Chuck Peddle Passes

[Razer]

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

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