Lecture and Presentation of the Victor 9000 Computer, by Chuck Peddle

without a do all introduced speaker his name is Chuck peddle and he's president of Sirius systems technology incorporated he is a designer of the Commodore pet computer the 6502 microprocessor and of the Sirius systems machine which is represented here as a victor 9000 and he's going to talk tonight about where the market is going and to a certain degree where his company is going Chuck what I'm really going to do is talk about where some things came from where we are we're probably going to have a press conference very shortly to talk about where a company's going so I won't steal that the one thing I can say is that this morning I lost a lawsuit so the name of the company won't be serious systems anymore we'll talk about the solution to that problem they sweet hello hello is that better I wish I had a better mic okay is that better get everybody good what I thought I'd talk about tonight is a little bit about third generation computers and because I was asked to keep it a little not salesy and a little bit not totally technical I thought I'd explain what a third-generation computer is by talking about first generation and second generation computers and how they happen and because I was flying in and I read Adam Osborne's misinformation about how this business happened I thought I'd correct a few of those along the way I'm allowed to take swipes at Adam behind his back because I take him choice face to basically the first generation by my definition and I think someone accepted my most everybody was the original single board computers in these products were introduced in early 1975 and they were a direct result of a market factor they had to do with the introduction of the 6800 and 80 80 micro processors in 73 74 the fact that the industry that had been the electronics design industry in a variety of related businesses all had suddenly faced a technological change for most of you aren't old enough but those of you are will recall that we used to have to design computers one gate at a time and back in the old days one transistor won't resist hieratic on some of you even did it with tubes but all of a sudden we were faced with an industry dramatic change we're about 80% of what computer designers used to do was already prepackaged for them it was a circuit designed by a bunch of semiconductor types that didn't understand architecture so well so what we had to do was to relearn what these bad guys had done to make up our new building block for how electronic design was going to happen I had the pleasure of being part of the 1600 design team and was involved in part of this learning experience and so we went off to do the 6,500 family one of the things that after we had the chip tune we started to address was how did people learn how to use this product there was a person by the name of Jerry Ogden who was the first guy that I ever heard that suggested that in order for people to learn to use micro processors that somebody ought to come out into the marketplace with a series of plug in circuit boards that would allow people to easily interconnect their own system he came up here with me to cambion here in Boston in I think it was late 73 and tried to get the idea of soul it didn't take directly but when we introduced the 6502 in late 75 we introduced a product which was developed by a calculator designer called the Kim one which is effectively a super calculator on a board that allows you to program a computer using a calculator keyboard there were a series of products introduced almost simultaneously with this the one that is probably the closest identified we the first generation computer market place was the Altair by mitts without demeaning them in any way I would point out that MIT's at that point was a going broke calculator company who managed to turn their fortunes around by introducing a computer for people that wanted to learn what micro processing was all about other prior companies that came around at that time was a digital group which is also started prior to the time we introduced the 6502 the major thing had happened with the introduction of the 6502 is that we dropped microprocessor prices from $300 a pop to $25 a pop what have an implied was is that Wozniak only had ten dollars for a microprocessor I know for a fact he paid 25 for one because I remember today he bought it and he didn't get a discount the the factor that was driving this desire in addition to wanting to learn what a computer was all about was is that coming out of the universities at this time were series of engineers who had been trained in the use of computers with time sharing they wanted to have a computer of their own the work that was done here with the original time sharing products at Dartmouth we're effectively made each person that sat down to a teletype believed he owned his own computer about the same time those of us that did have our own computers were thrown out of the computer room because of the fact that people discovered that if you didn't let the programmers get in and muck up the machines the data processing guys got to exert more control and have bigger budgets so we had two factors that happen in the marketplace kind of simultaneously we had the ability to have very cheap computers for people and we had a group of people who wanted to have computers the first generation guys were however quite limited almost all of the products were sold in kit form or on a board with a stupid little calculator pen and you had to program the machines in hex and you had to dream up your own TV interface and you had to hang together your own cassette and so what would happen was as we started developing computer clubs Computer Club at that point was a place where people went to help one another debug their computers to trade back and forth old used hardware that one another had and a steel Bill Gates's Microsoft basic it wasn't a hell of a lot more software out at that time and what was happening is the guys were writing very trivial programs and in at that point in