"Unconfirmed stories and unreliable sources" are what mass readership is about. I'm not saying the MOS 6502 was not important but its impact does not match the 8080. The very early days the 6502 had its day in the sun! The INTEL monopoly was well underway solidifying with the 8088 in the PC World. I wrote a book about the early micro-computing days as an historian and do confirm statements I make. I agree Chuck Guzis was the expert here and we do truly miss him.

Murray, is your book still available?

-----Original Message----- From: Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 12:50:37PM +0000, Frank Ventura via cctalk wrote: [...] If it's _A Historical Research Guide to the Microcomputer_, ISBN 9781411646520, then it's a print-on-demand book through Lulu with a 2-3 week lead time. Amazon offers a preview of the first few pages, but that's mostly front matter and not really enough of the actual content to tell me whether I want to order a copy. Does Amazon (or anyone) offer a Kindel or another form of EBook for this?

"Unconfirmed stories and unreliable sources" are what mass readership is about. I'm not saying the MOS 6502 was not important but its impact does not match the 8080. The very early days the 6502 had its day in the sun! The INTEL monopoly was well underway solidifying with the 8088 in the PC World. I wrote a book about the early micro-computing days as an historian and do confirm statements I make. I agree Chuck Guzis was the expert here and we do truly miss him. Happy computing,

On 2025-09-19 10:52 a.m., Christian Liendo via cctalk wrote: Here I think the 6800 had a big impact as the 65xx was to pin and timing compatible device. With that memory model Apple and others developed the video cycle on first phase of the clock and ram access on the second half. Mostek's 4K dram was also a major factor. Two hardware simplifications over chips using a different bus cycle. Ben.

Which I find ironic, because the 6809 uses big endian notation for code and vectors, whereas the rest used little endian (and so did the 65XX, not that anyone here didn't already know that)

On 2025-09-19 10:52 a.m., Christian Liendo via cctalk wrote: Here I think the 6800 had a big impact as the 65xx was to pin and timing compatible device. With that memory model Apple and others developed the video cycle on first phase of the clock and ram access on the second half. Mostek's 4K dram was also a major factor. Two hardware simplifications over chips using a different bus cycle. Ben.

Another thing showing contemporary "popularity" of those early processors is surveys at the homebrew computer clubs. One I came across from Feb 1977 (pre Apple-2 release) had 182 responders.

On the other hand, has the Z80 or 8080 ever had a song written about it?? See song sample entry #4 "Add With Carry" here (The Stop Bits, and of course the "6502 song"): https://thestopbits.bandcamp.com/album/return-from-interrupt

Debatable?? Unconfirmed stories from the usual unreliable sources (Infoworld, etc.): (find confirmation before sticking your neck out) Steve Wozniak was going to build his own computer. That was a given. Likely 8080, because Z80 was EXPENSIVE. Like a good engineer, he went to WESCON. There, he saw the 6502, and realized that it would be adequate, and save much money. Some stories even say that he got some free samples! (no free samples of Z80, or even 8080) Because of that, the Apple 1 was a 6502 machine. Its success also helped Atari and Commodore to decide that 6502 would be good, or at least adequate. Impact? enormous. And Intel's market share went from predicted to be approaching monopoly, to quite healthy. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com On Wed, 17 Sep 2025, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/the-mos-6502-how-a-25-chip-sparked-a-… >> >> According to many 50 years ago on September 16, 1975, MOS Technology >> showed the 6502 at WESCON >>

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:

On Sep 19, 2025, at 3:09 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: On Fri, 19 Sep 2025, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote: Also prices were volatile; announced at one price, and then up or down on demand As did TRS80 ("Level 2 BASIC") where all numbers were single precision floating point by default! also AppleSoft, and many/most? of the other Microsoft BASICs. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

Also prices were volatile; announced at one price, and then up or down on demand

-- Grumpy Ol' Fred             cisin(a)xenosoft.com