Non-fake Apple 1 on ebay

[Chuck Guzis]

On 20 Nov 2009 at 8:16, Al Kossow wrote:

> 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.

There were variants of the 6502 with mask-programmed ROM on board (I 
have a Micropolis floppy drive with one) and 3M Iomat quarter-inch 
tape drives had a controller that's not much bigger than a file card 
that holds a 6502, EPROM, a little SRAM and a VIA.  So the thing 
*was*  suited to what we'd call microcontroller use. 

The $25 price tag may be a red herring.  ISTR that MOS started a 
price war at Wescon, and the other exhibitors soon followed with 
severly reduced pricing.  Within one or two years, a Wescon attendee 
could go home with not only a sample CPU, but databooks as well, for 
free.  I used to have a National PACE that I received in that way.  I 
think my GI CP1600 was a Wescon freebie.  The microprocessor war was 
heating up fast...

--Chuck