MOS 6502
More info
- Creator
- Chuck Peddle, MOS Technology
- Released
- 1975
- Type
- 8-bit microprocessor
- Launch price
- $25
The processor that cost $25 when the competition cost two hundred, and therefore sits inside half of the 1980s.
Chuck Peddle left Motorola with part of the 6800 team and built a stripped-down successor at MOS Technology. The $25 price against Intel's and Motorola's $179–360 was provocative enough that the industry suspected a con. The design has only three registers but compensates with zero-page addressing: the first 256 bytes of memory are reached with shorter instructions and act in practice as extra registers.
The result was the standard processor for cheap machines — Apple II, Commodore PET, VIC-20 and C64 (as the 6510), Atari 2600 and 800, BBC Micro and Nintendo's NES. The chip is still made in modernised form by the Western Design Center and used in embedded systems.