Happy 50th birthday, 6502!

[orac81]

It occurred to me that its the 50th anniversary of the 6502 this year. Has anyone worked out an exact date?

[GARTHWILSON]

The Wikipedia article says of the date the 6502 was introduced at the Wescon convention, and ads leading up to it,

• MOS Technology's microprocessor introduction was different from the traditional months-long product launch.  The first run of a new integrated circuit is normally used for internal testing and shared with select customers as "engineering samples".  These chips often have a minor design defect or two that will be corrected before production begins.  Chuck Peddle's goal was to sell the first run 6501 and 6502 chips to the attendees at the WESCON trade show in San Francisco beginning on September 16, 1975.  Peddle was a very effective spokesman and the MOS Technology microprocessors were extensively covered in the trade press.  One of the earliest was a full-page story on the MCS6501 and MCS6502 microprocessors in the July 24, 1975 issue of Electronics magazine.  Stories also ran in EE Times (August 24, 1975), EDN (September 20, 1975), Electronic News (November 3, 1975), Byte (November 1975) and Microcomputer Digest (November 1975).  Advertisements for the 6501 appeared in several publications the first week of August 1975.  The 6501 would be for sale at Wescon for $20 each.  In September 1975, the advertisements included both the 6501 and the 6502 microprocessors.  The 6502 would cost only $25 (equivalent to $146 in 2024).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502

[barrym95838]

I just need to get my rear in gear and finish up my 24-bit floating point package before July (50/50 chance, I estimate). I'm going to attach it to VTL02C and debug it on Kowalski. If it works I'll skip VTL02D and E and go straight to VTL02F and have a 2K language editor/interpreter with 7:17 floats!

I take my compact and nimble coding inspiration from driving around in my little beat-up 1989 Toyota MR2. It's great fun until there's a crash ... then the party ends abruptly, but hopefully not permanently.

[BigEd]

I'd take the date of Wescon as the introduction date - that's where they were selling parts from a jar.

That'd be September 16, 1975, it seems.

The story has been told many times:

Quote:

The 6502 team took their new microprocessor to the WESCON trade show in San Francisco in September 1975. To show it off they wanted to sell the new chips and to show that they had lots of working processors. The only problem was that they only had some that worked and lots of chips that didn’t.

The solution, place the 6502s in large jars with the working ones at the top and the duds at the bottom. When a customer bought one the team took a working 6502 from the top of the jar.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

BigEd wrote:

I'd take the date of Wescon as the introduction date - that's where they were selling parts from a jar.

That'd be September 16, 1975, it seems.

The story has been told many times:

Quote:

The 6502 team took their new microprocessor to the WESCON trade show in San Francisco in September 1975. To show it off they wanted to sell the new chips and to show that they had lots of working processors. The only problem was that they only had some that worked and lots of chips that didn’t.

The solution, place the 6502s in large jars with the working ones at the top and the duds at the bottom. When a customer bought one the team took a working 6502 from the top of the jar.

Furthermore, the WESCON organizers would not allow any sales from the exhibit floor.  So MOS Technology rented a hotel suite across the street and Chuck Peddle’s wife (who, BTW, was very attractive ) sat there with those infamous jars, smiling winsomely...and selling 6502s like hot cakes. That was, on Chuck’s part, an absolutely-brilliant sales move, and the rest, as they say, is history.

BTW, I happened to be in San Francisco on business while that WESCON was going on—San Francisco Muni, the city’s mass transit operator, was a customer of ours.  Alas, I wasn’t able to get over to the show.  Had I been able to, I would have had the opportunity to score some original 6502s.  I still regret the missed opportunity. 

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Incidentally, it was in 1976 that our company embarked on developing an event recorder for locomotives, a device similar in function to the flight data recorder on an airliner.  The proposed design was based upon the Z-80, which was brand new at the time, and a working prototype had been built and tested in the electronics lab.  However, the unit transfer cost, the cost of the unit as manufactured, but before any overhead is added, was too high for management’s liking, and the project lead was ordered to do a cost shrink.

As it so happened, the biggest single cost driver was the microprocessor.  One of the “young guys” in the electronics group (not me) suggested the 6502, apparently having seen a MOS Technology ad in one of the trade magazines.  Engineering samples were procured and the design was redone to use the 6502.  That change not only greatly drove down the cost, it proved to be easier to produce in quantity, with a near-100 percent good rate once the kinks had been worked out (this was my introduction to the concept of “bodge wiring,” although we didn’t call it that in those days).

The only problem was in programming the thing.  Two of the project engineers were fluent in Z-80 assembly language, but none knew the 6502’s equivalent.  Me, being the brash young guy I was at the time, looked at the documentation supplied by MOS Technology (complete with some handwritten notes by Chuck Peddle himself—I wish I had saved that stuff) and opined that I could do the programming.  MOS had provided us with a “reference” assembler written in FORTRAN, which was loaded onto our S360 mainframe.

I was given a terminal at which to work (a VDT was an expensive luxury in those days) and over the space of about six weeks, learned the assembly language and how to work with the assembler, and wrote the code that went into the prototype event recorder.  Much to everyone’s astonishment, especially mine, it actually worked.    We installed the prototype recorder on an Amtrak locomotive for testing, and in a space of about three weeks, identified a few bugs in the code and fixed them (code was in PROMs—I don’t think EPROMs were available at the time).

As luck would have it, that same locomotive was involved in a high-speed grade (level) crossing collision, in which a truck driver and his co-worker were both killed.  The recorder, which logged operational parameters such as throttle opening, brake pipe pressure and speed, worked as advertised.  The recovered data proved that the engineer was running his train at the prescribed speed (79 MPH, 128 KPH), had whistled for the crossing (as required by law), and had made a full-service brake application immediately before the collision.

Using the recorder evidence, Amtrak was able to get the lawsuits lodged by the families of the driver and his co-worker dismissed with prejudice.

[Dr Jefyll]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Using the recorder evidence, Amtrak was able to get the lawsuits lodged by the families of the driver and his co-worker dismissed with prejudice.

6502 on the witness stand, eh? And still just a youngster at the time? Remarkable!

As for documentation, that's a subject Chuck pursued at some length. The eventual result were the *very* fine manuals included with every KIM-1. See this post for an amusing anecdote and a link to its source, an Oral History by Chuck.

-- Jeff

Chuck Peddle wrote:

before we're going to introduce this-- we know we're going to
do this thing, we know we're going to do this at this show-- my buddy who had worked for me in Phoenix
came in and he said, look, people don't know how to use this thing. He was a programmer out of a
Czechoslovakian institute, he was a really smart guy. He says, people don't know how to use this thing.
Unless we write a really good menu it's not going to get used.

So I said, OK, we'll sit down and write it together.

[orac81]

Interesting that the first published feature was 24th july 1975 Electronics magazine. Is this the magazine?

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Elect ... r_Page.htm

They seem to be missing that issue!

Does that imply they had a working version at that stage? I guess I was thinking of the first working chip out of a wafer as the "birthday", but maybe knowledge of that date is lost..

[orac81]

Are the dies of the 6501/6502 identical, just with different wiring to the pins? Also 6504/5?
( I have a 6505 datecode 7644.)

[barrym95838]

Too much stuff going on in my life right now. My 24-bit float package will have to wait for another anniversary, but hopefully not for long.

[electricdawn]

It's still 2025, so I can still congratulate the 6502 and Chuck Peddle (RIP) for 50 years of awesome service. May you still be available for another 50 years and teach the young'uns how it's done. Learn the basics, then upgrade from a solid knowledge.