Chuck Peddle Dies at 82; His $25 Chip Helped Start the PC Age
I don't wish to detract from Chuck Peddle's work, because the 6502 really is an amazingly efficient and elegant design.  But I've always felt the microprocessor has been overstated in its importance in the computer revolution.Throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, memory was usually considerably more expensive than the CPU, for all kinds of computer system.  The majority cost in mainframes, minis and embedded machines alike was the core memory.  Early semiconductor RAM was even more expensive than core!It was possible to design a simple CPU in the early 70s using a few dozen SSI/MSI chips, and a board with such a CPU could have been done in less than 30x30 cm.  Indeed, that's basically a description of the numerous low-end MSI-based minicomputers of the 70s.  The cost of such a design would have been in the same ballpark as many of the early single-chip microprocessors released in '74 and '75 before the 6502.But what use would such a processor be, whether discrete or a single-chip microprocessor, without memory?  A mere 4 kilobytes of DRAM in 1973 would have cost over $1000, and a useful general-purpose computer really needs more like 8 or 16 KB to host an assembler and disk-operating system.By late 1978, the cost of 4 KB of semiconductor DRAM fell to $60.  By 1983 a mere $2.  In many ways, that was the true revolutionary technology.  Even if no one had thought of microprocessors, and even if advances in CPU speeds had petered out, a minicomputer with 2 MB of RAM is an entirely different kind of beast from one with only 4 or 8 kilobytes.