big happened, with a different style and a smaller budget.

While California fought over 64 kilobytes, an inventor named Clive Sinclair was doing the opposite in the United Kingdom: working out how cheap he could make a machine without it stopping being useful to learn and play with. The result was called the ZX Spectrum, and it changed what computing meant to a whole generation of British people.

An inventor with an obsession for small things

Clive Marles Sinclair was born in 1940 in Ealing, England, and worked as a technical journalist before starting his first company: Sinclair Radionics, in 1961.[2] His fame did not begin with computers but with calculators: he produced the world's first ultra-thin pocket calculator.[2]

That is the profile of the man, and it explains everything that came later: he was not a computer manufacturer trying to cut costs, he was a miniaturiser who ran into consumer electronics. He lived through that period as a star: he was chosen businessman of the year, knighted in 1983, and presented by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as an example of the new technological Britain.[2][3] The Guardian, in his obituary, summed him up with a phrase that does him justice and takes it away at the same time: he was a "better inventor and publicist than businessman".[3]

And that second part is also part of the Spectrum's story.

125 pounds: the cheapest machine in the world

The ZX Spectrum was launched in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, at 125 pounds for its basic version.[1] To give you an idea of what that meant: its American rival of reference, the Commodore 64, had come out the same year at 595 dollars.[5] The Spectrum was not more powerful. It was four times cheaper.

In the United States the Spectrum never became important; it went on sale from November 1983 at about 200 dollars and made no dent.[1] But at home it was another story: it sold about 5 million units.[1] Five million computers in a country of a little over 55 million people. That is not a product: it is a phenomenon.

For years it was the best-selling computer in the United Kingdom, and in 1982 a machine with rubber keys and a rainbow stripe in the corner became the doorway into programming for thousands of kids who had no money for anything else.

The rubber keys

Here it is worth telling it without romanticism, because nostalgia deceives: the Spectrum was an uncomfortable computer. The keys were rubber, they had no travel, and typing on it was torture. The sound came from a tiny buzzer that could barely manage a beep. And yet, there was the important part: it cost what it cost and it worked.

That combination (cheap, limited, sufficient) is what put it in the hands of people who would never have had a computer. An entire generation learned to program on the Spectrum, and not because it was a good instrument, but because it was the only one within their reach.

It is the same lesson as Commodore, told the other way around: the winner is not the one who builds the best machine, it is the one who gets it into the most hands.

The end, told without decoration

And here the Spectrum crosses with what I have already told in this blog, because its end was not decided by its inventor: the market decided it, and then Amstrad signed it off.

By 1986, Sinclair Research owed its creditors 7 million pounds, and its last computer, the QL, had been a disaster in the shops because of reliability and production problems.[4] The C5 electric car, another of Sinclair's bets, had found no market.[4] The inventor had been at the head of a company that reached 40% of the British computer market, and that same scale did not save him: the costs of the reliability failures ate him alive.[4]

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Commodore: the company that sold 17 million computers and died without noticing | Commodore: la empresa que vendio 17 millones de ordenadores y murio sin enterarse

jlsw.dev — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:37:39 GMT

Cover photo: Marcin Wichary, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. English version translated with AI. Original article (Spanish) written by the author.

🇬🇧 English

My first computer was a Commodore 64. Then came an Amiga 500, and with it the best years of my life in front of a screen: games, magazines, 3.5 inch disks you had to look after like gold, and the feeling that that brown box could do anything. I knew nothing about Commodore. I only knew it was my computer.

Years later, when I already work with computers to make a living, I started looking into the history of the company that made those two machines. And it turns out to be far more interesting than a product catalogue: it is a story of survival, of trade war and of an ending nobody saw coming.

A man who came out of hell and started a company

Jack Tramiel was born in Łódź (Poland) in 1928, under the name Idek Trzmiel.[2] When the Nazis liquidated his city's ghetto, his family was sent to Auschwitz; he was rescued from a labour camp in April 1945 by the 84th Infantry Division of the United States Army.[2] In November 1947 he emigrated to the United States, enlisted, and there learned to repair office equipment, typewriters included.[2]

That detail is no mere anecdote: it is the origin of everything. In 1954 he founded Commodore Business Machines in Canada, repairing and selling typewriters; by 1958 the company was formally incorporated with his partner Manfred Kapp.[1] Tramiel came from the typewriter business, not from electronics, and that explains his way of working: produce cheaply and sell to a lot of people. His motto was business is war and his target audience, he said, were "the masses, not the classes".[14]

From calculators to computers, via a scare

Commodore got into calculators and nearly died for it: Texas Instruments entered that market directly with prices below what the chip itself cost, and Commodore did so badly that it was on the verge of disappearing.[11] A capital injection saved it, and Tramiel (who would never again trust a supplier) decided to buy his suppliers.

In 1976, Commodore Business Machines bought MOS Technology, the company that made its chips. MOS had designed the 6502, an 8-bit microprocessor that reached the market in September 1975 for 25 dollars, when the competition cost ten times as much.[11] It was so cheap that at a 1975 trade fair many people thought it was a scam.[11]

That chip, and that purchase, are the heart of the story. Whoever owns the chip factory can sell the cheapest computer in the world.

