The Legendary Chuck Peddle, Inventor of The Personal Computer

Written by Ian Matthews January 22 2006 – Last updated January 3 2020

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

Motorola 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.

Chuck 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

Jack 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.

The 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

Yet 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

In 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

I 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!  Dec 2019 – Chuck Peddle passed away on December 15 2019.   This is a great loss for the industry and on a personal level for us at www.Commodore.ca

 

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NOTES:

January 2020: We want to clarifiy the claim that MOS/Commodore produced the first single board computer, the KIM1.  There were many single board machines prior to the KIM1, but none contained an integrated input (keyboard) and output (screen).   The SOL, NOVA and others were lovely computers but NOT single board computers.   Thanks to Maury M for requesting this clarification.

Intel 8086 vs 8088

The difference between an Intel 8088 and and the more powerful 8086 is that the 8088 only has an 8 bit bus so it needs to load two eight bit “words” before it can process its 16 bit package.

6502

A huge but partial list of MOS 6502 based devices can be found HERE.

More

Our original Chuck Peddle page is available HERE if you still want more Chuck!

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NOTE 1 – January 2020: We want to clarifiy the claim that MOS/Commodore produced the first single board computer, the KIM1.  There were many single board machines prior to the KIM1, but none contained an integrated input (keyboard) and output (screen).   The SOL, NOVA and others were lovely computers but NOT single board computers.   Thanks to Maury M for requesting this clarification.