MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (1975)
When the chubby-faced geek stuck that chip on the computer 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 went on to become the main brains of ridiculously seminal computers like the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the BBC Micro, not to mention game systems like the Nintendo and Atari. Chuck Peddle, one of the chip’s creators, recalls when they introduced the 6502 at a trade show in 1975. “We had two glass jars filled with chips,” he says, “and I had my wife sit there selling them.” Hordes showed up. The reason: The 6502 wasn’t just faster than its competitors—it was also way cheaper, selling for US $25 while Intel’s 8080 and Motorola’s 6800 were both fetching nearly $200.
The breakthrough, says Bill Mensch, who created the 6502 with Peddle, was a minimal instruction set combined with a fabrication process that “yielded 10 times as many good chips as the competition.” The 6502 almost single-handedly forced the price of processors to drop, helping launch the personal computer revolution. Some embedded systems still use the chip. More interesting perhaps, the 6502 is the electronic brain of Bender, the depraved robot in “Futurama,” as revealed in a 1999 episode.
