What Happened to the MOS 6502? Why the MOS 6502 Never Died Out

The MOS Technology 6502 cost just 25 dollars in September 1975, when rival chips cost close to 200 dollars. It lost the office desk to Intel, yet half a century later the same design is still being made. Chuck Peddle and seven engineers left Motorola in 1974 to build a cheaper chip at MOS Technology near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Their processor went into the Apple II, the Commodore PET and 64, and the Atari 2600. Commodore bought the company in 1976 for its calculator chips and never paid for a successor. Designer Bill Mensch rebuilt it in low-power CMOS and licensed it, and his Western Design Center still sells the 65C02. In this documentary: 1975: the WESCON hotel suite and the jar of chips 1975: the 6501, built to fit Motorola's own socket 1976: why a calculator maker bought MOS Technology 1978: how Mensch carried the design into CMOS 1981: the IBM PC and the successor that never came What remains is a 40-pin chip still on sale, and a factory address that is now a federal Superfund site. If a Commodore 64 or Apple II was your first computer, tell us what you loaded on it first. Subscribe for more of the processor battles behind the stickers on American computers.