Chuck Peddle interview on The Amp Hour.

Heater.

There is a great interview with Chuck Peddle on The Amp Hour. http://www.theamphour.com/241-an-interview-with-chuck-peddle-charismatic-chipmaking-coryphaeus/

Great in many ways including the fact that it is nearly three hours long !

Recommended listening for anyone interested in early Micro history.

Hear how Chuck taught Bill Gates how to put his BASIC together, and MS-DOS and Windows.

Learn how Chuck had to get Steve Wozniak's Apple 1 board working when Steve was stuck.

Interestingly Chuck is still working and has a controller chip with 11 * 6502 cores in it ! Imagine that, a Propeller built out of 6502s!

Tor

I never got around to actually listening to the interview, because the bullet list of "facts" is inaccurate, to be polite about it. I can't imagine Chuck Peddle actually said that in the interview. And only Android tablet the page is not very nice, that headline "THE AMP HOUR ELECTRONICS PODCAST" in black keeps scrolling down and covering what you want to read.

-Tor

LoopyByteloose

Well, if all else fails... make your own 6502 via Verilog and an FPGA, maybe a multiple code in a Propeller-like hub architecture.

The podcast is working for me in Debian.. no adware blocking, visually okay on a notebook. I doubt if I will listen to all of the 3 hours as it is 1:10AM here.

http://ladybug.xs4all.nl/arlet/fpga/6502/

Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL)

I enjoyed it. It brings back great memories. The first computer I repaired was a Commodore Pet.

Heater.

Tor,

Do you mean my list of facts? They are just a couple of things I was surpised at when listening to Peddle. Who am I to argue with the man?

Or do you mean the bullet list on the Amp Hour Page? I'm curious to hear which of those facts are inaccurate and how?

Tor

Heater. wrote: »

Tor,

Do you mean my list of facts? They are just a couple of things I was surpised at when listening to Peddle. Who am I to argue with the man?

Or do you mean the bullet list on the Amp Hour Page? I'm curious to hear which of those facts are inaccurate and how?

The latter. Peddle can't possibly have claimed that Woz "wrote a compiler called SWEET16 but it flopped". It's "not even wrong", as a physicist once said. And the TRS-80 didn't fail.. it was outselling everything else. Again, I can't imagine Peddle said that. I have not listened to the podcast though - three hours? I usually find the 20 minutes ones too long, it's much faster to read an interview.

But at least theamphour seems to have fixed the web page since I (and someone else) looked at it and found it unreadable - now I could read the full bullet list and there are many things listed there that seems interesting and at least not wildly incorrectly recited by the web page author.

Oh, and Jobs didn't buy that 6502 at the show. Woz did, according to Woz. There's a tendency to state that Jobs was behind everything that ever happened at Apple, among younger web page authors. It's not true.

potatohead

SWEET 16 did sort of flop, and it was an interpreter, not a compiler. Apple users, in the know, and early on, did use the thing. Later on, it more or less fell out of general use.

It's cool though. Fast for a 6502. Nicely written as well.

As we move through time, some of this stuff will blur. Best to just comment and move on. A quick note to the author helps.

Thanks for the link. I love interviews like this. It's great to get a sense of who those people were and it helps put those times, and memories of them for those of us who lived them, into context.

Yeah, agreed. Woz really wanted an inexpensive microprocessor.

TRS-80 is an interesting case. Just like the Color Computer. In terms of what Tandy got out of them, I would have to say success. Had they not clocked the CoCo down, it may have punched through to a more general status, particularly the 3. It was a Moto Reference Design, packaged up and sold as a nice, capable machine. I don't know about the TRS-80 design.

Both enjoyed niche markets for years. I never cared for the TRS-80, but I used the Smile out of the 6809 based CoCo models. Still got a 3, and it's a nice, fun machine.

Tor

Sweet-16 is first and foremost a VM, a virtual machine. It's in its nature that it is interpreted, but it's nothing like e.g. a BASIC interpreter, and thus calling it "Compiler" isn't simply just a mistake. And it did not fail, or fall out of use, Wozniak wrote it for a specific purpose: To help keeping Integer BASIC small. In the end he didn't use it there, but it is in the ROM and used elsewhere. http://apple2history.org/museum/articles/byte8501/. In short, it did what Woz wanted it to do.
So it's nothing like a stand-alone language like a BASIC interpreter or a BASIC compiler. You embed Sweet-16 opcodes in your stream of 6502 opcodes. The statement about Sweet-16 on the amphour web page simply makes no sense.

And I wanted a CoCo3.. still want one, in a way. The 6809 is great. I used a CoCo 1 and a nearly compatible Dragon32 for a while.

potatohead

Yeah, the 3 has a few really fun attributes:

-NTSC models get a one byte per pixel 256'ish color mode due to how artifacting works. Never got used in a commercial game, but really should have been. A friend of mine and I did a few pretty awesome picture conversions. One byte / pixel + 6809 packs a punch similar to the VGA mode 13h.

-Simple MMU

Low complexity overall. The video system and MMU really aren't difficult.

Do a search on "What is SWEET 16?" and Woz, and descriptions are all over the place!