Chuck Peddle, RIP
On Dec 15th, we lost Chuck Peddle, the lead designer of the MOS 650x series microprocessor and the Commodore PET. His processor was the heart of the Atari 2600/5200/400/600/800, Apple II, NES, VIC-20, C-64, Kim-1, Master System, Lynx, BBC Micro, arcade games and so much more. RIP
In the Spring of 1974, Chuck asked me to head a semiconductor engineering team to design a microprocessor family of chips that the world knows as the 6502 family of chips. We left Motorola as a team on August 19, 1974 to begin work at MOS Technology.
[…]
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. Chuck had negotiated a relationship with FLASH memory suppliers to support his “page-mode” business.
[…]
Chuck’s latest work was on Solid State Disc (SSD) drives, used some of the TFC concepts for high speed DMA transfers.
Previously:
Update (2019-12-26): See also: Cade Metz (Hacker News).
I loved the 6502. On it I learned programming. At that time it seemed foreign and mysterious, yet logical. The 6502 put me in touch with the "truth", that BASIC was shielding me from. Since then I have been on the non-Intel path and I promptly stopped coding in assembler, when I had to move to Intel platforms eventually (curse you Apple :) ).