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The story of the team behind the chip that
launched a revolution

Rod Orgill
Co-Design Engineer

Rod Orgill was one of the team of eight Motorola employees and engineers who worked on the 6800 microprocessor and left the company in 1974 to work at MOS Technology along with Wil Mathys, Harry Bawcom, Ray Hirt, Mike Janes, Terry Holdt, Chuck Peddle, and Bill Mensch. He was a co-design engineer of the 6502.
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Sadly, Rod passed away in 2012. The following biography was provided by his wife, Phyllis:


Rod Orgill, metal oxide microprocessor design research engineer, entered the Motorola engineering world almost by default. Adverse to the higher education system, he volunteered for the U.S. army.  Honorably serving two years as a front line surveyor for the Honest John Nuclear Rocket, he decided military life was not for him.

Frustrated listening to student questions that he considered common knowledge, he reluctantly entered University of Utah graduating with distinction in electrical engineering & a member of IEEE. 

Graduation brought job offers that he ranked according to location and lifestyle. Data Control in Minneapolis was too cold, busy and urban. Texas had the Cowboys football. Intrigued with an unrelenting persistent, almost mysterious recruiter, he pacified him for several interviews. Each meeting brought an increase in offers to a point they were almost triple other offers. It also brought an increase in awareness in this employment as this recruiter questioned if Rod could remove walls, add devices & replace walls in an evening without being detected. They assured his wife that even though she would not know his whereabouts, someone from the agency would. Sounding like the CIA, Rod halted all communication with them. Motorola, in Phoenix, seemed closest to western civilization with outdoor activities abounding. 


There his responsibilities included the basic circuit and system design of the the Motorola 6800 with John Buchanan. At this time, Chuck Peddle was employed with Motorola to "peddle" the micro chips. Twas a challenge due to cost.

Fast forward to 1974 and the venture with MOS Technology. 1974 earmarked tension between Peddle & Motorola's management team. Motorola generated a "wine & dine', 4-day party in Austin, Texas as a precursor to a divisional move. This created an opening for Peddle to engage engineers reluctant to transfer to Texas.

He recruited those engineers to join him in Norristown, Pennsylvania, as the design team for the 6501 & 6502. To Rod's dismay, his friend & co-designer of the 6800 (John Buchanan) did not join them (John & Rod designed the 6800 chip with Rod completing  the circuit analyzer & chip layout).

In August 1974, Peddle orchestrated the move to Pennsylvania... With the force of a E4 tornado, houses were put on the market, movers at the door, humans & animals in vehicles and on the road. 
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The team was banking on producing low cost microprocessor small size chips. Rod, Chuck, and Will designed the initial architecture of the processors. Rod was responsible for the 6501 design. Electronic Engineering Times ran a full front page report on the team...

Rod's focus was strictly on design vs. money, fame, and management. All he wanted to ever do was design. Rod designed the 6501 which was tabled as part of the settlement with Motorola. The team put all their energy on the 6502. He had help from others, such as Bill Mensch, but said he made sure he would get credit for the design (without flaunting the credit) by labeling one pin after his dog, Sam Orgill (S.O.). He holds a patent with two others for the decimal correct circuitry. Late hours, overnight work, tension within the team, and Motorola's lawsuit to stop production and sales. plus a call from his friend John Buchanan with an offer to work in Colorado, Rod left the team for NCR...

With this lawsuit, MOS fell into financial woes. In 1979, with a spiraling downfall, Commodore bought MOS. Later Rod was recruited by Hewlett Packard/Agilent. He was the senior leader, designing chips to go in logic analyzers to test and verify microprocessors that companies such as Intel were building. He filled cabinets with designs/patents. A few of the patents include:
  • Oct 6, 1998 CONFIGURABLE MULTIFUNCTION FLIP-FLOP, 5,818,273,
  • March 24, 1998, CONFIGURABLE RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY FOR PROGRAMMABLE  LOGIC DEVICES, 5732407, 
  • November 4.1997, CONFIGURABLE MULTIFUNCTION FLIP-FLOP 5,684,744.  
  • August 5, 1997   LEVEL SHIFTED HIGH IMPEDANCE IMPUT MULTIPLEXOR, 5654660
  • August 30 1988 ECL to NMOS CONVERTER CONFIGURABLE MULTI FLIP-FLOP 4767951

After his move from MOS until just before his death, he was approached by several publishers for interviews, universities for "talks" of which he had no interest, stating there was too much already published of which some was accurate yet an amount was skewed. 

