Like Tim May, a Santa Cruzer who really didn't give fux for moneygrubbing techie libertards infesting the industry. "Chuck Peddle, the engineer and entrepreneur who helped launch the age of the personal computer after designing a microprocessor that sold for a mere $25, died on Dec. 15 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 82. His partner, Kathleen Shaeffer, said the cause was pancreatic cancer. In 1974, Mr. Peddle and several other engineers were designing a new silicon chip at the Motorola Corporation in Phoenix when the company sent him a letter demanding that he shut the project down. Mr. Peddle envisioned an ultra-low-cost chip that could bring digital technology to a new breed of consumer devices, from cash registers to personal computers. But his bosses saw it as unwanted in-house competition for the $300 processor Motorola had unveiled that year. So Mr. Peddle moved the project to MOS Technology, a rival chip maker near Valley Forge, Pa., taking seven other Motorola engineers with him. There they built a processor called the 6502. Priced at $25 — the cost of a dinner for four, and the equivalent of about $130 today — this chip soon powered the first big wave of personal computers in both the United States and Britain, including the Apple II and the Commodore PET. “The market needed a cheap one,” Mr. Peddle said in a 2014 interview with the Computer History Museum. In later years Intel, the Northern California chip giant, would come to dominate the personal computer business. But the market was seeded in Valley Forge, not Silicon Valley. “Chuck Peddle is one of the great unsung heroes of the personal computer age,” said Doug Fairbairn, a director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Virtually all of the early, successful, mass-market personal computers were built around the 6502, not chips from Intel or anyone else.” More: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/technology/chuck-peddle-dead.html
On Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:22:51 -0800 Razer <g2s@riseup.net> wrote:
Like Tim May, a Santa Cruzer who really didn't give fux for moneygrubbing techie libertards infesting the industry.
your view of may seems pretty idealized. May was a self-described 'anarchocapitalist', he liked the randroid cunt and he got some million dollars* working for flagship americunt govcorp mafia intel. IIRC I read somewhere that may left the cpunks list because it was renamed/hosted at al-qaeda.net. he certainly was better educated that the typical rethuglican 'libertarian' but that bar is pretty low. *not really sure about the figure, maybe around a hundred million dollars?
On Wednesday, December 25, 2019, 12:40:41 PM PST, Punk-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote: On Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:22:51 -0800 Razer <g2s@riseup.net> wrote:
Like Tim May, a Santa Cruzer who really didn't give fux for moneygrubbing techie libertards infesting the industry.
your view of may seems pretty idealized. May was a self-described 'anarchocapitalist', he liked the randroid cunt and he got some million dollars* working for flagship americunt govcorp mafia intel.
> IIRC I read somewhere that may left the cpunks list because it was renamed/hosted at al-qaeda.net.
he certainly was better educated that the typical rethuglican 'libertarian' but that bar is pretty low.
*not really sure about the figure, maybe around a hundred million dollars?
You probably don't realize it, but during the time (1979)? Tim May became famous for discovering that alpha particles created soft errors (mostly in DRAM), Intel was a relatively small (15,000 employees) backwater IC company. Intel didn't really get big and famous until IBM chose the 8088 microprocessor for their original IBM PC. In fact, I suspected then that the reason IBM chose the 8088 was that Intel was small enough so that they (IBM) figured they could manipulate Intel. The company which made an alternative, Motorola with their 68000, was huge and even IBM couldn't have controlled it. The 68000 would have made a much-better PC, and it would presumably have been made with a 16-bit data bus, instead of the original PC's silly 8-bit data bus. (One theory was that IBM deliberately "dumbed down" the original 8088 PC to ensure it didn't compete with IBM's low-end computer selection.) And, the ultimate solution to the alpha-particle was to change the chemistry of the DRAM chips so that they wouldn't have to be contained in a hermetically sealed package, like a CERDIP (think Oreo cookie) or a ceramic package. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_in-line_package (However, that article sorta confuses "CERDIPS" with ceramic packages.) Alpha particles were emitted by high-atomic-weight nuclei in the ceramic; purifying that ceramic to remove such elements would have been expensive, negating the advantage of using CERDIP in the first place. Plastic, on the other hand, are made with extremely low atomic-weight elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen) which cannot emit alpha particles. Jim Bell
Punk-Stasi 2.0 wrote:
On Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:22:51 -0800 Razer <g2s@riseup.net> wrote:
Like Tim May, a Santa Cruzer who really didn't give fux for moneygrubbing techie libertards infesting the industry.
your view of may seems pretty idealized. May was a self-described 'anarchocapitalist', he liked the randroid cunt and he got some million dollars* working for flagship americunt govcorp mafia intel.
