Chuck Peddle
Written by Ian Matthews January 22 2006 – Last updated Nov 23 2018
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Chuck Peddle is an inventor, engineer and entrepreneur of highest class. His
rich early history mirrors that of Commodore; hugely important successes through
the 60’s 70’s and early 80’s, followed by late 80’s and 90’s turmoil. Today he,
like Commodore, is in an exciting new phase developing fresh technology
concepts.
I have been fortunate enough to interview Chuck at length
several times in early 2006 and that is where the bulk of the content below came
from. He is a quite a character and quite a contrarian, which probably explains
his success. If he ‘followed the pack’ he would not have invented or been part
of so many important technological advances.
CHUCK’S A NEWFIE! (sort of)
Even Chuck’s family history is interesting. Like Commodore, Chuck Peddle has
Canadian roots. His family emigrated from the UK and setup in Newfoundland of
all places. Chuck proclaims with a smile “We’re Newfie’s” He still contacts
people named “Peddle” when he visits the region.
The family name is
actually “Piddle”, named after the river that ran through his ancestral town.
However, after moving to Canada, his grandfather discovered that “piddle” is
slang for urinate and so he changed it to Peddle. Newfoundland was hard on the
family as work was scarce and so the family moved to Bangor Maine, US.
Chuck graduated as an Engineer, from University of Maine in 1960 but had only
been introduced to Information Theory (binary & algebraic concepts) in his final
year. “I just fell in love, this is where I was going to spend my life”.
His first notable job was at General Electric in 1961 where he implemented the
new concept of Time Sharing Main Frame computing power and developing the
Electronic Cash Register. But by 1970 GE decided there was not enough money in
computers anymore so they gave Chuck and three colleagues a severance package
which they promptly used to start their own cash register development business.
While Chucks new team was able to develop important concepts, like the
credit card driven gas pump and the electronic cash register, they did not have
the funding to get product to market. “It’s too bad we did not patent the shit
out if it, because we could have been very wealthy as a result.” Chuck had also
decided to marry his partners beautiful ex-wife which caused a strain. “I just
could not stay with the company so we put it to sleep… we did not kill it.”
Chuck interviewed at and was offered a position with Texas Instruments. He
was to “do the Air Traffic Control system. …TI had the biggest fastest computer…
they were the top of the industry”. He also interviewed with Motorola “…to build
the 6800 which was the lowest end of the industry… where (his) heart was”.
MOTOROLA DEVELOPS THE WORLDS FIRST MICROPROCESSOR
In 1973, Chuck took the
job at Motorola under Tom Bennett who needed help to completing the legendary
6800 microprocessor. Chuck needed the job and so he made a deal to work for
Motorola: he would help complete the chip and then take the concepts back to his
own company. Chuck not only fixed several key problems with the 6800 but also
developed many of the support chips required to drive it.
It is important
to note that Chuck believes that the worlds first microprocessor is not the much
ballyhooed Intel 4004 or 8008, “(I am) not trying to be negative about the guys
that did it… they are nothing more than calculator chips”. He believes the
worlds first real CPU is Tom Bennett’s 8bit Motorola 6800 “…it’s terrible that
guy never got any credit.”
At this time, you have to remember that there
was no such thing as personal computers and most technical staff in large
corporations would not have authority to work on main frames. As the lead
technical engineer, Chuck was often tasked with explaining the capabilities of
this new wonder, the microprocessor, to large industrial manufactures like Ford
and Unisys. After one of Chuck’s one day courses, Engineers were always
impressed with the potential for such a device but at US$300 ($1350 in 2018
Dollars!) would almost always say it was far to expensive for their application.
Chuck started to asked Motorola’s customers the price they thought it would be
possible to put a microprocessors into their mass market products; $25 ($110 in
2018 dollars) came up as the magic number.
MOTOROLA SAYS STOP & CHUCK
SAYS “GOTTA GO”
As one might guess, discussing a $25 version of a $300
successful product, did not impress Motorola management. Conversely, failure to
pursue an obviously improved product did not impress Motorola engineers. Without
so much as a phone call for warning, Chuck received an ominous formal letter
from Motorola management telling him to stop pursuing a cost reduced version of
the then 6800. Most people would be intimidated but such a formal reprimand but
remember that Chuck’s plan was to leave Motorola after he saw the 6800 to
fruition. He seized the opportunity and immediately “…wrote a letter back saying
that (Motorola’s) letter was notice of product abandonment…” and that he “…would
not work on that chip for Motorola any more but (he) would continue to work on
it for (himself)”.
