Byte Interviews Chuck Peddle, Father of the MOS 6502 and Commodore PET (1982) | Hacker News Reader

Byte Interviews Chuck Peddle, Father of the MOS 6502 and Commodore PET (1982)

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42 pointsrbanffy9 comments

One of the relatively unknown pioneers of microcomputers. Here is the transcript of his interview with the Computer History Museum https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Chuck was also a guest at The Amphour in 2015 (four years before his passing in 2019). It is a really good listen. https://theamphour.com/241-an-interview-with-chuck-peddle-ch...

Fantastic article. It does a great job of describing a point in time in the computer business from the point of view of someone who was deeply inside it. It’s fascinating to see how much Peddle got right and how much he got wrong. This early on, there was little to no installed base, so everything was up for grabs and there were many companies doing the grabbing.

Clearly Chuck Peddle is a major designer and engineer. So what went wrong with the new computer he’s describing?

The company filed for bankruptcy protection within a couple years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Systems_Technology

Steamrollered by PC compatibles obviously. At the time it wasn't clear yet that for 8086/8 you needed register level hardware compatibility, not just BIOS call compatibility (as in the CP/M days) to stay in the market. And nonstandard disk format to boot.

The non-standard floppy format was a huge annoyance for users. While the higher density formats were cool, the hardware could operate on PC-compatible format, but the OS wouldn’t support it.

ROM BIOS compatibility would have been nice, but it could be implemented at the custom MS-DOS version and run from RAM, but I’m not sure there were clean room implementations back at that point.

You can emulate the Victor 9000 / Act Sirius 1 computer he talks about in the article with mame. There's a lot of software on the internet archive or this machine. It's quite interesting to look at the hardware level how many differences there are in the design decisions compared to an IBM PC.

He got this wrong:

> PL: So you think multi-user systems are going to fade away in favor of networking?

> Peddle: I’ve believed that for a long time.

He was right, then he was wrong, then right again. He’s currently wrong.

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