IIRC I read somewhere that may left the cpunks list because it was renamed/hosted at al-qaeda.net.
he certainly was better educated that the typical rethuglican 'libertarian' but that bar is pretty low.
*not really sure about the figure, maybe around a hundred million dollars?
I don't think he was the typical ancap libertard. Or perhaps he was a 'tard of the times' and the concept has become even more disgustingly perverted (Remember, Mother Earth News first rag-paper issue had an article about Rand corp and techie types becoming nomads in RVs and fleeing the corporate world... A fit with the back to the land hippies of the time) Did you note this in one of my earlier posts? (sj: penal code). The person's name is Jeff. He and Tim used to sit with him on a bench downtown ... Tim wearing a tinfoil tricorner hat and 'x-ray' specs. They may be related.
"There was a middle age 'street person' who used to hang out downtown. Literally lived on one of the benches on North Pacific St. for years. Played guitar well, but never busked... just played to himself. Highly intelligent on a wide variety of subjects but hostile if confronted with information he thought was garbage. One day at the coffee shop his ears perked up when I mentioned Tim and he told me he knew him well. A few days after Tim passed, he disappeared and I haven't seen him since. The guy has been around here doing that 'bench living' gig for literally decades. I do recall seeing them sitting on a bench together once or twice. Does anyone know if Tim had a brother? The guy was too old to be a son. It's just odd that he should have disappeared concurrently with Tim's passing and I wonder if he's related, or had some sort of willed rights to Tim's property."
As far as making millions, like my friend Wally, a Mechanical Engineer for HP in the early 70s who got a big cut of the patent for the measurement system HP used to gauge the flying height of a drive head over a disk, Tim really wasn't interested in being a millionaire nor was it a goal and both GTFO as soon as it happened ... to do what they wanted in life. Wally bought an apple ranch up in the Soquel hills and grows apples for Martinelli Cider in Watsonville for example. He hires Mexicans for better than prevailing wage to pick them. He borrowed a farm truck from one of the big name local growers down by Moss Landing and I'd use it to take the bins down to Watsonville. Martinelli's weighmaster was one of the family daughters. The whole biz is a family operation. Point being people who aren't trying to be rich and do become that have a choice... they can either choose to become a psychopath, or GTFO. Even the guy who wrote the Angry Birds game GTFO.
On Thu, 26 Dec 2019 08:08:31 -0800 Razer <g2s@riseup.net> wrote:
I don't think he was the typical ancap libertard.
Agreed. To state the obvious, while typical 'libertarians' will sing the ode to facebook, google, and the rest of the private stasi, cypherpunks must realize by virtue of being cypherpunks that the private sector is the enemy too. May being a key cypherpunk must have been aware of this little issue...
Or perhaps he was a 'tard of the times' and the concept has become even more disgustingly perverted
yeah, I think political culture or what passes for it has gotten worse. Though on the other hand the US is a slave society 'founded' by slave owners like jefferson and franklin who were the kings of fake libertarianism. So in a sense nothing's changed.
(Remember, Mother Earth News first rag-paper issue had an article about Rand corp and techie types becoming nomads in RVs and fleeing the corporate world... A fit with the back to the land hippies of the time)
Did you note this in one of my earlier posts? (sj: penal code).
Yesh, but I know nothing abou May's family so I didn't comment.
The person's name is Jeff. He and Tim used to sit with him on a bench downtown ... Tim wearing a tinfoil tricorner hat and 'x-ray' specs. They may be related.
That's possible I guess.
As far as making millions, like my friend Wally, a Mechanical Engineer for HP in the early 70s who got a big cut of the patent for the measurement system HP used to gauge the flying height of a drive head over a disk, Tim really wasn't interested in being a millionaire nor was it a goal and both GTFO as soon as it happened ... to do what they wanted in life.
That's certainly more sensible than keep working for govcorp.
Wally bought an apple ranch up in the Soquel hills and grows apples for Martinelli Cider in Watsonville for example. He hires Mexicans for better than prevailing wage to pick them. He borrowed a farm truck from one of the big name local growers down by Moss Landing and I'd use it to take the bins down to Watsonville. Martinelli's weighmaster was one of the family daughters. The whole biz is a family operation.
Nice. Living in the countryside is way better than living in a city.
Point being people who aren't trying to be rich and do become that have a choice... they can either choose to become a psychopath, or GTFO. Even the guy who wrote the Angry Birds game GTFO.
Yes. And leaving the corporate world like your friend and May did is not something that typical 'libertarians' would do.
participants (3)
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jim bell -
Punk-Stasi 2.0 -
Razer