time nobody really thought about selling him gates used to write ugly letters but nobody else worried too much about selling software it was really an opportunity for everybody to share in the learning experience so we had the first market was really generated by people that wanted to have the computer that we're really trying to survive as either technicians or engineers why developing and learning about this new generation of product one of the facts we discovered starting to look at this marketplace is that once a guy got his computer working and once he was satisfied he understood the microprocessor and the technology that was associated with it oftentimes a computer would then gather dust as a matter of fact I was talking about 6502 there was a whole series of guys who wanted the care and comfort of the fact that they could buy a microprocessor for $25 - the fact that we sold something like 600 of them the first day we introduced them at Westcott only half of those ever got out of a desk drawer drawer there's a whole bunch of guys still happy to pull them out and show them to me from the time they originally had him it was a feeling of warmth and comfort at that point what we discovered and I went into the semiconductor business to find a home in the system's business and so I was looking for something equivalent to the break over from mechanical calculators to electronic calculators to make my fame and fortune and one of the things that came out of visiting the computer clubs talking about our Kim and talking about the 6502 was that there was a classic person who could have his own computer and there's a class that couldn't the classic could was a guy who could build it himself and who really cared about what the programming characteristics of a 6502 VI a was the classical computer programmer the person that had been a COBOL hands-on program or even a basic handgun programmer but had never gone into the hardware aspects of the business had no opportunity to participate in this computer revolution many of them joined clubs but were frustrated byte stores happened in about part of their business was making computers for people that did this but it's a pretty expensive process because you were effectively making them one at a time in a store with somebody soldering him together without instructions and without the ability to test them memory was still expensive and so you really had a product that was demanding for a next generation we had a second factor that happened right about this time the bike stores happen they were a retailing outlet designed to service the need of people that wanted to buy these little computers if you look at actually what was happening in byte stores they were selling a hell of a lot of manuals that's how Adam got to be famous but without and some hardware but what they really were doing was selling computer knowledge there was a company in the marketplace at that time who defined their future as being the neighborhood electronics store they were in the process destroying their major competition Lafayette and they wanted to stop this little upstart phenomena from happening about the time that Commodore bought in most technology the place I did the 6502 they were talking to RadioShack about a product which could be sold as an assembled product for the average RadioShack outlet could be sold at such a low price the byte stores couldn't compete and they would put them out of business from such desires an industry happened in late 1976 we set out to build the product that RadioShack wanted and that was really responding to the need of the computer programmer in the hobbyist computer club the guy that wanted a machine for himself but didn't want to have to mess around with it in addition to the RadioShack specifications it was those of us that had been around when time-sharing came into being recognized that one of the things that made time-sharing work was is that people could sit down to the computer and get instant success within the first hour and so therefore that was our fundamental goal was to have a product that could be sold through a retail outlet and it wasn't necessarily just ready to show that could be serviced by a low-level distributor and that could be handed to a user who was semi computer literate and who could have the Machine up running and doing something for with it within an hour the decision to package the product with a CRT built in came out of a calculator salesmen who work for comer who pointed out that people just didn't want to carry around a computer and hook it up to a television set but then in fact if you put the thing together and you made it look attractive you'd have a product that was far more meaningful to the average consumer the one of my first arguments with Wozniak who up until then had been a customer was over that particular fact we were looking at buying Apple which if it had happened would have set the industry back about four years but we were looking at buying Apple instead of designing our own product luckily Jack jamel was too cheap to put up the extra fifty thousand dollars and we got an industry out of it and we went on to have Wozniak believing that the hobbyist the super hobbyist which he was trying to develop the Apple 2 for wanted a computer that he could hook up and play with with color and Sam the RadioShack product had been defined as having a product that hooked up to a standard black on my TV and that worked within low-cost cassette based on our own pricing goals of trying to get a product at under $500 and that had all of these other ease-of-use features we decided to go with an integrated black and white product and that became the first differentiation between the pet and subsequent trs-80 and the Apple 2 products were developed in early 1977 then the Apple 2 which was designed to be hooked up to somebody else's television set and the pet product which was designed to have its own integral product we were successful in demonstrating the product to RadioShack they wanted on the other hand we weren't successful in developing a business