Meeting Chuck Peddle

by Leonard Tramiel

Shortly after Commodore bought MOS Technology Dad told me that he needed my help to evaluate a proposal he had been been given by an MOS employee. Chuck Peddle told my father that he was going to build a personal computer. If Commodore wanted the product he would do it as an employee. If they didn't them he would quit and do it on his own. The fact that dad wanted my opinion was quite a shock. I was in my early 20s at the time and the idea that my dad would ask for my help on a business decision was unprecedented.

I had worked at Commodore during the summers while in college. Starting with working in the warehouse. One summer, based on my interest in science and technology I learned to repair electronic calculators. Yes, there was a time when that was possible. I learned a LOT that summer. During a later summer I went to work with dad and went to the group designing Commodore's most advanced calculators. These were based on fully custom chips of this group's design and running firmware written by them. Dad introduced me to the head of the group saying: "This is my son. Give him something useful to do". I was handed the instruction set for the custom processor and the firmware listing for a four function calculator and told "Come back when you understand". That summer I wrote the firmware for 3 calculators. I learned even more.

I hadn't realized it, but dad had come to trust me on technical questions. We went to a trade show in southern California where MOS Technology had a booth where they were displaying the 6502 and the MDT development system. As an example of the ease of development they had a pinball game that had been developed in 3 weeks. We met Chuck Peddle and, in one of the strangest conversations I've ever had, he described the world he wanted to live in. It was the world in a sci-fi story we had both read, The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein. Chuck was an absolute visionary and I got completely absorbed in the vision of the world he was describing. One where nearly everything had a computer in it. Chuck thought that before people would accept this kind of world they would need to be comfortable with computers so he wanted build a machine that was inexpensive but powerful enough to learn to program and experience the power of personal computing. Before that there needed to be a very inexpensive yet powerful microprocessor, so he spearheaded development of the 6502. Now it was time to go on to the next step. He described a computer very much like the PET. I lost track of time and I really can't say how long we spoke. I tried to portray the vision to dad and I succeeded well enough that he gave the go ahead for the project. Chuck moved out to California, assembled a small team to produce, in an astoundingly short time, the PET computer.

Chuck Peddle at the Winter 1978 CES
Photo by John Feagans




Popular posts from this blog

If Looks Could Kill

by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demos on the PET and answering the questions of those that walked by. I noticed a large group of people approaching, but at first I didn’t recognize anyone. As they got closer I saw that it was Bill Gates leading the others around. There was a translator repeating what Bill said into Japanese. When they reached me Bill walked up to a PET and typed WAIT 6502,10. This caused the machine to hang and he froze. I said, quietly enough in the loud hall that only he could hear, “Bill, there’s nothing at 6502 so that’s just going to freeze”. He turned and gave me a look that was a perfect example of a look that could kill. I knew what he was doing so I turned to the group and said something along the lines of, “Microsoft BASIC is a valuable part of this machine”. Bill relaxed and the group left the suite. The WAIT command in Microsoft BASIC was an unusual addit...
Read more

Calculators, codes, and hidden messages

Image
by Leonard Tramiel Looking at a list of the chips used in Commodore calculators we see some letter and number combinations that are quite meaningful, if you know the stories. Some of the most sophisticated processors that Commodore made were based on a custom chip set that used a common processor and different ROMs (or two) that contained the code for that particular model. I wrote the firmware for a few of those. Like this one: Photo credit: Dave  McMurtrie One of my favorite memories is the way those ROMs were programmed, as described here . This processor was a fully custom chip and it required a LOT of engineering work, time, and money. When my father, Jack Tramiel, was persuaded to approve the project he told the person in charge "God help you" if this doesn't work. The chips all have product names the contain GHU for God Help Us. The first set of calculator chips that Commodore engineers developed included as much of the circuitry as thought possible into a single ...
Read more

Creating PETSCII

Image
by Leonard Tramiel When Chuck Peddle was given the go ahead to bring his ideas of what would become the PET computer into reality many of the ingredients were only loosely constrained. One example is the character set. It would clearly need to have alpha-numeric characters and the basic punctuation. But that was far  too limiting for many recreational uses of the machine. It should be possible to create a set of graphics characters that would allow a wide range of images to be created yet still have the hardware simplicity of a character based system. He knew that one of the likely uses of the computer was going to be card games. The game of Blackjack was a favorite of both Chuck and my dad. That meant the only thing that was well defined about the set was that it needed to have the four suits; hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds. He gave me the task of designing that character set. Each screen location would store an 8 bit number, 256 possibilities. The top bit would swap on and of...
Read more