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PostPosted: Sat Oct 15, 2016 11:02 am 
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I was just looking through early issues of Microcomputer Digest, a monthly newsletter put out by Microcomputer Associates - who made the Jolt, the first single-board 6502 offering. And I found some pieces on the early days of the 6502, quoted here for your reading pleasure. The PDFs can be found in the bitsaver archives.

Volume 2, number 2, August 1975:
Quote:
3rd Generation Microprocessor

A third generation family of 8-bit microprocessors faster than the 6800 or the 8080, but compatible with the 6800, has been announced by MOS Technology. According to Chuck Peddle, marketing director for microcomputers, MOS Technology designed the entire family to be sensibly priced while giving the user a high performance microprocessor system,

The family's first entries are the MCS6501 and the MCS6502.

Both are N-channel, silicon-gate, depletion load, 5V devices compatible with the Motorola and AMI 6800. They will be offered for delivery in September at single unit prices of $20 with production orders priced substantially less.

Future software compatible versions of various pin configurations will range from very low cost devices to very high performance 16-bit competitive products .

The MCS6501 microprocessor uses an external two phase clock, is a plug-in replacement for the 6800 and can address up to 65K memory. The MCS6502 has an on-chip clock, external single phase input, RC time base input, and a crystal time base input. Both microprocessors are available in 40-pin packages and are currently being sampled by selected accounts . A cross assembler and emulator is also available on national timeshare services .

MOS Technology says they will demonstrate their microprocessors and software, and display their full line of documentation at the McArthur suite in the St. Francis Hotel during WESCON. Both devices and the software will be available for purchase and delivery at that time.

Other members of the 650X family will include combinations of RAM, ROM and I/O as well as versions of current peripheral devices , and a full range of memory products .

The microprocessors will be second sourced by Synertek. The companies have entered a verbal agreement in which MOS Technology will provide Synertek with masks for all 650X microprocessors and Synertek will provide MOS Technology with masks for their 2101, 2102, 2111 and 2112 RAMs. Synertek expects to have samples of the microprocessors in September.

Although the architecture of the MCS650X family is based around the PDP 11, several architectural innovations have made this microprocessor the first of a third generation. These include significantly expanded addressing capability, including two real index registers (not available on any other micro), two powerful forms of indirect addressing, an 8080-type Ready, fast decimal arithmetic (including subtract), and pipelining for higher thruput. According to AH Systems' benchmark tests at 1MHz, the 6501 outperforms all competitive 8-bit machines.

Hardware features of the 6500 microprocessor family include an accumulator, two output buffers, data buffer, a high and a low program counter, two real index registers, stack pointer, instruction register, condition code register, ALU, and all instruction decode and control circuitry. The 6501 adder can perform both binary and decimal arithmetic operations.

There are 55 commands in the 6501 instruction set and eleven addressing modes: accumulator , immediate , absolute , zero page , indexed zero page, indexed absolute, implied, indexed indirect, indirect indexed, absolute indirect and relative.


Volume 2, number 4, October 1975:
Quote:
MOS Technology demonstrated their newly announced 8-bit microprocessor priced at $20 in single unit quantities. The family includes the 6501 and 6502 microprocessors which are pin compatible with the M6800.


Volume 2, number 6, December 1975:
Quote:
Motorola Sues MOS Technology

Motorola is seeking an injunction against MOS Technology to halt the manufacture, marketing and filling of orders for MCS 6500 microprocessor products. The injunction action is intended to stop MOS Technology from further 6500 activities until the outcome of a pending trial of a suit filed in Federal Court in Philadelphia PA by Motorola. As of yet, the injunction attempts have been unsuccessful.

Motorola, citing several Motorola patents that led to the development of its own MC6800 microprocessor, alleges that seven former employees of Motorola (Charles J. Peddle, Rodney H. Orgill, William D. Mensch, Wilbur L. Mattys, Terry N. Holdt, Ernie B. Hirt, and Harry E. Bawcom) left Motorola and joined MOS Technology in similar posts and helped establish that firm's line of MCS6500 microprocessors.

