RIP: Chuck Peddle, designer of the 6502.

Author: EIS Release Date: Feb 24, 2020

Chuck Peddle, designer of the 6502, has died at the age of 82 from pancreatic cancer.

 

With Bill Mensch, who later founded the Western Design Centre, Peddle and five other engineers left Motorola in 1974 after being told to stop designing a low-cost processor and took the project to MOS Technology in Pennsylvania.

 

There they built the 6502, priced at $25 – about a sixth of the price of comparable processors from the leading companies.

 

It went into the Apple I and II, the Commodore PET, the BBC Micro made by Acorn and into Atari and Nintendo games machines and enabled the launch of many of the early computers. 

 

 

In 1976, MOS was bought by Commodore Business machines – a calculator company – and Peddle became its chief engineer. 

 

Soon after, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak offered to sell Apple to Commodore, but Commodore declined.

 

While at Commodore Peddle designed the PET which is often credited as the computer which kicked off  the personal computer revolution.