Are these 3 men slaves?

    All 3 were keynote speakers at this year's Borland developers' conference. All 3 are among the best computing engineers on this planet, imho. They work for Intel, MS and Sun respectively. Are they slaves of evil empires? Come on, give me a hint!

   Are these guys a looser coalition? Are they saints? Will they pull through? Can they compete?

Doug McIlroy

Mathematician, engineer, programmer, manager of Bell Labs Fame. 2 of many things this guy worked on: Stream processing: Unix pipes, classic coroutine sieve making Unix manuals short and accurate

He's got a homepage at cm.bell-labs.com

Chuck Peddle

This man helped develop the MC6800 microprocessor chipset at Motorola and later, together with architect Bill Mensch, became the driving force behind first sub $100 CPU (the $25 6502) at MOS Technologies.

He was also the team leader in the design of the KIM-1 and Commodore PET Micro Computers.

Beside Peddle's own designs many good things came from the 6502: the Apple II, the VIC20, the BBC Micro, the C=64 and the NES that revived Video Gaming after its '83 crash.

The PET, Apple II and Tandy TRS-80 (with a Zilog Z80) were 3 preassembled micro-computers that all appeared in 1977 and really did change the game.

Steve Wozniak, who engineered the Apple I and II, in his autobio "iWoz" claims that, compared to Peddle's PET, the Apple II was a superior design.

Still, without the availabilitiy and price of the 6502 CPU the Apple I and II might have probably been based on a different processor that would not have lent itself to Wozniak's design style as easily. Wozniak & Jobs probably would have failed for many reasons with yet another Z80 machine. Woz also claims that Peddle himself was the person who had sold him samples of the CPU at the WestCon fair. Peddle says he sold them to Jobs. It seems Peddle had more of a competitive problem with Wozniak than with Jobs which, given their engineering roles, seems plausible. Any of those guys are welcome to their own nice memories.

We are not completely shure of all the claims: For sure a modern notebook with integrated display and storage is more similar to a PET and the average office PC is more like the Apple II. And no one should forget that all these guys worked in and with teams.

Now the Intel 8080 and the Motorola 6800 where announced at around $360 when bought individually. Of course Motorola's and Intel's large established customers could negotiate much lower bulk prices. But that would have meant nothing for a private person like Wozniak.

By pursuing the possibility of a 25$ CPU and leaving Motorola, Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch might be just the most important PANC (personal affordable networkable computer) pioneers ever.

The 6502 (along with the 6501) where ready for the market and shown at the Wescon tradshow in the fall of 1975. As Peddle was no bad marketeer and spokesperson they got quite extensive coverage in the trade press.

Peddle wanted every interested engineer and hobbyist to have access to the chips and documentation. Other semiconductor companies preferred to deal with "serious" customers only.

We'll write about the Z80 & CP/M one day. That would be about Mr. Faggin, Mr. Shima amd Mr. Kildall. Great pioneers by themselves. Surely in the same league as Mensch and Peddle.

Mr. Peddle believes that the worlds first microprocessors are not the famous Intel 4004 or 8008: "I am not trying to be negative about the guys that did it ... these are nothing more than calculator chips". He believes the worlds first real CPU is Tom Bennett's 8bit Motorola 6800 "... it's terrible that guy never got any credit."

The Victor 9000 was another interesting PC design by Chuck Peddle.

It seems to be true that of the guys that "invented" the microprocessor at Intel at least Marcian Hoff, Stan Mazor, Frederico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima are widely credited and Tom Bennett is not even mentioned in Wikipedia's 6800 entry. ComputerHistory.org though mentions him in its 1971 - Microprocessor Integrates CPU Function onto a Single Chip article.

Not true anymore, since Tom Bennett is now in the wikipedia article as the chief designer of the 6800. And no matter how you count, Intel's 8080 was available from April '74 and the 6800 from August of the same year. Never mind. Both were both expensive and still led to the Altair 8800 and silicon based memory was more of a hurdle than cpus. Still, Peddle, Mensch, Faggin and Shima would soon lower real micro-cpu prices by a factor of 5 or so, made them available to everybody and so forced the large companies to follow.

Now as a business person Mr. Peddle was not as sharp but still more apt than Mr. Wozniak. He could never achieve the kind of friendship with anybody (especially Jack Tramiel) compared to what Wozniak had with Jobs. He seems to have also been a bit of an idealist freak: At MOS technology he got them to finance 200 research projects with the money earned. But like Mensch he was no loser in business things either.

Check out his deeds and life via his wikipedia entry and on the Commodore history pages.

More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry. (Byte Magazine)

Steve Wozniak built his computer from parts available on the market, but Chuck Peddle built his machines starting with raw sand.(Brian Bagnall)

Don Knuth

If there was one (male) god of programming it is this man Did use email from 75 to 90, uses mmail now.

Steve Ditlea: Since the 1960s, Donald Knuth has been writing the sacred text of computer programming. He's a little behind schedule, but he has an excuse: he took time out to reinvent digitial typography.

When you write about Donald Knuth, it's natural to sound scriptural. For nearly 40 years, the now-retired Stanford University professor has been writing the gospel of computer science, an epic called The Art of Computer Programming. The first three volumes already constitute the Good Book for advanced software devotees, selling a million copies around the world in a dozen languages. His approach to code permeates the software culture.

"Mathematics belongs to God," he declared. But Knuth's God is not above tricks on the faithful. In his TeX guide, The TeXbook, he writes that it "doesn't always tell the truth" because the "technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas." Mark Wallace in Salon on Donald Knuth

To get Knuth fast, check out this one: Important Message to all Users of TeX

Anders Hejlsberg

developed Turbo Pascal practically singlehandedly, left Borland after 13 years with Pascal, objects and Delphi to join MS, now the architect of C# . The man who gave peek, poke, deek and doke to your avarage Pascal programmer. Heavy sinner against the laws of [Niklaus Wirth]

A conversation with A. H. about handcuffs and stuff (via hns and lcom)

update Dec 2005: Of course the guy's got wikipedia entries in different languages now (deservedly) and many good links on google. . Here's what he says about MSTF:

I also think that Microsoft in the last five years has gone through a big transformation in terms of transparency and community involvement, openness and so forth. The kinds of dialogues we engage in with customers now are very, very different from what they were five years ago, and night and day from what they were ten years ago. You know, the whole industry, through blogging and open source and what have you, has very much switched around, and sort of the center of gravity lies much more with the individual developer and the individual person than it used to.

I tend to quite-believe him. But then again, I don't see this has reached many of their otherwise indoctrinated people on the edge yet. They are trying to change and with all that image to defend it is clear that J++ was not their way to go.