The suit seeks triple damages plus all profits MOS Technology has made on the 6500 product line. MOS Technology has denied the allegations and stated that Motorola's claims are unfounded.


Volume 3, number 5, November 1976:
Quote:
Financial
COMMODORE TO ACQUIRE MOS TECH.
Commodore International Ltd. has reached an agreement in principle to acquire MOS Technology. MOS Technology is to become a subsidiary of Commodore and will remain a separate profit center. Officials state that no management changes are anticipated. The company will remain at its present site in Valley Forge, PA.

Reasons cited for the proposed sale included MOS Technology's recent patent infringement suit with Motorola and the withdrawal of a 6800-pin compatible microprocessor. Also noted, the sale guarantees MOS Technology's survival and gives the firm necessary resources to exploit their microprocessor product line.


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 12:43 pm 
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This is a very interesting read! Thanks for this.

It also makes me think...imagine if Jack Tramiel tried to do something really stupid...like prevent the sales of the 6502 to Apple, Nintendo, etc.

I would imagine there would have been lawsuits. But, Apple wasn't as big at the time. Commodore could have kept them in court I suppose.

Then again, it would be pretty stupid to cut off your customers so you can profit off your own hardware. Just ask TI. :-)

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 12:55 pm 
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Very devious! But I think Jack would have been thwarted - in the 70s and 80s customers demanded a second source, before a chip would be regarded as a reasonable one to buy. (Of course Commodore's own custom chips were single source, but they were not sold on the open market.) In the case of the 6502, Synertek and Rockwell were, I think, signed up pretty early as second sources. Rockwell's license evidently gave them the freedom to make variations too.


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 1:15 pm 
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AH! But, I wonder why Jack didn't do what TI did to them and "jack" up the price of the 6502 to unreasonable costs so that their competitors would have suffered in the same way TI made Commodore suffer?

To have been a fly on the wall back then. :-)

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 2:01 pm 
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If Jack had increased the price or limited the supply (and perhaps he did!) then Synertek and Rockwell would just sell more parts. The idea of second sourcing is to have at least two independent suppliers. It wasn't just about defending against sharp practice - in those days, a company might only have one fab line, so if they had a yield crash, as they sometimes did, they'd be unable to make product for weeks or months. Yield crashes could be caused by contamination in the plant, in the chemicals, in the water.


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 7:31 pm 
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Quote:
so if they had a yield crash, as they sometimes did, they'd be unable to make product for weeks or months. Yield crashes could be caused by contamination in the plant, in the chemicals, in the water.

or by a fire in wafer fab, like we had at the UHF/VHF power transistor manufacturer where I worked in applications engineering in 1984-85. I had to go into the wafer-fab area sometimes, and observed the cleanliness procedures and see everything absolutely dust-free, and then to go to work one morning and find it all open and half burned down was amazing. It was also amazing though how quickly they got it back up, since of course the whole company depended on it.

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 9:10 pm 
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Wow.


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 11:23 pm 
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Over the last few years it's become clear to me that the 6501 as well as the 6502 were both pin compatible with the 6800, and the most important difference was that the clock generator was part of the 6502 so you basically only needed a crystal to make it run, which was pretty unique at the time. The Apple 1 schematic and circuit board show the significant amount of components that you would have needed to make it work with a 6800 (provided you could exchange the PROM with another one). It's pretty obvious from that schematic how the Non-Connected pins on the 6502 were used on the 6800, and how they're not needed for the 6502.

I think I remember Chuck Peddle mentioning in an interview that the 6501 was basically designed as a the sacrificial lamb in case Motorola would come after them, and the 6502 was always their prize product, to be used in terminals and simple controllers, not "real" computers. We'll probably never know the details of the settlement between Commodore/MOS and Motorola but we know that Commodore could keep producing the 6502 which was better than the 6800 anyway because of the built-in clock generator. If patent laws back then were what they are now, the world wouldn't have seen the 6502.

Also I remember someone at MOS or Commodore saying that the reason that they had to settle with Motorola because, even though the group who had left Motorola had strict instructions to destroy all the notes from Motorola as part of plausible deniability of using Motorola patented inventions, one of the engineers (who remains unnamed) had a copy of the 6800 mask or a 6800 handbook or something in their office when Motorola's lawyers came in for discovery.

