[cctalk] Re: 50 years of the MOS 6502

I'll confess, I wasn't even born in 1975 :) But from what I've read... Chuck Peddle had come up with some kind of manufacturing method that let them mass produce enough 6502, where the initial price they offered was about $25 for a chip. I don't know enough about all the intricacies of those methods (and how they compared to Motorola and others existing processes) - though I do know the 6502 was also very trimmed of features (which made me wonder if the lesser-price was just better yields due to just an overall simpler chip?). I didn't get the impression the Z80 was "expensive" - contemporary prices that I found placed the Z80 at something like $60 (or at least, under $100) and an 8080 at over $300? (but it's hard to pinpoint individual price vs bulk order, and normalize across those critical years of 1974-1977). Apologies if this is all covered in your book. It's interesting to me reading the two arcs of minicomputers and the micros sort of eventually converging. You had minicomputers used to make Star Wars and solve huge real-world problems, while micros clawed their way up out of calculators. Note, there is the claim of Elon Musk and Linus Torvald starting their computer careers using a VIC-20 (6502-based). At Lockheed (then GD), when the F-16 was first being developed, I'm told they used Commodore PET's to do initial aerodynamics modeling because it's BASIC had floating point support. Obviously, that's not unique to the 6502 - but the point was they chose PET because they were so relatively affordable and easy to use for the math-folks to figure out and simulate their equations. (maybe the "all-in-one" ness of the PET was a factor too, from a material purchase standpoint, I recall that being a factor whereby they got around calling it a computer? ) -Steve On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 8:11 PM Murray McCullough via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: