In college (more than a decade ago for me, but still in this millennium) our MOS 6502 hardware/assembly programming lab was called "Microcontroller Design". Thi

In college (more than a decade ago for me, but still in this millennium) our MOS 6502 hardware/assembly programming lab was called "Microcontroller Design". This was as opposed to the later lab class "Microcomputer Design" which used the more recent Motorola 68k. I suppose the chip that powered the original Macintoshes is slightly closer to today's idea of a microcomputer than the 6502 and its original "microcomputer revolution" Apple II/TI Home Computer/Commodore 64. One of the takeaways from those courses was that the "microcomputer" has moved on so much from what you can breadboard in a lab (the Motorola 68k was one of the last "microcomputer" chipsets that you could breadboard and even that was still a hardware reliability challenge), but MOS 6502 was cemented as a "forever" tool as a "microcontroller". You can still get ICs in bread board forms and build it next to classic TTL logic chips and test/prototype it at human scale clock cycles (things you can see/read in an oscilloscope in real time). You can merge into an SoC core and run it at modern processor clock cycles. There are so many wild uses for the MOS 6502 as a "microcontroller" on the periphery of computing. Between MOS' bankruptcy and the many licensees of the 6502 and the many people that cut their programming teeth in the "microcomputer revolution" of the Apple II et al, the 65xx family likely really is a vestigial "forever chip". As a programmer, and I've heard this sentiment from others too, I also think the 6502 was also the last "fun" assembly language to write directly without a higher level language, which adds to its legacy.