As for Apple buying 6502s from Commodore, did that ever happen? Does anyone have any pictures of Apple II computers with MOS chips in them (that are not replacements that were done by the owner)? I would expect that if Apple (or any other competitor for that matter) would order 6502s or other chips from Commodore, Tramiel would take their money and let them wait forever or at least until after Christmas) for their order to go on the truck ("business is war" after all). I also think Steve Jobs would be smart enough to understand that, so he probably wouldn't even try ordering chips from Commodore; he'd probably get his chips from Synertek or Rockwell. Without those second sources, the 6502 would not be what it is today.

===Jac


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 21, 2016 1:31 pm 
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jac_goudsmit wrote:
As for Apple buying 6502s from Commodore, did that ever happen? Does anyone have any pictures of Apple II computers with MOS chips in them (that are not replacements that were done by the owner)? I would expect that if Apple (or any other competitor for that matter) would order 6502s or other chips from Commodore, Tramiel would take their money and let them wait forever or at least until after Christmas) for their order to go on the truck ("business is war" after all). I also think Steve Jobs would be smart enough to understand that, so he probably wouldn't even try ordering chips from Commodore; he'd probably get his chips from Synertek or Rockwell. Without those second sources, the 6502 would not be what it is today.


That's a very good point!

I didn't even think of that. I will have to crack open some of my Apples and see what kind of 6502 is in them. My Atari's too. I only have about 20-30 of them. lol

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 21, 2016 1:50 pm 
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It's blatantly obvious that Tramiel was no dummy. And I've never seen any evidence that despite his antics, that he wasn't a stand-up guy. I've never seen a MOS chip in an Apple, but I would surmise that was because Apple didn't want to buy from Commodore, not because Commodore didn't want to sell to Apple.


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 21, 2016 5:43 pm 
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KC9UDX wrote:
It's blatantly obvious that Tramiel was no dummy. And I've never seen any evidence that despite his antics, that he wasn't a stand-up guy. I've never seen a MOS chip in an Apple, but I would surmise that was because Apple didn't want to buy from Commodore, not because Commodore didn't want to sell to Apple.


I guess we'll never know. But it's a known fact that Woz bought one of the 6502's from Chuck Peddle's wife in the hotel room at Wescon in 1975 (the famous jars full of working 6502's on top of non-working ones), and put it into the Apple 1 which he had already designed for the 6800. So Woz was probably a fan of MOS, Jobs probably not so much, but that's just my speculation :-)

Most, if not all, Atari VCS systems have two MOS chips in them: a 6507 and a 6532 (The third chip was the TIA custom chip, I forgot who made that). There's a story about Chuck Peddle going to their office in Grass Valley CA to help them get the system going, and I bet Atari was a good steady source of income for Commodore for a long time. I don't think Tramiel would have seen the Atari consoles as competition for the PET, CBM, VIC-20 and C-64, and evidently he liked the company so much that he bought it from Warner when he left Commodore. They may have had a non-competition clause in their contract, who knows.

So yeah, probably plenty of MOS/Commodore chips in Atari gear (at least up to 1984) but not in Apple.

===Jac


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 21, 2016 8:36 pm 
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But, since Commodore owned MOS, wouldn't any purchase net Commodore some royalties? Didn't other manufacturers have to license the IP from MOS/Commodore?

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 21, 2016 8:41 pm 
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The second source agreements were, I think, once-and-for-all agreements. Not based on royalties or any recurring payment.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2016 2:30 am 
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jac_goudsmit wrote:
But it's a known fact that Woz bought one of the 6502's from Chuck Peddle's wife in the hotel room at Wescon in 1975 (the famous jars full of working 6502's on top of non-working ones), and put it into the Apple 1 which he had already designed for the 6800. So Woz was probably a fan of MOS, Jobs probably not so much, but that's just my speculation :-)
The motivation for Woz was simply the price. He couldn't afford the CPUs of the other vendors, at maybe hundreds of dollars. That he could get a 6502 for $25 was the turning point, and why Apple used the 6502 in the years to come.


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