Computer History Museum
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2019–2024
3:55:45 · 42K views · Jul 30, 2019
A Computer History Museum oral history of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502 and the Commodore PET, covering his career from GE through Motorola and MOS Technology. It runs nearly four hours.
Used as a primary source for 6502 origins, pricing strategy and Commodore history.
6 comments from Hacker News
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] this video [3] [LINK]
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 ( this video ) with the Computer History Museum and really was impressed at how he understood and expressed computation.
Tramiel had a habit of firing good engineers 3 months after product release. Either directly, or by screwing them by moving to useless positions or taking bonuses away until people 'got the message'. Those who didnt get what was going on or didnt care about money/dignity were the ones who stayed as long term employees. Jack had an eye for suckers and people putting passion before common sense and self respect. Whole C64 design team was effed out of promised bonuses and fired/left. People like Bruce Crockett (manufacturing), Al Charpentier (VIC) and Robert Yannes (SID) went to start Ensoniq (later sold to Creative), Chuck Peddle went to Apple, Bill Mensch hung around for two years of abuse. Same with Amiga team (Jay,RJ,Needle). Those two videos touch on the Commodore culture of curb stomping until only the weak and dumb survive: Oral History of Chuck Peddle this video Oral History of William David "Bill" Mensch Jr. [LINK]
Yup. Chuck Peddle (one of the guys largely responsible for the design of the 6502) did an oral history interview with the CHM (Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.) In it he discussed their design process. They thought the market for the 6502 was as a controller (cars, HVAC, instrumentation, etc.), not the CPU of a microcomputer. But then Tiny BASIC came along at exactly the right time and hid the messier 6502 design decisions (zero page, weird addressing modes, 256 byte stack, etc.) from a whole bunch of users. So yes... BASIC is absolutely a contender for small systems. But so are MicroLisp and FORTH. Personally, I prefer Lisp, but completely agree Lisp's learning curve is waaay steeper than BASIC's. Same for FORTH. Here's the video, btw: this video
So sad. I learned to program with my Atari 130XE, mainly in 6502 Assembly. Truly respected him and his constant engineering and entrepreneurship efforts. The Computer History Museum interviewed him back in 2014 and posted the video on YT earlier this year: this video Scene World Magazine also did an extensive interview 6 years ago: [LINK]