I just received an email from Bill Mensch that Chuck Peddle has died. He died on December 15 (2019). Chuck Peddle was one of the team of eight Motorola employees and engineers who worked on the 6800 microprocessor and left the company for MOS Technology in 1974 along with Harry Bawcom, Wil Mathys, Rod Orgill, Ray Hirt, Mike Janes, Terry Holdt, and Bill Mensch.

Peddle considered the $300 price point of the 6800 a disadvantage, and urged Motorola management to pursue a more affordable microprocessor that could be used in a wider array of applications. When they refused, Peddle convinced seven other Motorola employees, including my father, Terry Holdt, to pack up their homes and move across the country to begin work on what would become the 6502 microprocessor at MOS Technology, a wafer-fab company in Valley Forge, PA founded by a former colleague of his from General Electric, John Paivinen. After Commodore Business Machines purchased MOS Technology in 1976, Peddle oversaw the creation of the Commodore PET computer, the predecessor of the Commodore 64, the best selling personal computer of all time.

While curating the information for the team6502.org website, one of my favorite anecdotes comes from MOS Technology employee, Frank Slattery, who wrote:

What a great bunch of guys the Motorola eight were. I was the manager of the layout people and it was my duty to make sure that the Motorola eight had every opportunity to do their design work with no problems. I was standing next to Chuck Peddle when he said to Jack Tramiel, the CEO of Commodore Business Machines, “With this chip we can build a personal computer." It was the first time I ever heard the words, “Personal Computer.”

I just received an email from Bill Mensch that Chuck Peddle has died.

More recently, in May of 2007 Chuck asked me and my team at WDC to design what was named The FLASH Controller (TFC). The TFC chip was designed using my 65C02 microprocessor with high-speed DMA features for USB FLASH Modules Chuck planned to manufacture sell. The TFC used Chuck’s patented “page-mode” concepts for replacing bad pages with “good” pages within tested “bad” segments. Chuck wrote the Assembly language code for the TFC.

The world would have been a different place without Chuck, and my life would have been very different.

without Chuck [...] my life would have been very different.

before we're going to introduce this-- we know we're going to
do this thing, we know we're going to do this at this show-- my buddy who had worked for me in Phoenix
came in and he said, look, people don't know how to use this thing. He was a programmer out of a
Czechoslovakian institute, he was a really smart guy. He says, people don't know how to use this thing.
Unless we write a really good menu it's not going to get used.

So I said, OK, we'll sit down and write it together. Well I was too busy talking to people on the phone and
everything else. So Peter walked into the president, John Paivinen, and he says, if you don't throw Chuck
out of here and make him write these manuals, they're never going to get done. So Paivinen calls me in
his office with the guard captain and says this guy can't come through the door again until I let him come
through the door. And I sat at my house, and Peter would come back and forth, and that's how we wrote
And because I'm sitting at home and only focusing on the manual, we did a good job. And Peter was also
a really great editor. And Paivinen also edited for us, too, because he knew what we were trying to do.
And then a couple of the other engineers edited it.

And what we were trying to do is make it so anybody could read it and do it. And they did. Those
manuals, really and truly we were proud of them. But Peter deserves the credit. Because he was
the guy that kept me out of the company until we got it done.

There's no authorship credit in the manuals themselves, so for years I didn't know who had so thoroughly earned my gratitude. The unsung hero was Chuck Peddle.

Searchable PDF's of these and some other good 65xx-related manuals are on http://users.telenet.be/kim1-6502/ here...