Historical Document · 2014
Oral History of Chuck Peddle (2014)
Peddle on Motorola, the 6800, MOS Technology, the 6502, the KIM-1 and the Commodore PET.
Historical Document · 2014
Peddle on Motorola, the 6800, MOS Technology, the 6502, the KIM-1 and the Commodore PET.
Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Interviewed by: Douglas Fairbairn and Stephen Diamond Recorded: June 12, 2014 Mountain View, California CHM Reference number: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Doug Fairbairn: OK. So it's June 12, 2014. We're here at the Computer History Museum. I'm Doug Fairbairn and we're talking with Chuck Peddle, who's the creator of a number of very important things in the microprocessor and personal computer and other things we'll be discussing as part of this oral history. So Chuck, we're delighted to have you here. And thank you for coming over and spending the time with us. Chuck Peddle: Yeah I'd like to go on record right now saying what you guys are doing-- the idea about getting all the old men to come over and talk-- is a great idea. I don't know who came up with it, but it really is something that needs to happen. And it's consistent with-- Fairbairn: Well thank you. Peddle: --it's consistent with what you're doing with the museum. But catching these guys while they're still alive-- I suspect you thought probably Jobs brought it home to you. Stephen Diamond: Well we actually didn't get Jobs in an oral history like this-- Peddle: That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Fairbairn: --but that's an example. Peddle: Yeah, I think that may have been one of the things that triggered you starting it. Because he died pretty young, right? And all of a sudden-- Noyce was dead. Right? You got Moore, though, I hope. Fairbairn: Yeah, we got Moore. Peddle: OK. Fairbairn: The museum actually started 10 or 12 years ago collecting oral histories like this, long before the physical museum was here. But it becomes clearer and clearer as time goes by that we're trying to accelerate the pace because so many of the early pioneers are passing on. Peddle: Yeah. It's just such a great idea that I'm glad you thought of it. Thomas Edison is a hero, right? And we don't have enough film of him, right? We don't have enough. And is it Steinmetz that invented-- I think it was Steinmetz that invented the AC. I was trying to remember the guy's name. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Fairbairn: Yeah I think so. We'd love to have all the recordings of that story, wouldn't we? Peddle: Yeah there's no question that Edison was wrong. And he was educated badly. He had no education at all. And so for him to guess that DC current was a solution was just a guess. Right? And he was just wrong. And Steinmetz was a mathematician and enough of a guy to be able to understand why alternating current was the right answer. And then of course at GE they did all of the things-- I don't care which segment you want to put that in, but I want to talk a little bit about having to create all of the other pieces. Fairbairn: OK. Let's start with you. Peddle: I think we-- OK. Fairbairn: So let's just go back to the beginning. Where were you born? What year were you born? What environment did you grow up in, in terms of family and brothers and sisters? Peddle: OK. I was born in Bangor, Maine. And when I say "Bangor" you'll catch my Maine accent. It's one of the few things-- Bar Harbor is the one that I can't say without admitting I'm from Maine. And I grew up outside the capital city. My father had a large piece of land that ultimately became the first shopping center in Maine. That was his development over a long period of time. My father was a very successful farm machinery salesman right after World War II. And then he was ill-right after the war all the doctors had come back believing penicillin was a wonder drug. And they almost killed him because by that time they discovered that maybe penicillin was good for about 90% of the people and the other people it was literally a poison to. So my father never really recovered from that. So we kind of grew up poor. But we had farm equipment around. Fairbairn: So you were born in what year? Peddle: 1937. Fairbairn: And do you have brothers and sisters? CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 3 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Peddle: Three half-brothers and sisters older than me. And then four brothers and sisters. Fairbairn: Wow. So you had a pretty large family around? Peddle: Oh my father-- my mother was his second marriage. All of the sisters and brothers lived with us at sometime or another. And one sister lived with us for a long time. So I kind of always had six-- well I didn't have six because my younger brother wasn't born until 14 years after I was. So we really grew up as four kids. And then the tag-along. Fairbairn: So what were your early influences? And what got you on a path? Peddle: A couple influences which I was kind of proud of-- we were poor and so we had to make a living off the land that we had. And so this is Maine, and my father's furnace quit working when we were about seven or eight. And so we had to use wood. And from nine 'til 15 my brothers and I cut the entire wood for a Maine winter and sawed it up. We sawed up an old barn. So you learn hard work pretty early, right? Fairbairn: It was survival. Peddle: What? Fairbairn: It was survival. Peddle: No, we just were poor. And my father was-- he's long dead so I can say it-- my father was a guide for the sheriff's company, and he was a serious poacher. And we would go out hunting, and my father taught most boys how to drive deer. And he was a great shot. And he one time dropped five deer crossing the road with a five-shot rifle. And just to finish this story, only because it's kind of something I like. My father, as I said, was a great shot. And because we had some tricks-- because you had to register the deer. And so we had a deal with everybody in town, the watchmaker, the shoeshine guy, and everybody. My dad would call them up and say, go hunting tomorrow and if you shoot a deer you get one. If not, you got a deer, because we've got it hanging in the woods. