Development of the MOS Technology 6502: A Historical Perspective (2022)(embeddedrelated.com)
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Development of the MOS Technology 6502: A Historical Perspective (2022)
https://www.EmbeddedRelated.com/showarticle/1453.php
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Fifty years ago today, on September 16, 1975, MOS Technology exhibited the 6502 at WESCON, making samples available:
> Here the story takes one of those legendary turns. Steve Wozniak had been designing the Apple I around the Motorola 6800, but he sees the MOS Technology ad, realizes he can get a better price (even better than a Motorola discount he can take advantage of as a Hewlett-Packard employee), goes to WESCON, and buys a couple of chips from Peddle, who’s selling them in a jar from a suite in a nearby hotel because WESCON won’t let them sell product at the convention. The 6502 is soon in the Apple I design. Only two hundred Apple I computers were manufactured in 1976, but by that time, Wozniak is already thinking about the Apple II, introduced in 1977, which will quickly take off like a rocket, starting the use of the 6502 in the personal computer industry with a bang.
> Here the story takes one of those legendary turns. Steve Wozniak had been designing the Apple I around the Motorola 6800, but he sees the MOS Technology ad, realizes he can get a better price (even better than a Motorola discount he can take advantage of as a Hewlett-Packard employee), goes to WESCON, and buys a couple of chips from Peddle, who’s selling them in a jar from a suite in a nearby hotel because WESCON won’t let them sell product at the convention. The 6502 is soon in the Apple I design. Only two hundred Apple I computers were manufactured in 1976, but by that time, Wozniak is already thinking about the Apple II, introduced in 1977, which will quickly take off like a rocket, starting the use of the 6502 in the personal computer industry with a bang.
I much prefer Chuck Peddle's telling of the story of surrounding MOS's acquisition by Commodore and the history of the 6502 at VCF East: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBnmJhEOdC8
I wrote my first chess-playing program in 6502 hex because I didn't have an assembler, and I still remember some of its opcode values all of these years later. Such a fun little chip!
Chess? Wow. I did some 6502 programming in hex on my Atari 800XL, but just for simple things like display list interupts. I had a list of all the 6502 opcodes and hex encodings from a magazine or book and figured it out from there.
I have been working with 6502 the past few days. Apple IIe hires mode was the bane of my childhood existence, but these days it's not so bad- an LLM can easily write code (C or assembly) to do high performance drawing. Unfortunately, the 6502 is a really limited chip with a number of very awkward challenges.
Weird coincidence just finished watching the 8 bit guy video about the 6502 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=acUH4lWe2NQ&pp=ygUNOGJpdCBndXk...
The book "Commodore: A company on the edge" covers a bit about early MOS. It was quite fascinating. Worth a read if you are interested in the era.
Its amazing what Chuck Peddle accomplished
Its amazing what Chuck Peddle accomplished
Happy birthday, 6502!
By the way, this is a terrific article.