20 Nov
2009
20 Nov
'09
4:16 p.m.
Jules Richardson wrote:
> The 6502 to me always seemed to be a little
"brain dead" compared to
> the 8080.
Chuck Peddle told me a couple of months ago that the 6502 was never intended
to be a general-purpose microprocessor, it was designed to be a replacement
for hard-wired logic.
They had a die size target to hit to get to the price point they wanted
and pulled out things they thought were unnecessary for its use in that market.
In particular, the length of the registers. I had always wondered why they built
a microprocessor with an 8 bit stack pointer, when the previous 6800 design had
16.