- [Narrator] It's the 1980s,
a time when we were allowed to leave our homes.
Today, we're gonna be talking about Chuck Peddle,
the man, and the very brown computer.
Chuck Peddle is not a household name,
or at least in the same way
that Jobs and Gates et cetera are.
But he deserves far more recognition
than he's got publicly,
as his work has a huge impact
on the modern world of computing.
For those of you aware of Chuck Peddle,
it's probably due to his work on the 6502 Microprocessor.
Chuck headed the design team of the 6502,
which was hugely successful
in the world of early computing.
To give you some idea,
it's the microprocessor inside the Atari VCS,
the Apple II,
the Commodore PET,
the Commodore 64, the VIC-20, the BBC Micro, the Acorn Atom,
the Nintendo Entertainment System,
the Atari Lynx,
the entire of the Atari 8-bit range,
The Oric-1, the Oric Atmos.
That's not even an exhaustive list
of the machines that that thing was in.
In fact, the 6502 can be found
inside modern systems as well,
as a piece of embedded IP logic inside much larger ICs.
In fact, take apart your modern Flash ATA Drive,
and you'll find there, yeah, there's gonna be a 6502.
Chuck grew up on a farm in Maine,
along with six other siblings.
And while growing up, Chuck's great ambition
was to become a radio announcer.
But after having spent a while working
at the high school radio station,
Chuck realized there was a certain talent of presenting
that he just did not possess,
but it was suggested due to his technical abilities
that Chuck should take up engineering.
Now this stage, Chuck didn't know what kind of engineer
he wanted to become.
So when Chuck went to college,
he took a degree in Engineering Physics.
Chuck credited his primary motivation to go to college
on the fact that before he'd gone to college,
he'd worked pick-and-shovel,
and then seeing that people were kept doing that
for most of their lives generally tended
to not fair too well in later life.
In an interview, Chuck stated
that being at the damn end of a shovel was really hard work.
So therefore, all the stuff that he did in later life
did not feel like hard work in comparison.
While at college, Chuck signed up for a module called
Information Theory taught by Claude Shannon,
who is known for inventing both the words bit and byte.
It was this module that set Chuck on the course
that he'd spend the rest of his life following.
From college, Chuck moved on to work for GE.
Now, Chuck had many roles in GE.
One of his first mainly was involved in the team
that was creating some of the very first hard disks.
As part of that team, Chuck got a patent
for inventing zone bit recording,
which is a technique used in modern hard drives still
to this day,
and it would be a technique that Chuck could later employ
when working for both Commodore and the Sirius.
After a number of roles inside GE,
Chuck moved to their tail end point of sales team.
And while part of this team, he was approached by Exxon,
who at the time was one of the largest operators
of petrol stations in the U. S,
or gas stations if you're American,
'cause I still have no idea why you call them that.
I mean, it's liquid not a gas.
Yeah, but most of the point,
Chuck designed the system for Exxon,
where instead of everything going back
to a central mini computer somewhere,
you had a certain amount
of distributed intelligence onsite,
i.e. the till itself was actually a small computer,
that could handle information from the pumps
and pass the display information out,
as well as having a card reading machine.
In other words,
Chuck had basically come up with the way
that all modern till systems work,
but at this time, yeah,
it was just uniquely Chuck's idea at this point.
He presented this to the board of GE,
who then informed him that they were shutting down
the computer division.
So, Chuck chose to take early retirement from GE
and start his own business,
producing the kind of till systems that he envisaged.
With this new company,
Chuck designed all the hardware you need for the tills
and card readers, et cetera.
However, he realized in order to be able to deliver this
at an affordable price point,
he was gonna need LSI, Large Scale Integration
to create the kind of processing elements
that this system was gonna need.
LSI is basically what we think of
as the modern microchip these days.
And at the time that Chuck was looking into it,
this was a very new technology.
And more importantly from Chuck's point of view,
a very expensive technology.
Now, if you've got to this point in the video,
you're probably gonna guess that
this is not the sort of thing that Chuck
was gonna let stand in his way.
No, Chuck came with a plan.
Chuck was gonna go work for another company
who had the kind of money that could do LSI
and create the technology
that he'd need for his own business.
So Chuck headed off to Motorola.
When Chuck joined Motorola,
Motorola had already started work
on one of the very first microprocessors, the 6800.
Chuck joined that team,
but the design was already well advanced by the time
that Chuck became part of it.
So, the first idea that Chuck got to introduce
to that processor was that
of the non-maskable interrupt.
This meant the processor would be able
to do real time operations,
'cause something could interpret what the processor
was doing, and nothing else would be able to get
in the way of that interrupt.
So, you'd handle some real-time data arriving
at a particular moment in time.
