Comment by amelius
4 years ago
MOS Technology should have forced Apple to pay 30% of their revenue for the privilege of using their 6502 CPU.
4 years ago
MOS Technology should have forced Apple to pay 30% of their revenue for the privilege of using their 6502 CPU.
Hold on a minute. I was just glancing through this discussion and bumped into your thought here.
Why?
MOS setup to bring an inexpensive microprocessor to market and were successful. In some of the history Chuck Peddle has told, MOS really did not even target the personal computer market initially.
One, it was not quite a thing, and their KIM trainer was aimed at "distributed intelligence", basically embedded type use cases.
Once the ball got rolling, and Apple was a big part of that, using the 6502 gained traction.
Moto, by charging so much for the 6800, and later 6809, missed out on a lot!
Sidebar:
I often wonder what personal computing and video gaming might have looked like had the 6809 been inexpensive and was the basis for all the 6502 machines, or more of them... In terms of capability, the two chips are similar, but the 6809 offered a far more robust instruction set. Maybe it did not matter much overall. The set of possible things is similar enough.
But, I do wonder all the same. Doing really hard, or demanding things with the 6809 has advantages, but I digress big time here!
End sidebar:
In any case, MOS scored! Sold a ton of chips, and why would they be entitled as to get that kind of compensation?
Or, is this snark? Maybe is... LMAO. I probably bit on this when I did not have to. Oh well. Cheers!