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Chuck Peddle

Abstract

Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle (1937–2019) designed the processor that made cheap personal computers possible. Frustrated at Motorola, he led the team at MOS Technology that built the 6502, an eight-bit microprocessor sold from September 1975 for $25 when its rivals cost $360. It ran the Apple I and II, the Atari consoles, the BBC Micro and, as the 6510, the Commodore 64. Peddle also built the KIM-1 single-board computer and the Commodore PET, one of the three machines of 1977 that brought computers to ordinary buyers, and later the Sirius 1, Europe’s best-selling 16-bit computer before the IBM PC arrived there.

From GE to Motorola

Peddle was born in Bangor, Maine, on 25 November 1937, to a family that had come from nearby Canada. After high school and service in the Marine Corps he studied engineering physics at the University of Maine, graduating in 1960, and joined General Electric’s computer division, where he worked on time-sharing systems. In 1970 he set up his own company to build an electronic cash register; it failed, as did an attempt at word processing.

In 1973 he joined Motorola’s team in Arizona, which brought out the eight-bit MC6800 in 1974 (the Computer History Museum’s oral history dates his start to 1971). The 6800 and its rival, Intel’s 8080, each cost $360. From his work with customers Peddle concluded that a simpler chip, made more cheaply, could sell for about $25. Motorola’s management was not interested and told him to drop the idea (see The Microprocessor Revolution).

The 6502

In 1975 Peddle and several Motorola colleagues, among them Bill Mensch, left for MOS Technology in Norristown, Pennsylvania. There they designed the 6502, an eight-bit processor clocked at one megahertz that did more than the 6800 or the 8080 at a fraction of the price. It went on sale on 16 September 1975 at a trade show in San Francisco for $25, about 15 per cent of the cost of an 8080, and became a bestseller. Two young Californians, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, bought a few hundred for their first product, the Apple I, on sale from July 1976 (see Steve Wozniak). Over the next decade the 6502 and its derivatives ran the Apple II, Atari’s consoles and home computers, the BBC Micro, many arcade games and, as the 6510, the Commodore 64.

To show what the chip could do, Peddle built the KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor) in the spring of 1976 on a single circuit board. Meant as a demonstration kit, it was bought by hobbyists as a computer in its own right; with extra memory it ran BASIC, and it could drive a cheap monitor.

The PET

MOS supplied chips to Commodore, then a calculator maker run by Jack Tramiel. In 1976 Peddle persuaded Tramiel that the future lay in microcomputers; at the end of that year Commodore bought MOS, and Peddle became its chief engineer. Tramiel gave him six months to build a computer, and in January 1977 Peddle showed a prototype of the Commodore PET 2001 at the Consumer Electronics Show (see Jack Tramiel and Commodore). It reached customers in October 1977: a 6502, four kilobytes of memory, a built-in screen, a cassette recorder for storage, BASIC from Microsoft, and a keyboard that took some getting used to. With the Apple II and Tandy’s TRS-80 it opened computing to private buyers (see The Personal Computing Explosion). The PET grew into the CBM line, and the 6502 went on into the VIC-20 of 1980, of which more than a million were sold.

Sirius and Victor

In 1980 Peddle and Chris Fish, a financier from Commodore, founded Sirius Systems Technology in Scotts Valley, California, backed by the conglomerate Kidde. A small team started work in January 1981 and had a prototype by April. The Sirius 1 had Intel’s 16-bit 8088, the processor IBM chose for its PC that August, 128 kilobytes of memory expandable to 896, a screen of 800 by 400 pixels, sound, and two disk drives that varied their speed by track to store more than three times as much as an Apple II or IBM PC disk, at the price of incompatibility. It was first shown at the Systems fair in Munich from 19 to 23 October 1981 and in November, as the Victor 9000, at Comdex in Las Vegas.

In Europe, where IBM did not deliver its PC until 1983, the Sirius 1 became the leading 16-bit personal computer; West German buyers paid 19,995 marks, and Chip magazine named it computer of the year. In the United States the Victor 9000, at $4,995, was quickly overtaken by the IBM PC (see The IBM PC). At the end of 1982 Sirius took over its distributor and became Victor Technologies; it filed for bankruptcy in February 1984 and was bought a year later by the Swedish company Datatronic.

Peddle later worked for Tandon, a maker of IBM-compatible PCs, and in the 1990s for an Indian electronics firm. In 2014 he recorded a four-hour oral history for the Computer History Museum. He died in Santa Cruz, California, on 15 December 2019.

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