microchip pioneer chuck lead designer historic
Long-time Slashdot reader kackle writes:If you cut your teeth on 8-bit computers during their explosion into the mainstream beginning in the 1970s, you were likely aware of and/or influenced by the work of electrical engineer Charles “Chuck” Peddle, who died this week. The general public may not know his name today, but his efforts had a big impact on the cost and availability of computing to the average person at the beginning of the personal computer era. “More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry,” Byte magazine wrote back in 1982. While working at Motorola in the 1970s, management had told Peddle to abandon efforts to build an ultra low price microprocessor — but instead he’d joined MOS Technology, working on the team that designed their influential $25 650x processors, remembers the Computer History Museum. “The most famous member of the 650x series was the 6502, which was subsequently used in very many microcomputer devices (four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers).” in 2014 Peddle recorded a four-hour oral history with the museum, and earlier this year Peddle spoke at the University of Maine, where he’d earned an engineering physics degree 60 years earlier. This week in an online remembrance, engineer David Gray remembers “the joy of creating, inventing and innovating with Chuck on and off over a forty six (46) year period… I am missing your indomitable spirit as I write.”Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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