you might not know its name but you're probably familiar with the pixels it
pushes to the screen it made the calculations necessary to make you die
from dysentery it shifted bits so Mario could punch those question mark boxes
and zip down green pipes it is the brain of beloved bending robots in terminators
the world over and it allows Tamagotchis to poop I'm talking of course
about the mos design 6502 microprocessor
these days it's easy to act all nonchalant about the processing power
available to the average human being need to make an international call
record some 4k video host cat memes in real-time on Twitter while binging
Breaking Bad in HD you're goddamn right even bottom shelf phones these days can
pull all those feats off and more without breaking a sweat
but this 40 pin chip is from a far far simpler time an era when earth tones
were in cars were slow and ugly and corduroy was the only fabric available
you see it was the early 1970s and a bunch of ex motorola engineers at MOS
technology were appalled by the state of the industry micro processors were
expensive I mean how are you going to spark a personal computing revolution if
the average Joe or Jane can't even afford one measly chip but with the 6502
MOS's clever engineers were able to drive the price down at the time a
similar chip for Motorola cost around $300 mos were able to get their chip
down closer to $20 to put that into perspective imagine if a bunch of ex
Apple engineers offered a top-of-the-line iPhone xs+ competitor
for $90 instead of $1500 obviously this price gouging and corporate intrigue
caused some drama between the two companies there was a legal scuffle and
mos had to pull one of their processors off the market but when the dust settled
the company was still intact and they had a killer affordable microprocessor
in the 6502 the chip went on to be used in some of the most influential personal
computers of the 70s and 80s Steve Wozniak put the 6502 at the heart of
the Apple 2 home computer the system that would spark a personal computer
revolution a derivative of the 6502 the 6510 was the brainchild behind the
Commodore 64 which is considered one of the best selling personal computers of
all time
yet another 6502 based processor was used to power the first-ever Nintendo
Entertainment System the device that would single-handedly revived home video
game systems and would serve as the touchstone for today's nerd positive
culture I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this little
package of silicon and plastic is one of the most influential pieces of
technology in the world it's a testament to the 6502's utility that variants of it
are still in production to this day they're used in embedded devices like
sound controllers and also more specialized applications like modern
Tamagotchis there's also a cadre of dedicated programmers and tinkerers who
are still writing new code that runs on 6502 devices like the Commodore 64
their demos push the hardware to it's very limits combining brilliant
mathematical trickery with chip specific hacks to achieve hypnotic
effects the humble 6502 shaped the entire technology industry as we know it
today because it took computing out of gigantic mainframes and put it in the
hands of people like you and me by democratizing access to technology it
helped bring about the digital interconnected age that we take for
granted today thanks for watching did you have a c64 or NES growing up do
you have an idea of what we should discuss in our next episode let us know
in the comments leave us a like if you enjoyed this video and subscribe if you
want to see more from us so over the summer I taught myself some like
rudimentary form of 6502 assembly language which seems really scary but
it's not you get this book from Derek Morris the link will be in the
description of the video and it is a pretty clean way to learn it if you ever
wanted to mess around with the 6502 over here the Commodore 64 it was
very fun it was very intimidating at first but it's a good read and you
should learn you'll learn more about programming overall if you read it so
thank you for watching