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 4 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle And so we would then get half that deer. And we existed all winter-- because we had a couple freezers and Maine got really cold. And so we existed all winter with our only meat coming from the rabbits we shot. The only other thing I did learn during that time is I managed my father's kennel of beagles, hunting beagles and such. Fairbairn: But he was also a salesman in the [INAUDIBLE]? Peddle: Well he was a salesman. He was trying to make money doing the thing, and he did it. But he finally ultimately got a deal worked out where he was developing the shopping center. He developed it for about 20 years with a guy that helped fund him. But we were really poor. So my point is we learned about hard work, and we learned about survival very young. So now when I work 20 hours a day or something or other doing computer and typing, Rick says, you're working hard. And I said, no. You don't understand. When I got out of high school, I'm 17. And I wake up the day after graduation and my mother says, OK you've got to get out, go get a job. Because we can't afford you. So I'd always had a job up until then, I was working as a theater usher and a bunch of other stuff. And so I went out and got a job doing pick and shovel on the road. And I was really good at it because I worked hard. And they treated me really nice because I was good at it. But 12 hours a day at the dumb end of a shovel is hard work, OK? Working on a computer for 24 hours a day is not hard work. Fairbairn: Well said. Peddle: So I'm sorry, but that is my background. For me-- Fairbairn: Yeah, well it's important to know, to understand. Peddle: --this ethic of being able to get something done, and you have to get it done and you have to make it happen, is something I'm sure I learned then. Fairbairn: So during high school did you have any interest in technology or electronics or any of the-- CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 5 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Peddle: Yeah. From the time I was about 14 I wanted to be a radio announcer. The guy who was my-this is back, you guys are too young, but before television, disc jockeys were rock stars. Really and truly. People in town worshipped them, the big stations did them, they were rock stars. And my neighbor where we lived ran one of the stations there. And at school they had arrangements. So with speech class we could go down and do our own shows. So I actually worked with this neighbor's place all during high school. I was working jobs and everything, but I got to do it. And I was convinced that was what I was going to be, I was going to be a radio announcer. And television was just now starting to get serious, and we weren't sure what the transition was going to be. But if you kind of look at it, some of the early shows were really just disc jockeys. Ed Sullivan was kind of a very special kind of disc jockey, right? And so I'm convinced-- Fairbairn: Can you move over here? So that when he looks at you-- Peddle: I'm sorry, should I not be looking at him? Fairbairn: No, it's fine. No, you're doing fine. It's only natural. Peddle: I'm sorry, I guess I have to speak to both audiences, I should be looking at the camera. I try not to look at the camera. Fairbairn: No the camera's actually fine. Between the two of us it'll be fine. OK. So you are convinced you're going to be a disc jockey. Peddle: So now I'm convinced I'm going to be a-- so the technology that you had to do a radio was not very hard. But I did go through chemistry and physics in high school, and I had a really good instructor and a really good partner when we went through the labs. Two really good partners. So, we did very well with that. And my buddy was in charge of projections-- again, you guys don't do these anymore, but film projection was a thing that you did to educate children. In high school, you would have projection classes. Well somebody had to run the film. So, we would get out of our class to go run the film. Fairbairn: I remember those things. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 6 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Peddle: And I also worked as the sound guy for all the shows. We did two or three shows a year, the acting kind of thing. Because again no television, you could get away with that stuff. And so my buddy was the guy that ran the lighting, my partner. And I did the sound. So we found ways to get involved with quote, "technology" so we could get out of class. So we spent all of our time-- and I did really enjoy the engineering work in the labs and did well at it. But I was convinced-- and so my speech professor arranged for me to go to Boston to try out for a scholarship for one of the top disc jockey places there. OK? Best thing she ever did. Because what I did is I suddenly saw what talent was, versus me. And I came back home and sat down to talk to her and my neighbor. And my neighbor says, look, we were just waiting for you to figure it out. You can work for me and make a living. You're never going to be great as a radio announcer. We've talked to your professors and we really think with television coming on and all the new-- transistors really hadn't happened, but-- we think you should go to school as an engineer. And you can do the stuff with TV. You can learn how to do that. But come on, why don't you just give up this idea of being a radio announcer? So that was an important influence because I did go on to engineering. But the most important influence to me in going on in engineering was working pick and shovel. Because the guys who were older pick and shovel guys didn't have a life. And I could see that I should go to college. But I really didn't have an idea what engineering was about, what I was going to be doing. I mean I knew I'd done OK in school. And I did dean's list stuff when I went to college. And I went to a land grant college where the-- Fairbairn: Now you went to the Marines before that, right? Peddle: No I was a Marine reserve. Fairbairn: Oh, a Marine reserve. OK. Peddle: Right. Yeah. We were right after Korea. My brother was a Marine in Korea and got shot. And the group I joined had just come back from Korea. They were assigned as a group to Korea. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 7 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle But what most of us were doing was going into reserves and then going to school at the same time. And then there was a program. They didn't need active service. As a matter of fact, I think after Korea they cut the actual installed base down and depended on the reserves. And so we got trained in all the proper ways. We were actually on duty for summer camp when Eisenhower was going to invade Lebanon. And they told us, you guys are going to be extended, like these guys are today. You know that all the reserve guys now have had to do tours of duty, right? But they told us, you're going to be extended while you're here. We're not going home. And then something happened and they didn't invade. I don't remember-- it was a part of history that's not very well documented. But I just remember that. So I did some camp during the summer once a week, some training. And in the Marine job that I was in I was always doing something with electronics. We were anti-aircraft guys. And I was studying the radar and things like that. Although I was a gun crew chief and a fire team leader when we swapped over to be an infantry. And I really enjoyed that. Fairbairn: So what got you into college? Did you have enough money? Peddle: No I didn't. We really didn't have enough money. My father was able to arrange a couple people he knew to help me some. And I actually got through-- the bank in town had a program where some guy had given them a bunch of money and said, just do good with it. And so they decided that helping me to get to college was just good. But my father had an influential friend who knew the president of the university. And I went up there thinking I can get signed up and all that stuff. Fairbairn: This is the University of Maine? Peddle: The University of Maine. I went up and started signing up and discovered I didn't have enough money. And this guy had told me to go by and see the president of the university. And the president of the university gave me enough of a scholarship out of his fund to get me into the college. And I always remember that. I will absolutely find a way to take care of those guys. And then they helped me along after that. I got better paying jobs in the summer after that. Fairbairn: So you went in thinking, knowing that you wanted to be an engineer? CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 8 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Peddle: Sort of, right? Because these people that told me I should be an engineer. But the reason I want to stress this a little bit is because I didn't have a clue what kind of engineer I wanted to be. So I signed up for engineering physics, which was a new course being taught at the university, as opposed to being an electrical engineer, chemical engineer, so forth. And it was mostly aimed at the guys who wanted to go on to get PhDs in physics. But it was engineering physics, and we got a lot of the same classes that the other engineers-- we took classes with them. And what it did for me is it let me postpone what do I want to be when I grow up. Because I still didn't have a clue. I had then done good grades the first two semesters and I got kind of cocky. And so I signed up for this extra course my junior year just because it looked interesting. And it was called Information Theory. And I think I may have told this story, but if you don't mind I'm going to tell it again-- Fairbairn: No, go ahead. Peddle: --because it's really important. Claude Shannon, which hopefully you guys respect. I don't know if you have much about him here. Because he was more telephone, right? Fairbairn: Right. Telecommunications. Peddle: But Shannon invented the bite, invented the bit. Those words were Shannon's words. Because he had to find something to talk about. He had a small team at MIT. And this one guy was on the team and had a break down, a nervous break down. And they told him, I remember talking about the [INAUDIBLE]. They told him, you can't do this anymore. You just can't do any more. So he applied to the university to be a professor. And they were so happy to get a guy with that skill at MIT that they gave him-- he only did four classes a week. And two of them were this class and there was some other class. But so I signed up for this class not knowing what information theory was about. The physics guys didn't pay any attention to those kinds of things. We talked about why the sky is blue, but we didn't talk about information, because it wasn't important back in those days. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 9 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle When Shannon started, a telephone connection was made by some young lady taking a plug and plugging it in. And Shannon's the guy that found a way to automate that because of what he did with information theory. So we go into this class and this guy says, I know you guys are here wondering, and I did work with Shannon and we'll talk about it. But we're going to spend the first four weeks learning about the eye and the ear. Because he says communication only occurs when you can see it or hear it. And so he made us really learn how an eye works and how an ear works. And there were some important lessons there that you don't know about. The fact that you see by inverting what you see. And I'm watching you with two kinds of lenses because my mind can put the two together and I can read and see- those are all things that happen in your brain. They're part of the information system that your eye has in your head. And then he started us off with class, and now he's starting to move into information theory. So he says, I'm going to write a letter on the board-- A. Guess the next letter. And we had to sit there and guess the letters. Well what he was showing us is that the English language, which is highly redundant-- which is one of the bases for the phone system, because they go in and they compress it. And so he taught us that. And then he went in and taught us Boolean algebra. And then the fundamentals of binary arithmetic and so forth. And somewhere in that time, I fell in love. Totally, absolutely knew that what I was going to do for the rest of my life was that work. Something he said or somewhere along the way I went from not knowing anything to knowing exactly what I was going to do. So I struggled through the fourth, the last year college. Only interviewed with companies that would agree to put me on a training program. Because I knew I didn't know shit. And secondly, that would give me a job in California. Because I had been in California with the Marine Corps and had decided-- we were out in Camp Pendleton our first year. Fairbairn: That was better than Maine, huh? Peddle: Yeah, well no-- my aunt and uncle lived there. And I'm going to live in California and I'm going to work in computers. Those were the two-- and I only interviewed companies that would agree to do that. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 10 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle And GE was one of those companies. They had a great training program. I'm so glad I did that. Because for the first nine months of my life with GE I was working for missile and space vehicle and working on Gatling guns and reentry nose cones. And I was troubleshooting. We had to run a test in front of the tests that they were officially-- and you got paid big money if you made the test. Because remember, the Russians were ahead of us. And we were really frightened. This is a time when the US was truly frightened. Fairbairn: So what year did you go to work for GE? Peddle: It was 1959, it was 1960. Fairbairn: So Sputnik was up and we hadn't really-- we were struggling. Peddle: Yeah. I had done a speech class on what happened to us and why we got so devastated. And luckily, Brant von Braun remembered his days from living in Germany and put us back in the system. But the nose cone thing-- they had to figure out a way to deliver a hydrogen bomb across the long miles. And so it had to work. And it was up in the air, and there's pressure. So we were given tests in pressure chambers and so forth. But before we ran the tests we ran our own tests. And if you passed the test you got several million dollars which, back in those days, was a lot of money. And every failure that happened in the test, I would get them. And it was my job to go in the lab, figure out what the failure was, and then go to the supplier. Because we were starting to build an industry. So we had all these suppliers that didn't know shit. And we didn't have all the QC stuff that you guys grew up with. We didn't have any of those things. You'd start in your little garage and you could wind up this motor and send it to us. And we would stuff it in a multi-billion dollar nose cone to protect our lives, and it didn't work. So I would have to go in and literally teach most of these little companies how to do quality control. Fairbairn: So this is the electronics or whatever that failed inside the-- Peddle: It's inside the nose cone. And by the way it wasn't so much electronics. Because remember, transistors were barely there. This is motors and switches and-- CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 11 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Fairbairn: Mechanical stuff, right. Peddle: Yeah. All the timing was done by motor timing. But it was a great, great experience for me. I got to see the country, I got to see all these things. I got to do this great thing. I spent three months building something for the fighters, the fire control system. And then I went to Phoenix to be in computers. And that was when I did my Remington card reader thing. Fairbairn: Tell us, what was that? Peddle: Basically there were two punch cards, which most everybody's forgotten because IBM conquered Remington. But Remington Rand, which was a big competitor to IBM way back when they were both making calculators and other things had a round hole and it had a different coding than the IBM card, which you have on your