relationship with them so they were set off to do the trs-80 and in March of 1977 the Apple 2 and pet were introduced at a marketplace that showed that the market had changed and was real the west coast computer fair was a direct derivative of the computer club in the Bay Area they put together the first fair not to sell packaged computers by the way but to bring together a fair we're all of the guys who had been going to the clubs and bringing their hardware together could get all the guys on the East Coast to come out and all of them would trade wares in sell product the introduction of the two packaged computers or second-generation product at that fair combined with the fact that 25,000 people walked in and spent I think it was $20 a piece to show up and watch other vendors sell product indicated that we had a new market the difference between the first generation product in the second generation was in two areas one they were fully packaged and where you didn't have to build anything to make them work Apple had an illegal connection to your home television set or they would sell you a black and white monitor the other major difference the thing that really distinguished the second-generation product from the first generation product was the packaging of the software ROM technology had exploded in the two or three years since a microprocessor had occurred we were intending to be a factor in that marketplace because Commodore is semiconductor capability we decided to stuff as much Microsoft basic as we could buy into a rom develop our own operating system and try to make the computer appear to be a time-sharing so computer by virtue of having aimed at a market that we never really sold as much product into as we sold other products both Apple and ourselves had stumbled upon the product that made the personal computer industry happened a product with a packaged computer and an operating system and basic in it and had the ability to be used by almost every man that walked up and tried to run a program on it what point out there was one major limitation with the product that limited to only that market at that time you loaded the product with a digital cassette the last piece of code I ever wrote was writing this the algorithm by which we were able to recover data often the cheapest cassette we could buy at that point I burned out and I've never been able to write code since that late in 77 Radio Shack introduced their version of the product they actually introduced the first business oriented personal computer they made a great splash in The Wall Street Journal about the fact that you could write payroll on you cassette driven 4k trs-80 and you could actually theoretically run payroll for 12 people on that product luckily the business industry didn't care to grab it and it took us a while until we started to really service the product of a business computer the thing that actually made that happen and the major break in the marketplace that occurred next was when doing that from 77 until mid 78 the marketplace was selling all the cassette machines that we could get and some people actually get up to hooking up 16k and you know we were really winging the major thing that happened in the thing that Steve Wozniak doesn't get enough credit for was the introduction of the very low-cost floppy disk to the Apple 2 that occurred at the next West Coast computer fair I want you to notice the thread of the computer computer groups and this industry because woz introduced it as a cheap fast way of loading programs because he got tired of loading programs off cassettes the combination of those two disks on an Apple 2 with enough dynamic memory is what made the business computer marketplace suddenly realize that the thing that everybody thought was a toy had been designed for people to have for themselves was suddenly a business computer to give you a feel and apples shift in emphasis in 1978 they introduced it at West Coast computer fair in 1978 summer Apple only attended the Consumer Electronics Show they passed on the National Computers conference because it wasn't of interest to them they weren't selling a product in that marketplace in 1979 Apple decided to attend NCC and did very well in 1980 they took over Disneyland and in see see to announce their version of the business computer the Apple 3 which is really and truly the first attempt at a third-generation computer to put the industry in perspective 1977 when I put the pen out first the same guy that decided to package the machine the way that we packaged it decided to prove to me that I was wrong about there being a market for computers he had a survey done in Palo Alto California one of the technology centers of the world less than 10% of the people indicated that they would have any reason to buy a computer for themselves you can't discern an airplane sitting in a restaurant I'll hold a casual conversation with a stranger in today's society without discussing which computer they're going to buy it happened in five years in 1981 we had our first third-generation computer or pseudo third-generation computer IBM finally caught on to the fact that this is a real business and introduced their product which is designed to stop Apple the IBM personal computer in fact what really happened in nineteen November 1981 company called Victor business products introduced what I consider to be the first of their generation computer at the conduct shop the most important thing about it was the third product designed by a calculator company first second and third generation were all designed by calculator people it was in fact a product designed to be sold by an entirely new distribution channel the office products marketplace because the product is aimed at the market for which we never intended second generation machines to be on it had to have different characteristics as well as a different channel I'd like to give you a brief definition of what I consider to be 16-bit Micro 16 I'm sorry third-generation microcomputers and then I'm going to spend a minute talking about the market my