Family and outdoor activities best describe Rod. He often stated, "Work is only a means for life. Your work should not describe you. It's your integrity and family that describe you."
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Photo taken at the same time as the photo which appeared in the August 1975 issue of Electronic Engineering Times announcing the introduction of the 6502 (from left to right: Chuck Peddle, Rod Orgill, Terry Holdt, Ray Hirt, and seated, Wil Mathys)
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Rod with family.
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MOS Technology 6502 Rubyliths owned by Phyllis Orgill.
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Photo taken at the same time as the photo which appeared in the August 1975 issue of Electronic Engineering Times announcing the introduction of the 6502 (from left to right: Mike Janes, Harry Bawcom, and seated, Rod Orgill)

Sam: The Most Famous Rescue Dog You Never Heard Of
​by Nathan Winograd (animal advocate & son-in-law of Terry Holdt)
This article was published at nathanwinograd.com on May 29, 2019.

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This is Sam, a rescue dog, over 40 years ago. He’s the most famous dog you never heard of. But his spirit resides in your smartphone, your laptop, your PC, and every other digital device that contains a microprocessor.

When we were kids, his name was inscribed on our Apple I and Apple II computers, on our Commodore 64, our Atari and Nintendo video game consoles. We didn’t know it. In fact, no one did. Only Rod Orgill, Sam’s adopted dad, knew.

Rod Orgill was an engineer who worked on the layout design of the MOS 6501 and 6502 microchips; the latter a design that many hail as a masterpiece of computer architecture. Because of its unprecedented affordability, the MOS 6502 was the chip that ushered in the modern personal computing revolution. This is how one historical commentator described it: “When one particular chubby-faced geek stuck one particular chip into one particular computer circuit board and booted it up, the universe skipped a beat. The geek was Steve Wozniak, the computer was the Apple I, and the chip was the 6502, an 8-bit microprocessor developed by MOS Technology. The chip, and its variants went on to become the main brains of ridiculously seminal computers like the Apple II, the Commodore PET, the Commodore 64, and the BBC Micro, not to mention game systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 2600…”

My father-in-law was an engineer and the product manager for the 6502. When we cleared out his home last year, we found original documents related to the creation of the chip. Since then, Jennifer, my wife, has been reaching out to the original 6502 design team members or their surviving relatives, including Phyllis Orgill, Rod’s widow, to ask them to share memories, archives, and stories that might add to the historical record about the 6502’s production.

Included in those stories is that of Sam, a small, rescued terrier who holds the honor of having one of the “pins” of one of the most famous computer CPUs in history named in his honor: S.O. for Sam Orgill. That Rod chose to record his contribution by inscribing the 6502 not with his name, but that of his dog, shows the love and affection clearly evident in the photos of Rod and Sam that Phyllis gave us to share with the wider world. Sam was adopted as a puppy shortly before Rod left Motorola to move his family across country to work on the MOS 6502. He lived with the Orgills for 17 years and in three different states before he died.

When Sam’s initials were inscribed on history, American “dog culture” had yet to bloom. While today our beloved canine companions share not only our couches, cars, workplaces, and beds, when these photos were taken 45 years ago, many dogs still spent sad and unfulfilling lives on the ends of chains or alone in backyards. The same could not be said of Sam.

And so Jennifer and I have come to think of the 6502 portending the future in more ways than one. Not only did it democratize technology by placing the transformative power of the microprocessor into everyone’s hands, but it bears the mark of a future in which our dogs would come to occupy such a special place in our hearts that they would become synonymous with who we are.
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