Irving Gould - The Money Man
by Ian Matthews, Sept 30, 2002
www.commodore.ca
Last
Revised Dec 30 2018 by Ian Matthews
NOTE: Your are in the TEXT ONLY version of our site; Click HERE to go to our full Irving Gould page
We wrote a much more complete history of Irving Gould in 2018 that you might
also be interested in:
The Crazy Story of How Irving Gould Ended Up Owning and Killing Commodore
Irving Gould was the Canadian financier who gave Jack Tramiel the funding to
keep Commodore operating during several key periods of financial distress.
The Canadian Government’s 1966 investigation of the bankrupt Atlantic
Acceptance Corporation showed that Atlantic had produced potentially fraudulent
financial reports. Atlantic was a major investor in Commodore. To save his
company, Commodore’s founder and CEO Jack Tramiel, gave Irving Gould 17% of the
company in exchange for US$400,000 ($1.8M in 2018 dollars). As part of that
historic deal Gould became Commodore’s Chairman of the Board.
A few years
later, in 1975 Commodore lost US$5 million on sales of US$50 million ($225M in
2018 dollars). This was a direct result of Commodore’s CPU supplier, Texas
Instruments, entering the calculator market. Again Gould personally stepped in;
this time with a loan guarantee for US$3 million.
That money financed the
1976 purchase of MOS technologies, which quickly became Commodore Semiconductor
Group (CSG). The MOS acquisition was the key component in Commodore to ‘vertical
integration’ plans and was at the heart of Commodores string of huge product
success’ over the next decade.
In the late 1990’s Irving Gould told a
friend of mine that Commodore made its easiest money selling cheap calculators
in the 1970’s. However, Commodore’s great contribution to the world is the
development and popularization of the microcomputer. In 1975 MOS completed
development of the 6502 CPU which was the core technology behind:
the
world’s first single board microcomputer, the MOS KIM1
the world’s first
personal computer the Commodore PET
the world’s best selling computer the
Commodore 64 (which uses a 6502 derivative named the 6509)
dozens of
non-Commodore computers like the Apple I, II, III, Atari’s, Acorn’s, Franklin’s…
– check out this huge list of computers that used the Commodore MOS 6502 cpu
The profit motive drove Gould to play a critical and largely unacknowledged role
in computer history.
As important as the MOS’ fabrication facilities were
to Commodore’s calculator business, the greatest acquisition in the MOS deal was
a former owner and lead engineer named Chuck Peddle. In late 1976 Peddle
convinced Jack Tramiel to produce the world’s first real computer, the Commodore
Personal Electronic Transactor. The PET was announced several months BEFORE the
Apple 1 and about six months before the Radio Shack TRS 80.
Irving Gould
and Jack Tramiel had a successful working relationship until 1984 when an
argument that has yet to be fully explained caused Jack Tramiel to quit on the
spot. Soon after Jack bought the remnants of bankrupt Atari from Warner Brothers
(now called Time Warner). As a result of Jacks departure Gould immediately
became Commodore’s CEO.
Irving Gould and Medhi Ali (Commodore’s Managing
Director at the end) have been widely ‘credited’ with causing the untimely
demise of Commodore in 1993/4 through a long series of market squandering
mistakes. The drive to maximize profit by producing low cost equipment combined
with the serious mis-marketing of the Amiga product line was apparently the
result of their management.
If Gould had kept to the financial side of
the business and left the ‘big picture’ work to Jack Tramiel, Commodore may have
been a name we see on computers today.
History will not likely be kind to
Irving Gould but it is important to note that he single-handedly saved the
company on several occasions. For that, he deserves recognition and thanks.
2002 Post Script: A good friend of flew on the Commodore Jet to Irving
Gould’s house in the Bahamas in about 1996. At that time Irving Gould was alive
and well living in retirement and was believed to still be a Canadian citizen.
Go CANADA!!!
2005 Update: We were informed that Irving Gould passed away
in 2004.
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