floor downstairs. And so I was given the assignment of taking the code, which was the IBM code, starting with that program and turning hardware in that could read the-- and it was a great assignment. I was working for a really smart project engineer. And I learned a lot from that time. Fairbairn: So you're doing electronic design. Peddle: Yeah, we were doing-- Fairbairn: Or mechanical design, as well. Peddle: Yeah, fundamentally. It was mostly electronics. Somebody else was doing the mechanism reading. And this was back when I was telling you-- flip-flop we're the first guys making transistorized computers. And the transistorized computer was a flip-flop and a card this big with a whole bunch of transistors and stuff on it. And a NAND gate was two of them. And then you put them all together and you put them in a rack. And then you wired them up with, originally just hand wiring, and then somebody invented the Gardner Denver machine which wired them automatically. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 12 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle But we shipped a lot of computers. I think the whole 94 series was all built that way. IBM made that change when they went to the 360. But until then-- I expect if you open your 1401 up down there you'll see wire-wrapped panel in it. So I decided that I wanted to try-- I had wanted to go to California. And they had an advanced engineering course in California. And we had a computer lab in California-- Palo Alto, just up the road there. So I signed up for the advanced engineering program, which is like a master's degree, as far as GE was concerned. And I went and got a job in the computer lab up here. And that's a one-year assignment. And the nice thing about the computer lab is I got to meet guys like Bob Schreiner, who later on was the guy who second sourced the-- I met Joe Weizenbaum, who was the guy that headed Project MAC at MIT. Bill Davidow, who was the guy that made the 8080 happen. So I was with some really smart guys. And spent a year in the computer lab, knew that I didn't want to do research again in my life. I wanted to go back and do what I was doing before. Moved back to Phoenix and went into designing at the beginning of what we call the common peripheral family. And the first device I worked on was a paper tape. I was given the assignment to do the paper tape for this common peripheral. And I was also given the assignment to work with another guy on the first hard disk system. Now I want to stress this first hard disk system. It's got platters this size. It's got six of them. I guess we got five megabytes. Fairbairn: Yeah, we have the ones like that downstairs. Peddle: Do you? Yeah. And the way you accessed it is you shorted out a coil on an electric motor. And that's how you positioned the drive. And the most interesting thing to me-- I learned a lot. I learned to respect disk drives and have been with them ever since. But I actually invented the concept of zone recording, which is used in all drives today, in 1961, filed the patent. We couldn't make it happen. It takes a microprocessor and a bunch of other stuff. You couldn't build the electronics, because we didn't have the right kind of electronics. Fairbairn: They were too complex? CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 13 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Peddle: Yeah. Think about it. It's a pretty complicated calculation and everything. And microprocessors just eat it up. But this is flip-flop. We just didn't do it. We didn't finish it. And ultimately the patent ran out and guys like Seagate and everybody else use it without any patent. But it stuck with me. And we used that same zone recording technique to make our floppies four times denser than IBM on the Victor and on the Commodore. We put that technically. Fairbairn: We'll get to that later. Peddle: Yeah but I'm just saying, basically I carried that technology over. And I was approached by the group that was setting up the design automation group. And the guy said, look, you're doing a good job on design. But we're trying to design three new computer systems and we need some smart guys to sit down and figure out how to automate design. Schematics, equations, all that stuff. And so I wound up doing that and managing programmers. Fairbairn: What year was that? Peddle: Probably '63. Fairbairn: Wow. Very early for design automation. Peddle: Oh yeah. me and Peter [INAUDIBLE], who did the PET with me, one of our first joint assignments after he escaped from Czechoslovakia was doing one of the very first board layout systems. Laying out PC boards, instead of people doing it. OK. I'm sorry this is taking so long on the history, but there are two or three things in this background that you'll see were very important that we used later. And then I'd moved up the chain to a certain level and the design animation job was now dead-ending. And so I got a job as the systems manager for our jet engine business, which was based in Evendale. And we had 94s, and one of the things we had to do was prove a GE-600 was better than a 94, which is what we had was the GE machines. And the thing that I got the most out of that was that we had invented BASIC at GE, or the computer for the BASIC. And the first guy, [? Lyle ?] [? Hiddle ?], did the first online system doing teletypes, ahead of IBM, ahead of everybody. And we put that into BASIC. And so I taught the very first BASIC class in GE. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 14 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle But now Wang had just come out with a BASIC computer. And we had like six of these 225s. And every one of the jet engines was being designed by engineers running their own programs in BASIC and using the 225. It really made an impression. Fairbairn: 225 was a Wang machine or a GE machine? Peddle: No, no, our GE machine. It was the heart of the BASIC system that we sent to Dartmouth. And then we just carried it over. It was important because it had lots of ways to--you could hook up a lot of teletypes in. But we were designing jet engines using BASIC, which nobody thought was possible. We had a COBOL group that was doing the payroll and a FORTRAN group that was doing an analysis of everything. But the engineers were running BASIC for their own work. And a lot of the managers would make them then go back and run FORTRAN something to compensate. But it came home to me that to these guys the ability to write their own code and to use BASIC was really important. And you'll see how I use that-- Fairbairn: Great. Good insight. Peddle: --experience later. What? I decided that it was fun, I was living in Cincinnati, Ohio. I didn't want to keep living in Cincinnati, Ohio. I wanted to go back to Phoenix. And I was going to start my own timesharing company. And I went back to do that. Went to work for a guy who had the assignment of working on the electronic cash register system that GE was doing, which was a very online system called Tradar. And in the course of sitting there and thinking about what were trying to do, cash register. Because this group was kind of an advanced group we had somebody from Exxon come in and tell us, I want to automate every gas pump. Because, he says, we're the biggest companies in the world and we're represented by a pimply-faced kid who's pumping gas. We want to get rid of-- we don't need that guy, right? We want to automate all that stuff. And of course he was right. That was the idea. So I had all these inputs. And I also had interviewed to go to work for-- what was the company-- Fairchild just before Noyce had spun out with Schreiner. And I knew that LSI was coming, that it was going to happen because Schreiner was telling me about it. And so I sat down with a small team one day and I said, we're doing this whole thing wrong. What you want is distributed intelligence. You want to put the intelligence as close to the application as you can. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 15 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle The Tradar[??], you punch a key and it went all the way to a server someplace else and came back and put it on the screen. I mean that was the way people were thinking online systems. And I'm saying, what the fuck? What are you doing that for? Fairbairn: Now what year was this? Peddle: This was 1969, 1970. Fairbairn: OK. So you're still working for GE. Peddle: I'm still working for GE. But I've just given up on the time-sharing thing because I didn't think it was going to work. Actually a buddy of mine who was the first guy to automate McDonald's, who was the guy who had taught me computers in 1961, did one of the first McDonald's automation systems. And he kind of explained to me where he was going. So he kind of put it in my head. But I concluded-- so from that point on I'm fighting only to do [INAUDIBLE]. And I gave GE a proposal, which they should have taken. Because we figured out what a credit verification terminal-- like you have today in every store-- should look like, what a cash register should look like, and what an automated gas pump should look like. We had those all locked in. GE says, no, we're going out of the computer business. Shut it down. Fairbairn: So the things you designed, this proposal that GE relied on remote computing, you didn't-- Peddle: No. I was saying remote computing is not so important. What you want is distributed intelligence. You want intelligence in the devices. You want an intelligent card reader, you need intelligent-- Fairbairn: But this is before a microprocessor was available? Peddle: No, no, no, no. You'll see why this is important for the microprocessor. OK. So I had worked for GE for a long time, had a high level salary, so they gave me a big retirement package. Two of my other buddies took retirement packages, and we started a company called Intelligent Terminal Systems. And we actually designed a good little point of sale system. But my memory was dynamic shift registers, my computer was made up of MSI circuits, and it was just obvious that in order to make this work I needed LSI. And I didn't have the money because we weren't able to get it funded, didn't have the money to do it. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 16 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle So I took a short-term assignment to design a typesetting system for a friend of mine who had thought that typesetting was the new future. And so we put a typesetting system on a PDP-11 and started doing the local town Cave Creek newspapers and everything. So the PDP-11 was an extremely good eyeopener for me. Because it showed you that memory registers and memory addressing was important. That was DEC's idea, not mine. I think it's partially Carnegie Mellon's idea. Because remember I told you I was working on 94s and we had to prove 94s were-- and Carnegie Mellon had done this study on 94 instructions that were useful, and it came down to a small number. And we're going to talk about that when we're doing the 6502. So I'm now in a situation-- I finish-- this other time-sharing system company didn't have the money to go on. They were making a little money, but they didn't have money enough to afford me. And so I was looking for a job. And Tom Bennett, who is the guy who