The other idea Chuck introduced was in the form
of a set for a chip called the PIA.
Now, this may actually be Chuck's biggest contribution
to the world of modern computing, even Chuck felt so,
'cause this is basically
how all modern memory mapped I/O works.
The PIA chip is essentially what mapped all input/output
into memory space, so the processor could deal with it.
While Chuck came up with the idea,
a fellow young engineer, Bill Mensch,
actually created all the hardware for this
and did all the transistor logic.
Remember that name,
he's gonna be quite important later on in this story.
With the 6800 being one
of the world's first microprocessors,
there wasn't exactly a ready made market
just sitting there, wanting to buy microprocessors.
So, Motorola had to get out there
and start selling it to people.
So, that's what Chuck did.
Motorola sent him out to large firms
where he could sit and talk to their engineers
and explained to them what the microprocessor is
and how they could use it,
and a little bit of software
to replace a lot of logic in designs
that they were already doing.
However, one of the bits of feedback Chuck kept getting
from these engineers
was that $300, 6800 and it's supporting chip set
was far too expensive for them to use as a logic replacement
in their designs.
And let's remember, this was 300 in 1970s dollars.
That's a lot of dollars in today's money.
Yes, check out who can be bothered
looking that up in an inflation calculator.
So, armed with that knowledge,
Chuck did what Chuck does,
which is come up with an engineering solution
to that problem.
Yes, Chuck started working on a lower cost version
of the 6800,
talking to engineers about what functions
of the chip they really needed,
and working out how he could shrink the die size.
However, this did not go down well with the sales team
of the 6800,
who felt that Chuck's work was undermining them.
They then sent a letter to Motorola's management
who decided to send a letter to Chuck,
ordering him to stop all work
on the new low cost processor.
Now, this is where Chuck was a bit cunny.
Lots of engineers would have just said,
"oh, well, fair enough."
And got back on with the day job, but not Chuck.
No, Chuck wrote them a letter back.
And Chuck said he classed this as project abandonment,
and that all the intellectual property developed so far
would now become his property
and that he would continue developing this chip
and doing no other development work for Motorola,
but he would still go on the sales visits.
Now, let's be honest if you and I tried to pull that trick.
We'd probably get a letter
that goes along the lines of, no.
But this was Chuck and Motorola, they agreed.
So, Chuck started his own company and started
to design a new processor.
At the same time,
Motorola wanted to move Chuck's team to Austin, Texas.
And luckily for Chuck, quite a few of the good engineers
did not wanna live in Austin, Texas.
So, Chuck was able to push them away from Motorola,
including of course, Bill Mensch.
See, told you that name would be important in a moment.
Now, with his design team in place
for what would become the 6502,
Chuck needed to find himself a silicon partner,
so he could get this thing made.
Now, former boss of Chuck's called John Paivinen
had gone to work for a new silicon place
in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania called MOS Technology.
This should not of course, be confused
with MOSTEC an entirely different company,
which is the first one Chuck approached to partner up with,
but they were afraid that Motorola would sue Chuck
and they didn't wanna deal with Motorola.
So, with their new silicon partner in place,
Chuck and team could get on with designing
their processor while their silicon partner got on
with coming up with a new silicon process to produce
this chip in.
Between them,
they also worked out the size of die they needed in order
to hit the $5 mass manufacturing cost
that they'd have to get in order to get
this low cost processor up to market.
Chuck headed up this processor design team
while Bill Mensch did all the layout for the silicon,
and they designed their new processor,
as well as their own version of the PIA,
and also a timer chip, as well
that would eventually become the VIA timer.
So, come 1975, MOS Technology was able
to unveil their brand new processor and chip sets
to the world, 6501.
A fully pink compatible replacement for the 6800.
And then they were promptly sued by Motorola.
Yup, turns out MOS Tech were right.
Motorola was none too happy about that
being a pin for pin like with their own chip.
So they sued MOS Technologies,
who soon decided that, okay they'll change their chip.
And then the 6502 was born.
Now in order to demonstrate the 6502,
Chuck created his first ever computer, the KIM-1.
This was a single board machine with a hex keypad
where you could enter data directly into RAM
and then execute your program.
It was a fairly simple effect,
but demonstrated the 6502 very nicely
and was not much less sophisticated
than most of the other microcomputers available at the time.
It sold pretty well to hobbyists,
but demonstrated the capabilities of the 6502,
which led to other would-be computer designers,
wanting to lay their hands on the chip,
including the likes of Steve Wozniak.
It was during this period when working for MOS,
that Chuck persuaded then Commodore boss, Jack Tramiel,
to instead of resolving his supply issues
for calculated chips with TI,
to move into the computer business.
