Oral History of Chuck Peddle

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vidarh · 2021-06 · Recommendation

Most of what I know about that comes from Brian Bagnall's books (e.g. Commodore: A company on the edge). It's covered in the first chapter. I don't know of any preserved documents - if they exist they'd belong to Motorola, and I'd expect the leavers would have preferred to ditch any such documents (though part of the reason for the settlement with Motorola was that one of the engineers stupidly taking 6800 documentation with him). This [1] summarizes it. Here [2] is an interview by Computer History Museum of Chuck Peddle. It matches up with the first chapters in Bagnalls book very closely. From about 50 minutes in he talks about his meetings w/Motorola customers that told him the 6800 was too expensive. From about 58m in they talk about basically setting a size metric for the chip to meet a low enough price point. So the starting point was what they could fit in small enough space. You might also like the Computer History Museum interview w/Bill Mensch [3] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]

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ChuckMcM · 2019-12 · Recommendation

Agreed. I was sad to hear of Chuck's passing. His MOS Technology was a huge thorn in Intel's side in the early days. That company punched way above its weight class because the chip was so simple it made a huge number of things possible. I got to meet him when he did this interview ( [VIDEO] ) with the Computer History Museum and really was impressed at how he understood and expressed computation.

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LarryMade2 · 2024-07 · Reference

Chuck Peddle has claimed credit for the PET's (and later Commodore 8-bit) user friendly screen editor. I have heard it in some interviews with him. The computer History Museum has one interview where he mentions it - [VIDEO] Radio Shack's TRS-80 editor is also not that great either.

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