In November 1982 BYTE opened an interview with Chuck Peddle by saying that “more than any other person” he “deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry”. The magazine’s case was a price. “By producing the 6502 and selling it for only $25 while other semiconductor houses were saying the price would never fall below $200, Peddle made the personal computer possible.” He then helped build one of the first personal computers to use it, the Commodore PET. Neither came easily. His career in the 1970s ran through Motorola, MOS Technology, Commodore and Apple, and, as the historian Tim Danton puts it, his time at each was short or interrupted.
Before the 6502
Peddle was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1937. He took a degree in engineering physics at the University of Maine in 1959 and spent eleven years at General Electric working on its computer business. In 1970 he started a company to make intelligent terminals, and in 1972 a word-processing company. “Too early,” he told BYTE about both.
In 1973 he joined Motorola, which was developing its 6800 microprocessor. BYTE credited him with “the architecture for all the peripheral chips of the 6800 and all the I/O (input/output) structure”. He also sold the 6800 to companies such as Ford and Hewlett-Packard, and he kept hearing that its $300 price was too high. When he started work on a cheaper processor, Motorola sent him “a formal letter … saying you have to stop work on your low-cost microprocessor”, he told the Computer History Museum in 2014.
MOS Technology and the 6502
MOS Technology, a calculator-chip maker in Pennsylvania, offered him a team of his own. In 1974 Peddle left Motorola and took several of the 6800’s engineers with him, among them Bill Mensch. BYTE called Peddle the “chief architect” of the 6502; Mensch was its lead designer. Motorola sued. Peddle said the new chips owed nothing to the 6800 and that he had told his engineers to leave their paperwork behind. One of them did not.
The 6502 went on sale at the WESCON show in San Francisco in September 1975 for $25. According to Danton, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were among the buyers who crowded into MOS’s hotel suite. Peddle did not like the chip being called a RISC design. “It wasn’t,” he said. “It was a reduced instruction set machine before that became a popular term at Stanford.” He called it a “universal solvent”: “It’s just enough, and it’s simple enough, and it’s cheap enough that you can use it for anything.”
MOS also sold the KIM-1, a single-board computer with a calculator-style keypad and a six-digit LED display, for $245. Peddle later called it the first generation of microcomputer: “They were really hobby computers, meant to be used by people looking to develop computer skills.”
The PET
When Commodore bought MOS Technology in 1976, Jack Tramiel had the MOS staff come in one by one to explain their projects. “Almost the last one to come in was Chuck Peddle, and he showed me a product called the KIM,” Tramiel said. Peddle wanted to put the board, a keyboard and a screen in one box. Tramiel sent his son Leonard to check on him. Leonard spent most of the meeting discussing Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, a story set in a future full of small computers. That, Leonard said, was the society Peddle wanted to live in. Tramiel gave Peddle six months to build a prototype.
It was ready, just, for the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in January 1977, where Peddle showed it to Radio Shack. “I think we got the CRT right side up just in time,” he said. Radio Shack would not accept Tramiel’s terms, and it built its own TRS-80. Commodore sold the machine itself as the PET 2001, with BASIC, a built-in cassette recorder and a small monitor, and showed it at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, the show where Apple announced the 6502-based Apple II.
Apple, Commodore again, and Victor
The PET had no disk drive, and Apple had one. Peddle’s dual drive ran months late, Tramiel demoted him, and he went to Apple. It was not a happy few months, Danton records, and in February 1979 he returned to Commodore and finished the drive, the 2040, shown in June 1979. By 1980 he and Tramiel had run out of patience with each other. Michael Tomczyk, then at Commodore, describes Peddle being asked to move to the company’s East Coast offices and refusing to leave California. He left Commodore in October 1980, and several of its engineers went with him.
His new company, Sirius Systems Technology, designed a 16-bit business computer around Intel’s 8088. The team formed at the end of 1980, Peddle told BYTE, and showed its first prototype in April 1981. It was sold as the Victor 9000 in North America and, elsewhere, as the Victor 9000 or the Sirius 1, through a partnership with the business-machine firm Victor, where Peddle became president. Victor Technology sold $65 million worth in 1983, Tomczyk writes, but struggled to make a profit and went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 1984.
After Victor
In later years, according to his obituary in the Portland Press Herald, he lived part of the time in Sri Lanka, where he set up a business reconditioning microchips. He died at his home in Santa Cruz, California, on 15 December 2019, aged 82.
Sources
- BYTE, November 1982, pp. 256–257: Phil Lemmons, “BYTE Interview: Chuck Peddle, Chief Designer of the Victor 9000”: his degree, General Electric, the terminal and word-processing companies, the 6800’s peripheral chips, the team taken to MOS in 1974, “chief architect” of the 6502, the $25 price, the KIM-1 and the three generations of microcomputer, the PET shown to Radio Shack in January 1977, Sirius Systems Technology and the Victor 9000/Sirius 1, the design team and first prototype.
- Tim Danton, The Computers That Made Britain (Raspberry Pi Press, 2021), chapter on the Commodore PET 2001: the 6800’s $300 price and customers, Motorola’s letter (quoting Peddle’s 2014 Computer History Museum oral history), Mensch, the lawsuit and the paperwork, “universal solvent”, WESCON and the hotel suite, the KIM-1 at $245, Tramiel’s interviews and Leonard Tramiel’s account, CES 1977 and Radio Shack, the West Coast Computer Faire, the disk drive, Apple and Peddle’s return in February 1979.
- David Eyes and Ron Lichty, Programming the 65816 (Brady, 1986), introduction: Mensch as “the lead designer on the original 6502 development project”.
- Michael S. Tomczyk, The Home Computer Wars (Compute! Publications, 1984), pp. 133–135: Peddle’s last months at Commodore, his departure in October 1980, Sirius and Victor, and Victor Technology’s sales and Chapter 11 petition.
- Portland Press Herald, obituary, 24 December 2019 (web, secondary): Bangor, the University of Maine, 1959, Sri Lanka. https://www.pressherald.com/2019/12/24/chuck-peddle-maine-native-and-father-of-the-personal-computer-dies-at-82/
- Cade Metz, The New York Times, 7 January 2020 (web, secondary, read as republished by Santa Cruz Tech Beat): his death in Santa Cruz on 15 December 2019. https://www.santacruztechbeat.com/2020/01/07/chuck-peddle-dies-at-82-his-25-chip-helped-start-the-pc-age/