The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of competing designs from larger companies such as Motorola and Intel. It was nevertheless fully comparable with them, and, along with the Zilog Z80, sparked a ser...
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The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of competing designs from larger companies such as Motorola and Intel. It was nevertheless fully comparable with them, and, along with the Zilog Z80, sparked a series of computer projects that would eventually result in the home computer revolution of the 1980s. The 6502 design, with about 4,000 transistors, was originally second-sourced by Rockwell and Synertek and later licensed to a number of companies. It is still made for embedded systems.
The 6502 was designed primarily by the same engineering team that had designed the Motorola 6800. After resigning from Motorola en masse, the team went looking for another company that would be interested in hosting a design team, and found MOS Technology, then a...
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