The Apple ][ 6502 — and so much Moore!

iPhone 14 Pro Max

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I just bought this vintage Apple ][ motherboard, like the one I had in my first real computer in 1979.

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is just above the Apple logo — the 6502. For a sense of the progress in lithography since then, an entire 6502 built in Apple’s fab today could fit under a single transistor in the original 6502.

And if Lace Lithography is successful in scaling beyond the use of light, then the entire Apple ][ computer could be laid out in the space of a single transistor from the original machine (another ~150x in transistor count beyond the CPU).

More below.

5 responses to “The Apple ][ 6502 — and so much Moore!”

jurvetson

Sep 8, 2023 at 12:10 am

This is the original 6502 die, with bond pad wires for a sense of scale. It ran at 1 MHz. Deep dive & sim: http://www.visual6502.orgIn 1979, my Dad ran the world’s largest memory chip fab, and I installed his Mostek chips to upgrade to 48K of memory (inside the white box on the motherboard). I see one of his ROM chips on my motherboard too. My first real computer:

Ken Shirriff did an incredible reverse engineering of those Mostek 16Kbit DRAM chips here.

And more on my Dad’s Mostek Days here

Reply
PeterThoeny

Sep 8, 2023 at 2:19 am

I got one of those while studying in Switzerland, added an external floppy drive. I don’t know how/when it got lost

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jurvetson

Sep 8, 2023 at 4:22 pm

yes.. back when floppy discs were actually floppy and televisions were embedded in wood like furniture. The Disk ][ came out in 1978. The notch on the right side was for write protect — if you covered it with the black aluminum sticker, it could not be written to. So, I figured out by experimentation, that you could use scissors to cut out a similar tab on the left side, flip the disk over, and use the backside. This doubled my disk storage per dollar. It was an undocumented feature that all "single-sided" floppies could be converted into the more expensive double-sided.

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jurvetson

Sep 8, 2023 at 4:23 pm

By college, I moved to the 68000 processor. Wrote an OS multitasker in assembly code. And then this 68000-based computer with some speech synthesis hardware from National. After programming the boot ePROM, the most difficult task was debugging the rat’s nest of wire wrap 😉

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Mick_Danger

Sep 15, 2023 at 1:03 am

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/44124348109@N01/] I never owned an Apple II, but I owned Atari computers that were 6502 and 68000 based. Back then 128k (bank switched) was big stuff.

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The Apple ][ 6502 — and so much Moore!

5 responses to “The Apple ][ 6502 — and so much Moore!”

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