Commodore and Apple

[Jim Brain <brain@jbrain.com>]

I thought this might be worth sharing with the two groups:

Jim Butterfield happened upon the site:

http://www.mergetel.com/~blitz/C64/cpeople.html

Where the following was stated:


"Chuck Peddle was so sure of his idea [for a personal computer]
that he allied with Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and
father of the popular BASIC interpreter, to buy up Apple. This
took place almost at the same time when Commodore bought MOS
Technology. Wozniak and Jobs wanted back then 150,000 dollars
for Apple, but Peddle and Gates could only raise two thirds of
the required funds."

I was able to get ahold of Woz to ask what he remembers from this era. 
Here is his response:

Woz:

Ridiculous.

We invited Chuck Peddle to our garage and showed him the Apple ][ 
prototype. Chuck thought it was pretty good. We went to Commodore and 
talked primarily with Andre Sousan. We were told that Chuck wanted to do 
his own thing and that he could do better than us at reaching the cheap 
needs of customers. Jack Tramiel, the Commodore president, was talked by 
Chuck into shooting for cheapness. Steve Jobs was trying to talk 
Commodore into buying the Apple ][ for a large amount, like hundreds of 
thousands of dollars. I felt weird to hear this because I had done the 
whole design and very little existed besides that, and I had not been 
privy to talk of such big numbers. Steve Jobs also wanted Commodore to 
hire us along with the proposed deal. The deal was never on paper and 
never concrete, as to how much. We were told that Check Peddle was the 
instrumental force in passing on this deal. Andre Sousan himself shortly 
thereafter left Commodore and came to Apple, saying that we had the 
right (and better) computer.
--

I was amazed both at how reachable Woz still is, and how the fate of 
Commodore and Apple may have been different.  I don't remember the 
initial PET price and how it compared to the Apple II price, but I 
believe the PET was much higher-priced.  I suspect the overriding factor 
was Chuck wanting to do his own PC, and having the MOS fab at his 
disposal to make customICs, where Apple had no such fab, and used more 
off-the-shelf componentsfor the initial units.

Jim


--

Jim Brain, Brain Innovations
brain@jbrain.com                                http://www.jbrain.com
Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times!