I occasionally still each lunch with this guy. :-) Dr. Tramiel and one of my colleagues are best of friends.
Dr. Tramiel has a PhD in Astrophysics from Stanford BTW.
They had a healthy trans-shipment business to Europe (e.g., the grey market). A truckload of PETs would be unloaded at our warehouse in the evening, and be re-labeled and re-loaded for Europe the next day. I think the prices and demand were much higher in Europe, and it was a lot of money for a small amount of work. We’re talking entire semis full of gear.
The owner also ran one of the larger mailorder computer businesses in the country. If you bought mailorder from Compute! or BYTE, you probably bought some of our stuff. It was legally and anonymously a separate business entity in another state, and technically in the name of a brother-in-law.
Funny thing is that the brother-in-law walked into the office one day, and announced that the mailorder business was his, “how much do you want to pay for it.” A lot of yelling ensued.
Atari and Commodore and all the Japanese companies had a tendency to overlook these shennagins, whereas Apple kept pretty tight control over its pipeline. At the time my perception was than Jack wanted to move boxes no matter what, while Steve Jobs wanted to maintain ironfisted control.
Last time I saw Jack was in an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The other guys are still lurking around the business, all multimillionaires.