When I interviewed Jeff Bruette about Andy Warhol, of course I couldn’t resist asking him about other things about Commodore. Bruette wasn’t strictly an Amiga guy. He started at Commodore during its 8-bit era, including programming Commodore versions of hit arcade games like Gorf. So of course I asked him what he thought about Commodore founder and longtime CEO Jack Tramiel. To celebrate Jack Tramiel’s birthday, December 13, 1928, let’s retell his favorite Jack Tramiel story.
The time Jeff Bruette trolled Jack Tramiel
One evening, Bruette was shopping, and he wandered through the toy aisle, into the action figures section. At the time, The Dukes of Hazzard was a very popular TV show. Toy company Kenner had struck gold by licensing the rights to make Star Wars action figures. So rival companies licensed the rights to anything and everything, hoping to find the next Star Wars. Mego in particular was aggressive about licensing other properties, and the Dukes of Hazzard was one of its more successful product lines.
Mego produced a full line of Dukes of Hazzard action figures, which proliferated in toy aisles across the country. Boss Hogg, the villain of the series, bore more than a passing resemblance to Jack Tramiel. And right there, in the toy aisle, a Boss Hogg action figure was staring Jeff Bruette down.
He bought the action figure. And then he brought it to work.
At the time, Commodore developers did all of their programming on a Commodore PET and transferred the resulting binary code over to a Commodore 64 or VIC-20 for testing. The PET had good development tools, a bigger screen, and faster disk drives. This made it a nice cross-development platform. So Bruette had a PET on his desk. The back of the Commodore PET had a hinge, so the whole machine popped open like the hood of a car. So Bruette had a PET on his desk.
The back of the Commodore PET had a hinge, so the whole machine popped open like the hood of a car. Kind of like the General Lee, the orange 1969 Dodge Charger that was the star of the show. He popped open the hood of his PET and put the miniature Jack Tramiel doppelganger there. There was plenty of room for the 3.75-inch-tall figure inside.
One day, Jack Tramiel walked by, and Bruette motioned for him to come to his desk, where the trolling commenced. Bruette asked the Commodore CEO, “Do you know why Commodore computers are so good?” Then he lifted the hood on his PET to reveal the action figure hiding inside. “Because there is a miniature Jack Tramiel inside every one!”
Tramiel’s eyes got huge. “WHERE did you get that?” he asked loudly. “WHO is making miniature dolls that look like ME?”
“I guess he’d never seen the TV show,” Bruette said, laughing.
It wasn’t anyone within Commodore making them. The answer was the Mego Corporation, and you could get one anywhere toys were sold.
So you may get the idea that Bruette liked Jack Tramiel. Former Commodore employees have mixed opinions of him, but Bruette said he liked him, and found him fair to deal with. At the very least, this story shows the difference between Tramiel and his counterpart at Atari, Ray Kassar, who wouldn’t go near his engineers or talk to them.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
what is your opinion of the Amiga and why didn’t out sell black and white and more expensive mac in 1987
I’ve written tons of blog posts about the Amiga. I’m a huge Amiga fan. Better machine than the Mac in every possible way, they weren’t even in the same universe.
It’s notable that many Commodore engineers left the company to join Tramiel in his new venture at Atari – including Shiraz Shivji and Ira Velinsky, who you wrote a blog post about recently. If Tramiel was an out-and-out wrong ‘un, he wouldn’t have inspired that kind of loyalty. On the other hand, we have the testimony of Dave Morse and others at Amiga Technology, who found the Tramiels collectively a bruising bunch to deal with.