The 1977 trilogy: the PET

That same year, Commodore presented its first personal computer: the PET (Personal Electronic Transactor).[12] It was designed by Chuck Peddle, who had joined the company precisely with the MOS purchase.[13]

The PET 2001 came out in 1977 (it appeared before the Apple II) with four kilobytes of memory, for 495 dollars.[13] It came ready to work the moment you took it out of the box: keyboard, screen and a built-in cassette unit, made by Commodore itself.[5] Its lid opened like a car bonnet so you could get inside it.[13]

It had its faults, and the sources of the time say so without varnish: the keyboard was so small that touch typing was uncomfortable, and the 9 inch screen fell short.[13]

VIC-20: the first to reach a million

Then came the VIC-20, announced in September 1980, three years to the month after the PET.[4] It sold for 299.95 dollars and was the first computer of any kind to sell a million units, going on to 2.5 million.[4]

Stop and think about it: the first computer in history to sell a million units was not from IBM, nor from Apple. It was from a company that came from repairing typewriters.

The Commodore 64: the price war

And then Tramiel did his thing. When his team proposed a cheap successor to the VIC-20, he set one condition: 64 kilobytes of memory.[3] The engineers who built it have told the story several times: it is one of those projects you remember for the rest of your life.[6]

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Introduction: who writes here | Presentación: quién escribe aquí

jlsw.dev — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 14:42:27 GMT

Hi. This is my first post on Hive, so the sensible thing is to start with the basics: who I am and what I am doing here.

I write software for people, not just for machines

I have been programming in production with Python for four years. What I do, summed up without varnish: web applications, automation and the tools that make a business work on the inside. I work very often with Frappe/ERPNext, a framework used to build complete management systems, and I hold its official certification.

But the thing that shaped me most was not learning to program. It was what came before: almost a decade solving customer problems face to face, dealing with people who arrived with a complaint and left with a solution, or at least with an explanation. That teaches you something no tutorial does: the problem is almost never technical. It is almost always about communication.

That is why I write software thinking about whoever is going to use it. A program that only its author understands is not a good program; it is a problem with an expiry date.

My home has two servers and it is not a whim

I have a homelab with two servers that I administer myself. It is not a collection of pretty gadgets: it is where I actually learn. Docker, networks, backups, certificates, monitoring, and above all what cannot be learned by reading: what happens when something breaks at three in the morning and nobody is coming to help.

I have learned more there than on any course. A server at home does not let you move on to the next lesson without fixing the previous one.

AI as a tool, not as a crutch

Artificial intelligence is part of my daily work, and I want to say it precisely because it usually causes misunderstandings in both directions: I use it as a tool and I know when to switch it off.

I program assisted by AI tooling and I maintain my own agent that runs deployments, watches services and administers my servers. I have built the infrastructure so those programs talk to each other. It is a real part of my work and it saves me hours.

And I also know the opposite: there are moments when it is time to close the assistant and think. AI accelerates what you already know how to do; it does not teach you what you do not understand. I have seen people accept code they do not comprehend and discover the problem weeks later. I know that trap and I deliberately avoid it.

I learn systematically

I do not learn by trends. When I get into something, I go in fully and in order. Right now I am going deeper into Django and its APIs, and into the cloud (AWS, certification under way). Before that came Linux, then Docker, then management frameworks. Each thing as it came.

I like to understand things from the inside. I use tools, but I do not trust any tool whose inner workings I cannot explain. When something genuinely interests me, I end up reading how it is made.

What I am going to write here

This blog is mine and nobody else signs it: no copies, I sell nothing, and I do not promote products.

What you will find:

History of computing. How we got here. I am interested in the companies that won, the ones that died and, above all, why. There is far more to tell in that history than in most of today's news.
What I learn while working on servers. Real problems, with the real figures in front of me and no varnish. When something is not fixed, I say so.
Texts with sources. When I cite a fact, I cite where it comes from. Citing a source that does not exist sinks the credibility of whoever signs it, so I check before publishing.

And one rule I set myself: if I do not know something, I say so. I would rather look less clever than have lied.

About this account

I write here because I like the idea of a text being stored in a way that does not depend on any single company. This blog starts on Hive because this is where I write from scratch, carrying nothing over from before.

I do not promise to publish every day. I promise not to publish filler.

A pleasure. See you around.

🇪🇸 Español

Hola. Este es mi primer post en Hive, así que lo lógico es empezar por lo básico: quién soy y qué hago aquí.

Programo para personas, no solo para máquinas

Llevo cuatro años programando en producción con Python. Lo que hago, resumido sin adornos: aplicaciones web, automatizaciones y las herramientas que hacen que un negocio funcione por dentro. Trabajo muy a menudo con Frappe/ERPNext, un framework que sirve para construir sistemas de gestión completos, y tengo su certificación oficial.

Pero lo que más me ha marcado no fue aprender a programar. Fue lo de antes: casi una década resolviendo problemas de clientes cara a cara, atendiendo a gente que venía con una queja y se iba con una solución, o con una explicación. Eso te enseña algo que ningún tutorial enseña: que el problema casi nunca es técnico. Casi siempre es de comunicación.

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