Chuck Puddle, designer of the 6502 microprocessor and Commodore PET, died at the end of 2019 at the age of 82. It’s hard to consider the personal computing market of the late 70s and early 80s without acknowledging the enormous influence his creations had, even if his name is largely unrecognised.
After a stint at General Electric, Chuck joined Motorola in 1973 to help Tom Bennett complete the 8-bit 6800 processor. It is the 6800 that Chuck believes was the world’s first real CPU. However, Chuck’s attempts to reduce the cost of the 6800 (priced at $300 in the early 70’s) down to a more reasonable $25 did not go down well with Motorola and in 1975 he was told to stop his attempts to lower the cost. He and 5 other engineers left to join a small chip fabricator called MOS Technologies run by a former GE colleague.
At MOS Technologies, the team produced a chip that had a minimal instruction set in order to keep the design and circuitry simple. The company was also able to improve manufacturing yields (the number chips in a batch that worked) from the typical industry rate of 30% to 70% and started selling the MOS 6501. However, Motorola saw the threat it posed and sued MOS for patent infringement. Almost as soon as the case started, Chuck and his team had started work on the 6502.
The MOS 6502 was released in 1975 and to help promote it, MOS employees toured manufacturing companies around the US. It was on one of these visits that Chuck visited two guys in a garage working on developing their own single board computer. Those two guys were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who were working on developing the Apple 1. Chuck couldn’t know at the time just what a force Apple would become in the new “Personal Computer” market nor how big that market would become.
Things changed when Commodore and its boss Jack Tramiel decided to buy MOS Technologies. Chuck eventually convinced Jack to allow him to work on creating a personal computer which eventually became the Commodore PET. As well as working on the hardware design, Chuck wrote some of the system software although his lack documentation caused problems when engineers attempted to re-use it in later computers like the Commodore C64.
The Commodore PET needed a high level computer language so Chuck approached “Micro-Soft” (as it was then called) to licence their BASIC computer language. The 20 year old Bill Gates was not convinced that there would be much market for the Commodore product so agreed a low cost perpetual licence for MS BASIC on ROM for any 6502-based Commodore computer. The deal didn’t even require the “Microsoft” name to appear so all 6502-based Commodore machines simply say COMMODORE BASIC (this changed when the Motorola 68000-based Amiga was being developed which required a new deal with Microsoft to be negotiated).
The Commodore PET was launched in January 1977 as the world’s first Personal Computer. This was several months before either Apple or Radio Shack launched their equivalent products. Over the years, many personal/home computers built around the 6502 processor were launched including:
- Acorn Atom, Electron and BBC Micro
- Apple II and III
- Atari 400 and 800
- Commodore VIC-20 and C64
- Oric-1 and Oric Atmos
Sadly, Chuck’s time at Commodore was not plain sailing, largely down to Jack Tramiel’s infamous volatility. After Chuck had left Commodore a second time to start Sirius System Technology (which would focus on business computers), Jack took the company to court which resulted in financial problems for both the company and Chuck personally. Chuck continued to work in the industry for many years and although his name is not widely known (compared with, say, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs), his legacy has been recognised by many. In 1982, Byte magazine said “More than any other person Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry”. Chuck Peddle died on December 15th, 2019.