started the 6800 project-- and if you don't interview him it's because you are not listening. He actually took-- and I'll give you the reason why. He was a calculator guy. And almost all of the computers were coming out of guys that were calculator guys. Because they kind of had an idea-- and they'd done the LSI for calculators. So they had a feeling for registers and putting stuff-- the calculator was a long ways down towards being the computer. But he was working on a thing for a company called Viatron. And I don't know if you even mention Viatron in your Computer History Museum. Viatron is the company that announced they could build intelligent CRTs and lease them for $10 a month. There was a great big stock hype. And they went to all the semiconductor companies and said, we can't do this unless you do this LSI for us. And people like Motorola said, oh shit, we finally found somebody who can do it. And they'd also read all the hype. So this company was a stock fraud. They didn't have it done. The whole thing collapsed. And so here's this guy running this thing at Motorola. He's got this thing kind of done, he knows how the CRT should work and everything. He's got a design team-- Fairbairn: No customer, yeah. Peddle: --and the works over. And so he said, we're going to go build a microprocessor based around the calculator. And he talked to some guys in marketing who had come out of GE in Phoenix. When GE had broken up some of their marketing guys had gone over. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 17 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle And those guys thought that what he was talking about was letting him build a cheap minicomputer. That's really what they thought he was talking about. But he wasn't. He was talking about, I want to build something that's small and inexpensive and that can sit on people's desktop. Because he's a calculator guy, right? OK. So he said to me, look, you need this. You need a microprocessor, you need all this stuff. Come to work for me for two years, make it all happen, and then you can go do your company. OK. All right. So I sat down and helped make the 6800 work. Because there were some things that had interrupted. Fairbairn: Because it had some architecture, but the design-- Peddle: It wasn't the way it should have been done. And I put some stuff in, but it was a little too late in the program. The chip was already done. But the most important thing I did at Motorola, and the most important thing I ever did for the personal computer industry, was I knew that this thing called a microprocessor is just a power burner. You can sit there and make it run power, but it doesn't do anything. If you want to make it do something, if you want to make it run a copier, if you want to make it be a cash register, you need an I/O function. So we invented a thing called a PIA, which had programmable registers. And it was in memory-mapped space. And we put the structure in we needed to get an interrupt in. We made the interrupt 6800 work on it pretty good. And we could get an interrupt off from the edges, and you could make one edge drive another. We put some really nice programming features in it. And we did that, they patented it, and everybody in the world still uses that structure, programmable input/output registers. If you look at almost all the architectures today you'll see a piece of PIA. Fairbairn: So there's a PIA that's Programmable Interrupt Adapter? Peddle: Programming Interface Adapter, right. And it really and truly was the thing you needed. You needed memory, ROM, PIA, and done, right? OK. ROMs were starting to happen, memory was pretty slow. Fairbairn: OK. So we're getting into the Motorola stuff. Do you want to--? Peddle: No, no. This is-- OK. CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 18 of 108 Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle Fairbairn: I'm just going to switch. Peddle: OK. You can, but I just want to make the point that because I had done this computer and knew that I didn't have the right technology, I went to work for Motorola to create the technology. Fairbairn: Right. So you'd already designed what the microprocessor needed to drive, so you knew exactly what it needed to do. Peddle: Yep. Fairbairn: And so then you went to Motorola-- Peddle: --and did it. Fairbairn: And did it. OK. Well that's a good segue to-- Peddle: I'm sorry, I guess I forgot. I've been doing history. Fairbairn: No. That's fine. Diamond: OK. So I'm Steve Diamond, this is the Computer History Museum. Its part two of the Chuck Peddle oral history on June 12. Let's start with your involvement with the 6800 at Motorola. Take us through the development of the 6800 chipset and tell us about the announcement and what led you into the 6501. Peddle: Well, it's really the 65-- by the way, I want to go on record now and continue to go on record-- we built a few 6501s, we never sold one. We sold a few the first day at the show, but it was never intended. It was just an in-your-face to Motorola. Because it didn't have the single voltage, it was doing all of the things that we didn't want to do. 6502 and its derivatives, the small versions of it, was where we were going. We put all that address space and everything. But for a normal controller the small package one was the right thing. And that's what everybody used, Atari used, everybody used. So the 6501 was not really what I was designing. I was designing the 6502. We did the 6501 just kind of in case we needed or something or other. But the 6502 was the thing we went to Motorola. And one thing CHM Ref: X7180.2014 © 2014 Computer History Museum Page 19 of 108 Oral History