The RCA1802 was sort of a square egg. It had
popularity for a short
while. People lost interest after that, partly as RCA discontinued
it by the mid 80s. Also because it was slow and had a relatively
poor(primitive) instruction set and a total lack of high level languages
other than tinybasic.
Apparently the satellite people liked them because of their low power
requirments. Several companies (maybe RCA itself) produced rad-hard
versions.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net