My Door Into Summer

by John Feagans

Like the Heinlein cat I still looking for my Door Into Summer, when out of the blue, I got a call from Chuck Peddle on a Saturday afternoon. I had just packed the last of my possessions into my VW and ready to drive to Rochester, Minnesota from Ames, Iowa where I had been a computer science grad student. I had accepted a job offer from IBM to work in their System/34 group.

Chuck had a discussion the night before with Dr. Roger Camp, a professor of EE at Iowa State University with whom I had worked several 6502 projects. Roger met Chuck at Motorola where he had spent a sabbatical and they kept in touch. Chuck expressed his need for an experienced 6502 programmer and Roger expressed his concern to Chuck that I would be wasting my talent at IBM, and was the candidate.

In an oral history for the Computer History Museum, Chuck Peddle tells the story. "He (Roger Camp) says, I've got the perfect guy for you. He doesn't know it. He has no idea. He's taken a job with IBM. He's going to just get lost at IBM. I think he's the right guy for you. ... we kidnapped him, literally kidnapped him. His name is John Feagans, and he wrote all the software for all the Commodore products. It was exactly the right match."

So Chuck on the phone says, "Would you fly out to California and talk to us? We already made your reservations and if you decide not to stay we can fly you back before the end of the weekend." Chuck put his wife Shirley on the phone to confirm the flight times.

Chuck, his wife Shirley, and Bill Seiler picked me up at San Francisco Airport with Chuck driving and talking a mile a minute to sell me on the PET. Coming down Page Mill Rd from 280 I was a little concerned when Chuck made 3 U-turns in succession at the corner of Page Mill and the El Camino so he could enter the restaurant called "The Antique".

The restaurant was a street over from California Ave where Chuck took me to see the PET prototype. First thing I observed was the parking lot was littered  with little prophylactics that I found out later were finger cots from the LCD production facility. Bill saw me puzzling and came up with a clever response.

Leonard Tramiel had just taken a trip to the Hannover Messe with the wooden PET and it had returned to the lab at 901 California. WOW!   Turn it on and instantly programmable in BASIC. It was the appliance personal computer I had dreamed about having for my own since high school. Shirley typed the offer letter during the demo, and Chuck signed and handed it to me. I was speechless.

Chuck dropped me off at the Adobe Inn in Monte Sereno to think it over and he would come back in the morning to continue our discussion or take me back to the airport.  He left me a copy of Heinlein's Door Into Summer that I should read.

Little did I know that the weekend would stretch into three weeks and a seven year association with Commodore.


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 off pi
Read more