Today there are engineering design houses, like
RAMBUS, that produce nothing but engineering concepts and patents, but back then
if you were a chip designer you had to work for a company that actually
fabricated the chips (a “fab”.) In 1975, just a few months after Chucks letter
exchange, he took Bill Mensch and five other key Motorola 6800 engineers to work
for an old General Electric colleague, John Pavinen who ran a small “fab” called
MOS Technologies.
Chuck said he gave the engineers a “..tight list…”
of features to build into the chip along with a fixed die size. To get to the
$25 price they need to produce only the instructions that its customers would
required, nothing extra. It contained some of the 6800 concepts but nothing that
was patented. It was to be a newer, enhanced, faster CPU.
THE $25 CHIP
In the 1970’s, 70% of the industries chip production were defective and
therefore costly garbage. MOS invented a process to correct chips before they
entered primary manufacturing stage and as a result was able to produce with an
astonishing 70% success rate (yield). This obviously reduced the per chip cost
of manufacturing and made the $25 processor a possibility.
During our
2006 interview Chuck explained that selling a dramatically less expensive CPU
was not as easy as it sounded. A few years earlier there had been a high profile
scam involving a company that claimed it could produce mainframe terminals it
would lease for just $10 per month. The company had went bankrupt in a cloud of
scandal after taking millions of dollars from investors, and blamed the failure
on industries inability to produce cheap chips.
In an effort to drum up
interest in the chip they ran an advert stating that anyone could not only see,
but they could buy the amazing $25 microprocessor at the WestCon (Western
Electronics Show and Convention) in 1975. Unfortunately, when MOS arrived at the
show they were told that, in an effort the keep the show ‘high brow’, exhibitors
were not allowed to sell product at their booths. Chuck quickly rented a nearby
hotel room and had is very attractive wife, sit at a table with two glass jars
full of newly minted MOS 6501’s. Little did the buyers know that all of the
chips in the bottom of those jars were defective. “Image is everything”, Chuck
says.
MOTOROLA’S ANGER: A BLESSING IN DISGUISE
In June of 1975, soon
after the show, Motorola realized they had turned their engineers into their
competition. Motorola got mad and sued MOS for infringement of 6800 patents.
Chuck said “…there was no substance to their claims…” but it scared the old line
industry management at Allen-Bradley – the then owner of MOS Technology. “As
soon as lawyers got involved, they wanted out.” said Chuck. As a shock to
everyone, Allen-Bradley walked away from MOS and basically gave it to the
existing MOS management team. “It was a leveraged buy out and I probably had
some ownership at some point but it was all lost in subsequent transactions.”
A STAR IS BORN: MOS 6502
MOS_6502Motorola may not have had a solid legal
case but they did have something that MOS did not, money. It did not take long
for Chucks team to kill the 6501 and in September of 1975 they replaced it with
non-pin compatible version the called the 6502. “(The 6501) was never supposed
to be a real product anyway… it was just for demo’s.” The suit dragged on a for
a few years and MOS eventually settled the claims with a $200,000 payment to
Motorola.
Chuck designed two 6502 trainers call the TIM-1 (Terminal Input
Monitor) and KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor) to teach engineers how to use this
great new microprocessor. Without intending to, Chuck had built the worlds first
single board computers. Tens of thousands of KIM-1’s would be sold to budding
engineers in companies and colleges all the way through 1980.
Over the
previous few years Chuck had met with hundreds of computer enthusiasts,
educational institutions and main frame corporate users. He learned that “…what
people wanted was a computer that looked like a terminal.” The concept of the
stand alone, fully assembled, ‘Personal Computer’ was born.
In an effort
to start sales of the 6502, MOS staff ran though a quick tour of the US,
dropping into see major manufacturing companies like Ford. On the trip Peddle
was told that two young guys working in their garage wanted some help using the
6502. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were working on the first Apple and Chuck was
happy to lend a hand even though he did not design the 6500 line for computer
use. “…not in a million years… it was supposed to go into industrial and
consumer products.” Little did Chuck know that the computer business would
quickly become the mass market consumer product he was targeting.
THE
WORLDS FIRST PERSONAL COMPUTER: THE COMMODORE PET
Chuck went on to meet with
Radio Shack but was unsuccessful at selling his Personal Computer concept to
them.
At this time Commodore was MOS’ largest customer as there main
product line was still calculator chips. When the calculator market collapsed in
1975 Commodore decided to buy MOS. All of a sudden, MOS had access to money and
a visionary leader, Jack Tramiel. Tramiel knew about the 6502 and after a few
conversations with Chuck, he saw the future. However, Tramiel was concerned
about developing the product from scratch. They entered negotiations to buy
Apple but would not meet the $150,000 price set by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Jack then approved the development of what would become the Commodore PET. He
even promised to pay Chuck a bonus of $1 for every PET sold. That and so many
other Tramiel promises were never paid.
Chuck purchased a little book on
how to build your own television written by the legendary Adam Osborne and
“…Fujiyama Oogi contracted a company to make a chassis out of wood.” Using a
motherboard based on the 6502 processor he designed and built the worlds first
Personal Computer which would later be named the Commodore PET. Explaining how
cutting edge this concept was and how unprepared they were, Chuck said “The
first time we turned it on, the image was upside down… we got Adam’s book out to
figure out how to turn it…”
Chuck even wrote the machine language code to
handle the integrated tape cassette that was used as storage on the PET. “The
others didn’t ****** work.” Chuck said of his competitions tape systems. Much to
the bane of Engineers who developed Commodore’s future computers, like the C64,
he never documented that work. Over the years, several engineers were assigned
to either document that sub-system or re-write but all attempts failed. Chuck
said that a complex web of “…lots of error detection…” and mechanical
instruction meant that “fixing” one thing always caused some other problem. He
was writing code “…while watching an oscilloscope”. Manual tuning made it work.
During our face to face interview with him, it was apparent that that code is
still one of Chucks proudest achievements.
THE BIGGEST DEAL IN COMPUTER
HISTORY
To work as a “Terminal” did, the PET needed a built in operating
system and a high level language. At this time, Microsoft’s big product was
BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). The problem was there
was no copy protection and many users just stole it by making illegal copies.
Gates wrote a now famous Open Letter to the Homebrew Club demanding that they
stop stealing his software.
paul-allen_bill-gates_commodore_PETChuck
naturally turned to Micro-Soft and worked with one of their new hires, Rick
Wyland, to develop a version of BASIC that could be built into hardware called a
ROM (Read Only Memory). Even though this version would be difficult to steal
Gates was not happy because he was sure Chuck’s concept was not going to be
successful. Chuck tells of a 1976 trip to Microsoft’s small office, the in
Albuquerque. Gates had told Wyland to “…just get rid of it… he thought is was a
waist of time…” Chuck’s explains “Gates was not a visionary…” and the quickly
follows up with a respectful “…Hell, who is at 20 years old?”. As a result,
Chuck made a deal that would become legend: at that meeting, he negotiated a
stunning unlimited usage, perpetual licence for MS BASIC on ROM for any 6502
based Commodore computer. Out of respect for Bill Gates, Chuck does not want the
stunningly low price published, but we can say that over the 20 years Commodore
used that licence, it cost them less than a penny per machine. As part of that
deal Commodore could enhance Microsoft’s BASIC as long as they gave the updates
to Microsoft.
As evidence of Gate’s apathy Chuck points out that
Microsoft did not even require their name to be shown anywhere in the product.
When you boot up any Commodore computer manufactured prior to the Commodore 128,
the machine will display a simple COMMODORE BASIC screen. Not until Commodore
required a new version of Microsoft Basic, for their non-6502 based Amiga, was
Microsoft able effect any change to the original contract. Part of the Amiga
deal required all future computers models, including the soon to be released
128, to use the the Microsoft name in the boot up screen.
In January of
1977 Commodore showed the worlds first Personal Computer, the Commodore PET, at
the West Coast Computer Faire. Chuck had beat Apple by six months and Radio
Shack by four months.
Chuck tells a great story about trying to sell the 6502 CPU’s to Atari. Atari
was so worried about industrial espionage that they sequestered their top
engineers to a remote complex on a dirt road, several hours from Los Angeles.
Chuck packed he and his wife for brief holiday and made plans to stop in to see
this top secret Atari think tank on the way. Atari’s Steve Mayor was working on
three options for their new machine and one of designs called for a 6502, an IO
chip and a custom chip. Atari wanted him to produce the 6502 and the IO chip for
just $12. By this time MOS’ production cost on those two chips was just $4 and
so it was easy to agree. There only problem with the deal was the tight ‘Non
Disclosure Agreement’ “…the kind that would punch out your first and second
children. I knew what (Atari) was doing but could not say anything.” One of MOS’
projects was going to eclipsed by Atari. Chuck simply told some MOS staff to
“give up, start again” but could not tell them why. Commodore’s CEO, was famous
for breaking his contracts and when I pressed Chuck on this matter I was
surprised to here him say “Jack Tramiel never stole anything from anybody to my
knowledge”. The Atari 400 and 800 were announced in December of 1978.
JACK ATTACKS
mos_commodore_bulding_signJack Tramiel was an exceptionally
tough man to work for and well was know for yelling fits dubbed “Jack Attacks”.
Chuck quit Commodore twice in the late 1970’s. Each time he walked away from
potentially millions of dollars in stock options and unpaid promises (like $1
for each PET). The first time, he went to work for Apple as what was billed to
be their Lead Development Engineer. In an April 2006 interview with
Commodore.ca, Bill Mensch explained “Chuck didn’t do well with structure… he
clashed at Motorola and at Apple.” Apples culture was cold and regimented; not
well suited for a man of action like Chuck and after a few months he returned to
MOS / Commodore. The last time Chuck returned to Commodore, Tramiel set up an
R&D facility in Moore Park, Los Gatos, California so he could lead a small group
of R&D engineers.
MUTINY IN LONDON
In these days before the IBM PC,
Chuck spearheaded a group of Commodore managers who wanted to replace the aging
fleet of PET computers with a line of real business machines. At a fateful April
1980 meeting in London England, Tramiel was late and the group made the mistake
of openly considering splitting the company into to parts, a consumer division
and a business division. Chuck knew that Tramiel’s heart and expertise was in
the consumer line and Chuck felt it was only natural that he would lead the
business line. When Jack arrived and found out what was going on, he wrongly
interpreted the meeting as a mutiny. “Or maybe it was?” says Chuck. Jack was
furious and Chuck was going to take the brunt. The next day Jack ordered the
Moore Park facility closed and the staff to be relocated to Commodore’s head
office in Pennsylvania. Chuck had had enough and quit for the last time.
GET SIRIUS
This time Chuck had stayed long enough to accrue a small fortune
in Commodore stock options and used some of that wealth and his industry clout
to start a new venture. “Sirius System Technology” was to design and manufacture
a real business desktop computer. Chuck took many of MOS’ / Commodore’s top
engineers and one of Commodores financiers, Chris Fish, with him. Jack was not
amused and began litigation against Chuck effectively claiming that Sirius was
stealing Commodore patented technology and that he personally had not earned his
stock options.
By the early 1980’s Tramiel’s Commodore was so ‘law suite
happy’ that a joke inside the company was that the legal department had become a
profit center. Chuck explains “The strategy is just to slow you down… give them
time to catch up”. Chuck was sure he was in the right but in the end Sirius lost
to Commodore’s enormous legal power and was forced to pay fines. Worse, Chuck
personally had to return his Commodore stock options. In a 2005 interview for
the book The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore, Chuck said of Tramiel
“(Jack) destroyed me, he destroyed my family, he did all kinds of terrible
things”.
Chuck wanted to do what Commodore had failed at: have a real
presence in the US. Coincidentally Victor Monroe, a major player in the
calculator business and told Chuck “we want to play; we think computers are
going to take off.” Sirius needed money and distribution so they made a deal to
sell machines in US exclusively to Victor. Victor was to order a set number of
machines on a schedule.
European_sirius_computer-advictor_9000-computer-1983_print_adThe Sirius was a
$5000 ($10,000 in 2018 dollars) 16Bit business computer with a hard drive,
manufactured Scotts Valley, California. Every key could be programmed and fonts
could be changed. Click HERE for a Byte Magazines full review of the Victor
9000.
At a time when many people still did not know what a computer
really was, Chuck had envisioned storage requirements that we take for granted
today. Again, Chuck worked with Microsoft to develop his 16 Bit power machine.
Unfortunately Bill Gates did not see a need for a hard drive and after months of
disagreement, Sirius wrote some of the code to support Hard Drives and gave it
to Microsoft. That was the major improvement in MS-DOS 1.2.
Chuck used a
16Bit Intel 8088 CPU (with support for an optional Intel 8087 math co-processor)
and had a myriad of drive configurations. Both single (620Kb) or double sided
(1.2MB) floppy disks and 10MB and 30MB hard disks could be shipped. It even had
four internal expansion ports, two RS232 (com) ports and powerful graphics,. The
machine had either 128K or 256K of RAM from the factory but could upgraded to a
massive 896KB. It ran both Garry Kildal’s CP/M-86 which was what most business
applications were built on at that time and MS-DOS 1.2. A more complete
specification is available here.
For a sales force, Sirius plundered
nearly the entire European Mannesmann Tally team. That team put together an
advertising campaign that “… won awards and put us on the map… a phenomenally
successful campaign”. The team told him “People relate to animals. Computers are
mysterious.” The paper ad’s showed “…a picture of a dinosaur with a caption like
‘things that don’t adapt, die’…”. The following pages showed a series of
friendly animals linked to the Sirius features. For instance a picture of an
Elephant would have a tag line relating to the Sirius’ large memory
capabilities. The problem was that it was very expensive. “We bet the company.”
Chuck recalls, still with a tone of nervousness all these years later.
IBM COMPATIBILITY
IBM_PCYet again Chuck was first, if only by a few weeks.
When IBM released its $3000 ($8000 in 2018 dollars) PC without even a hard drive
in September of 1981, their marketing strategy was to push “compatibility”.
Sirius sold their machine as a Victor 9000 in North America and a Sirius S1 in
Europe where it received some commercial success as IBM did not release their PC
until the fall of 1982 because of manufacturing delays. IBM had been pushing
nothing but compatibility and the Sirius wasn’t. “We just ran out of time to get
it done. No… I just didn’t make it a priority.” Chuck had just signed an
important deal with GM when he had his final meeting with Ford. “He said to me,
‘there is no question it’s better; its just not better enough.” This was the
beginning of the end of Sirius.
THE SECOND WORST DECISION
“We got a
call from Victor saying, we can’t take any more… you guys have to downsize”.
Victor was (and is) a calculator company backed by the Walter Kidde Corporation
which just could not expand their business model to include computers. Victor
was much larger than Sirius. “I made the second worst decision of my life… We
decided to buy Victor from Walter Kidde” Chuck says. Sirius sold off the Victor
calculator business but “…incorporated as Victor because people buy stock in
names they know”.
“Sirius (was) burning up Europe… killing the (IBM) PC”
Chucks states indignantly. In addition to a solid sales record Chuck points out
that Sirius “had a paid up Microsoft licence and computer parts other companies
had shortages of”.
In November of 1982, Byte Magazine said “…the chief
designer of Victor’s machine is not a novice but Chuck Peddle, a founder of the
microcomputer industry who knows how to bring maximum performance to the market
at an affordable price”. By March 1983, IBM caught up when they released the
legendary XT. That year the company renamed itself “Victor Technologies” and
fired 600 employees.
In the second quarter of 1983 they arranged for
bridge financing from a investment banker. Chuck ended up with $3 million worth
of stock which caused “greed over good sense. We were to take the company public
too early…” Kidde convinced Sirius’ CFO to take a loan to pay off the bridge
money and when that loan was unexpectedly called early, Sirius was instantly
insolvent.
On December 17th 1984, bankrupt Victor Technologies sold their
assets for $28 million ($61 million in 2018 dollars) to the Stockholm based
company Datatronic which, ironically, was a successful European Distributor for
Commodore at the time. Datatronic continued to develop and produce the Sirius
for some time. Today the Sirius still has a UK Sirius Users Group and THIS page
provides a complete Victor / Sirius technical manual.
THE TANDON YEARS
tandon_computer_manualIn 1985 Chuck went to work for his old friend Jugi
(pronounced jug-e) Tandon and started to build IBM PC clones. At one point in
the late 1980’s Tandon Computers was Europe’s largest manufacturer of clones.
Chuck credits Tandon’s use of non-standard chassis for some of their success. By
1991 they had 1100 employees and sales of $400 million. However, in 1993 Tandon
was bankrupt and Chuck went on to work with the residue of that company. Today
he is the Chief Technology Officer Celetron (which has over 5000 employees) and
is still involved in patenting important new technology concepts. He lives a
global traveler life style spending most of his time between Nevada, Sri Lanka
and India.
ON A PERSONAL LEVEL
chuck-peddle-2005I first met Chuck
during CES 2006 in Las Vegas and found him to be a personable, friendly, 68 year
old. We talked until after 3am and he was surprisingly complimentary to his
contemporaries, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Jack Tramiel. About the most
mean spirited comment I have heard him make is “There is nothing nice about
Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates. Gates is a good man”. Make no
mistake; Chuck was firm and had strong opinions about these people, but he never
once tried to take more credit than I thought he was due.
Chuck Peddle is
a legend in the industry who some insiders credit for their success. As an
example of this, during one of Bill Gates 50th birthday speeches, he mentioned
Chuck by name. One of Bill Mensch’s comments was “He understood the market and
has the vision”. The combination of the 6502, the KIM1 and the Commodore PET
leads many observers to credit Peddle with the lofty title: Father of the
Personal Computer.
Chuck Peddle deserves much more credit for inventing
the Personal Computer than he has received to date. In 1982 influential Byte
magazine said “More than any other person Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the
founder of the personal computer industry”. He changed all our lives. His
inventions and vision drove Commodore (and to a lesser degree Apple) to their
early success while making massive entrenched companies like IBM sit up and take
note.
We at Commodore.ca wish him all the best in his future endeavors
and look forward to benefiting from his new inventions. To this day, Chuck still
responds to our questions and is as friendly as ever. THANKS CHUCK!
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