After initially discussing purchasing Apple computers,
Jack decided to go his own way and commission Chuck Peddle
and team to design Commodore's first microcomputer,
Commodore PET.
Originally produced in 1976,
but made generally available in 1977,
the Commodore PET was one of three significant computers
released during that period of time.
There was the PET, the TRS-80, and the Apple II.
Of those three computers,
two of them were using the 6502
that Chuck Peddle designed.
After Mos Technologies was taken over by Commodore,
Chuck Peddle and Chris Fish, both from MOS,
decided that they start their own computer company,
Sirius Systems Technology.
They even got funding from John Paivinen,
one of MOS Technology's bosses,
who'd made quite a bit of money
where MOS had been sold to Commodore.
It was at this company
that Chuck designed his third computer,
the beautiful lump of brown plastic you see in front of us.
Yes, the Sirius S1, or as it was known in Europe,
The Victor 9000.
I mean, just look at this thing, it's just so brown.
Now, despite the fact
that it had quite a seventies design aesthetic,
for the time, this was a thoroughly modern microcomputer.
It's design bears a number of similarities
to that of the IBM PC.
But of course it was no IBM PC clone.
Whilst designing this thing,
Chuck and team had no idea about the IBM PC
or what shape it was gonna come in.
So, they came to a loss
of the same engineering decisions,
but arrived at via their own path.
In fact, in quite a few ways,
The Victor 9000 is somewhat superior to IBM's offering.
Now, obviously you're not gonna let me get away
with a statement like that without justifying it
in some way, but the main thing it had going for it,
the cleverest feature of all,
was that of its disk drive.
The five and a quarter inch drive,
a regular PC could handle about 360K maximum
on the floppy disk.
Whereas The Victor 9000,
well on the same disk, it could get over a meg.
Now, both sound like pathetically small amount
to us in this day and age,
but over a meg of storage in the early eighties.
Well, that was quite a lot of storage
on a single floppy drive.
You could get some serious work done with that thing.
As Chuck was fond of mentioning in various speeches,
you could run a whole payroll department
for like 10, 12 people on this thing,
which obviously was actually quite a big deal back then.
I mean, it was all done by paperwork before computers.
So yeah, this was a step up
it did not sell fantastically well in the U.S.
but inside Europe, it sold well.
I mean, look, here's it being used in Buzzer Rack.
I mean nothing says success like being in an episode
of Buzzer Rack,
it didn't just sell well
on the aisle of Jersey that she did well
in the UK, in Germany
and a number of other European territories.
Again, one of its key appeals being
that floppy disk drive system that we can see here
in front of us.
Now electronically this best quite a lot of similarities
to Commodore's test drive design,
which shouldn't surprise you 'cause guess what?
Yep, Chuck peddle came up with that one
and he came up with this one
and it used the whole magnetic zone recording system
he'd come up with while he was at GE.
See, told you that little fact could be useful later on,
it's got a couple of other little quirks in it's designed.
If you have a look around the back,
you can see that the monitor has no power supply
that's 'cause the display connector actually provides power
into the monitor as well.
She's well kinda neat to be honest.
Now The Victor 9,000 was made available
with both CPM and MS-DOS.
And despite the fact that MS-DOS
is definitely not PC compatible
and when PCs landed in Europe,
follow by the clones,
The Victor 9,000 was seen as more well just that
not very good IBM PC clone by a number of people
which really started to hurt sales.
Following the decline in sales
unfortunately the Sirius Computer Company went bust,
but don't worry that's not the end
of the story for Chuck peddle.
It was one of the final things he did with his career.
Chuck came up with a new chip
that would be used in modern flash drives.
He created that chip with the Western Design Center,
a company started by a longterm colleague, Bill Mensch,
and it's even got a little 6502 embedded in it.
So right up to the end,
Chuck was still helping define the modern world
in which we all live.
Now I'd love to be able to show you
this Victor 9000 all booted up
and showing off its various operating systems.
Unfortunately, I'm missing some disks for this thing.
And that these days is one of the problems
with the clever clever drive controller
that made this thing a success in the first place.
It's somewhat disk format.
You see the disk would run at different speeds
depending on where their head was on the disk.
Very few other computers did that,
which means that these days I can't use a modern computer
to write out that kind of disk,
the only thing I can copy that sort of disk on
is another Victor 9000
And I'm not even allowed to leave the house
to visit my parents,
leave alone go find someone with a Victor 9000
and copy it's boot disks.
So I'm afraid this one's gonna have to wait
until we're all allowed back out of our houses again.
And God knows when that's gonna be.
So unfortunately it means that's it for this video.
We have to leave it here.
Once again, thank you all for watching.
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