01:44 Item number one: Where the heck did Commodore computers come from?

Well way back in 1975 (or maybe a bit earlier) there were a bunch of engineers on the West coast making some chips for Motorola. A chip called the 6800 - a heck of a lot better than the Intel chips - but Motorola just wanted those things to say well they were doing the business.

So they finished this 6800 chip and the way I hear the story is they said "we got a wonderful new idea for a new souped up 6800. we're going to do a couple of clever things like putting the high order low order addresses backwards then we're gonna pipeline this thing we're gonna put it in NMOS we're gonna do great stuff with it." And Motorola said "we've been thinking about this and you're fired because first we only just wanted to have a processor chip and we have it now so we don't see what you guys are hanging around for anyway and secondly why should we pay you guys money to build a better chip when we have one."

So these guys wandered East and they found somebody on the East coast...[snip] who was into the microchip business. What they were making mostly was chips for watches and display chips. Their name was MOS Technology Incorporated - not to be confused with Mostek (that's a different company.)

And this little group of ex-Motorola people came in and said "We're going to make you rich, you're going to make a microprocessor - this is where it's at." And the management said "What's a microprocessor?"

I have no idea what those guys said but it must have been good.

So they got to set up their own microprocessor department and they started building the chip they wanted to do at Motorola. The 6501. Now the 6501 was like a 6800 - it had the same pins with the same designations but it was a heck of a lot faster and they decided to do something else that was amazing. They said not only have we got a better chip but we're gonna sell it at a lower price.

The price of any microprocessor chip - 8-bit microprocessor chip - back then was about $100 - in quantities of 300 or more. Single quantities it was right up there. They were going to sell this new 6501 chip for $25.

And eventually they did, except Motorola sued them for copying their pin layout. So they had to retire the 6501, which left them with the 6502 (which had an internal clock circuit, which was the biggest difference[?]) - it had a different pin layout too. So they launched this 6502 thing for far less than the general industry price and immediately people started saying "It can't be very good if it's so cheap."

Well, it was fantastically good. But it took a while to do it. The first thing they did was they built an engineering prototyping board called the KIM-1...