Chuck Peedle
1937 
Bangor [USA]
† 2019
He was an American electronic engineer, main designer of the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, which equipped the KIM-1 microcomputer and its successor, the Commodore PET home computer.
Belonging to a generation older than "young genius" entrepreneurs like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, Chuck Peddle's first contact with microprocessors came in 1973, when he joined Motorola to work on the design project for the 6800 microprocessor. Because it was one of the first microprocessors to hit the market, Motorola was able to price the 6800 at a premium. Peddle felt the product had been grossly overpriced and left Motorola to join MOS Technology.
He joined this relatively small company to work on the design project for another microprocessor, which in 1976 would become the MOS 6502, arguably the most successful microprocessor of the first decade of microcomputing.
Contemporary computing celebrities to Chuck Peedle
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Jonathan Titus
1935
[USA]
In 1974, he designed the Mark-8, the first 8-bit microcomputer based on the Intel 8008 chip, which could be purchased as a kit for self-assembly.
Its publication in Radio-Electronics magazine demonstrated the editors' interest in microcomputers, and just six months later, in January 1975, they announced the Ed Roberts Altair 8800. -
Ted Dabney
1937
San Francisco [USA]
† 2018
He was the co-founder of the Atari company, along with Nolan Bushnell.
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Ted Nelson
1937
Chicago [USA]
He is an American philosopher, sociologist, and information technology pioneer, known for coining the terms hypertext and hypermedia and for being the founder of the Xanadu project in the 1960s.
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Stephen P. Morse
1940
New York [USA]
He was the chief architect of the Intel 8086 microprocessor, the first processor of the x86 architecture, which went on sale in 1978, and which served as the basis for its version with a reduced 8-bit bus for the IBM-PC and compatible computers.
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Clive Sinclair
1940
Richmond (London) [United Kingdom]
† 2021
The inventor who set out to bring microcomputer technology to everyone, father of the hugely popular ZX Spectrum, the first computer on the market that families could afford.
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Dennis Ritchie
1941
Bronxville (New York) [USA]
† 2011
He was an American scientist who collaborated in the design and development of the Multics and Unix operating systems, and in the development of several programming languages such as C.
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Ed Roberts
1941
Miami [USA]
† 2010
He developed the first commercially successful personal computer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics magazine and could be purchased as a kit from MITS (which he co-founded with Forrest Mims) for $397.
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Larry Boucher
1942
[USA]
Larry Bouncher was the creator of the SCSI interface, originally developed at Shugart Associates, for transferring data between different devices on a computer bus.
It was standardized in 1986 and is commonly used on the Commodore Amiga and some Apple models. -
Brian Wilson Kernighan
1942
Toronto [Canada]
He is world-renowned for being one of the pioneering programmers who developed the Unix operating system kernel alongside Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. He is also known as the father of the B programming language, the basis for the C programming language.
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Gary Kildall
1942
Seattle [USA]
He was the creator of the CP/M operating system and founder of Digital Research, Inc., which refused to license the rights to its operating system to IBM, instead opting for Microsoft's DOS operating system, which would end up pushing it out of the market.
Paradoxically, years later, his company, Digital Research, released a version of DOS called DR-DOS, at the end of the operating system's lifespan, which enjoyed some success.
