Development of the MOS Technology 6502: A Historical Perspective (2022)

The 6502 is as important, if not more, than the iPhone. Simplicity, elegance that powered the early days of the personal computing revolution.

By the way, this is a terrific article.

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jason_s 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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keeglin 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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pklausler 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

	▲	brianpaul 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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dekhn 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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christkv 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Weird coincidence just finished watching the 8 bit guy video about the 6502 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=acUH4lWe2NQ&pp=ygUNOGJpdCBndXk...

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thevagrant 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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jason_s 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Happy birthday, 6502!