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The 6502 absolutely did evolve to compete (and overtake, in some fields) the 6800, no doubt about it! The motivation of competing on the embedded market (whethe
by systems_glitch 3y ago
The 6502 absolutely did evolve to compete (and overtake, in some fields) the 6800, no doubt about it! The motivation of competing on the embedded market (whether you see that in Bill Mensch's IEEE interview quote, or Chuck Peddle's lamenting that customers didn't like the $300 tag on the 6800) explains a lot of the design choices though, especially when considering support chips like the 6530 mask-programmed RRIOT.
Thanks for a great 6800 writeup, and I look forward to the follow-up! I feel like the 6800 does not get the love it deserves from the current generation of hackers.
- klelatti 3y agoThanks so much! There is so much to cover in Part 2 so it might take a little while. Completely agree that the 6800 needs more love. It was a really important design. PS I'd not seen Mensch's comment that Peddle's intention was to raid Motorola for engineers before - that's an interesting angle!!
- systems_glitch 3y agoYeah I'm sure the corporate raid had something to do with Motorola dropping the hammer on them over the 6501 pinout. Bill Mensch has said really it was just so they didn't need to design a development system right out the gate, and that they figured other engineers would appreciate that. Seems like it alone wouldn't have been enough to get Motorola mad, especially since they must've known they were just bogging MOS down, and that the pinout wasn't legally defensible reasoning to stop production (MOS and second sources later continued with the 6512, which is effectively 6800 pinout with very, very minor changes).