Author Topic: Chuck Peddle dies at 82; his $25 chip helped start the PC age  (Read 841 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Online Elderberry

  • TBR Contributor
  • *****
  • Posts: 24,281
Chuck Peddle dies at 82; his $25 chip helped start the PC age
« on: December 26, 2019, 01:19:46 am »
Houston Chronicle by Cade Metz 12/25/2019

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 Dec. 15 at his home in Santa Cruz, California. He was 82.

His partner, Kathleen Shaeffer, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

In 1974, Peddle and several other engineers were designing a new silicon chip at the Motorola Corp. in Phoenix when the company sent him a letter demanding that he shut the project down.

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 Peddle moved the project to MOS Technology, a rival chipmaker near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 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.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/techburger/article/Chuck-Peddle-Dies-at-82-His-25-Chip-Helped-14931107.php


My first computer, the SYM-1, had a 6502.