definition involves that it has to have a 16-bit micro the reason for that is one of the major limitations of the second-generation machines was is 64k particularly when you had to take memory space out for the operating system and languages just wasn't enough and almost all the business applications ran out of steam a 16-bit micro also gives you some memory protection and orientation features that allows you to truly use high-level compilers I feel that any third generation computer has to offer I all of the higher level languages because it's a business oriented product it has to be able to allow you to move programs were written for higher-level machines more easily and also to allow the marketplace to properly expand you have to have languages which have been used for business solutions my opinion that has to have 128k worth of memory minimum the reason for that is that if you don't get any real advantage out of the languages and or out of the higher memory unless you have that and in my opinion we're going to very quickly decide that a machine that can't run at least 256 K isn't a business computer I believe it has to have high resolution graphics we believe when we did the original pet that the ease of use of character graphics and the low memory utilization of that would allow the average user to start Apple clearly was a pioneer in the concept of high resolution graphics and has shown that any machine that's going to really penetrate the business market or the user-friendly sophisticated user market has to have high resolution graphics it's my belief that you have to have at least one channel of synchronous communications capability because almost all of the business computers should have the ability to hook up to a large database over a sophisticated channel and therefore my belief that asynchronous communication is not enough I feel that the business to sit their generation microcomputers because they're aimed primarily at a business marketplace or a professional user will be used for large numbers of amounts of time per day therefore I believe part of the definition has to include European ergonomics as a standard feature to give you an example you see in front of you a machine which fully meets that ergonomics the Victor 9000 it has a no glare screen it has tilt and rotate and separated keyboard characteristics which are defined to meet the standards which are developed in Germany for use in an eight-hour a day office environment it's my belief that all machines which don't meet that characteristic cannot be legitimately called third-generation I believe you have to offer at least one megabyte of disk almost anybody that's attempted to do more than 12 payroll on a disk quickly discovered that even though Wozniak made a great breakthrough with his hundred kilobyte disk that in fact at least one megabyte is really required to do any kind of serious processing and storage and I believe you have to show the use of the ability to expand up to at least 10 megabytes locally I think you have to have the ability to have network expansion because it's my belief that in a business environment computers have to talk to other computers and they clearly have to talk to other databases I would not make it a requirement of third-generation products but I think very soon we're going to all agree that voice out is also a requirement we point out the only other company that I've given true credit for having a legitimate third-generation product deck like the Victor product and serious product also includes voice but we won't make it part of the definition because I hate to have a null set or one or two people in this set and we've now invited some of the other companies to start to create product that truly meets this definition as opposed to making pretend what do I think the markets going is very simple I think the business computer marketplace the third generation kind of product is going to be continually developed in a more and more of a network and database oriented environment people will be able to buy a computer to use on their dead today which will solve a problem that they want to solve today economically that very soon several people in office will have common database and you will have to have the software and hardware to support the sharing of databases so that people can really work together to solve a business problem I think that very shortly after you have the ability to put databases into office environments using networks that everybody in the office will demand access to the database that it won't become a question of can I have a computer on my desk but why can't I have a computer on my desk are you trying to keep me from progressing as a professional the other thing that's going to happen and the other exciting part of the market is that is the very low in computer market the last thing my team did at Commodore before we left was to help create the follow on the Clyde Sinclair's throwaway computer business the victim Lee which I think shows what really we intended to accomplish in the second generation computer the vic-20 and Vic 40 were truly second generation computers revisited only this time we learned that Wozniak was writing he had to hook them up to a color computer and you had to sell them for $200 and I hope very soon that Tramel gets forced into selling it for $99 because it really then becomes disposable computing for education purposes I think you'll have a computer at your desk I think you'll have a computer at your laboratory I think you'll have a computer at home and I think you'll have a computer for on the road and I think all of your kids will have the computer if I had the perfect answer I'd tell you how you're going to connect them all out so they can all talk to the same database because that's really going to be the question and when I come up with that maybe I'll have a fourth generation product you

Channel: Computer History Museum

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Id: i_z443gwtW0

Length: 29min 36sec (1776 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2016