6502 Factoid De Jour

Today's 6502 related fact - It seems that the 6502 was largely designed and taped out by ONE person, Bill Mensch. The one huge benefit of this was that the 6502 was right first time. This adds fuel to my hypothesis that the more people you have on a project, the more it is likely to fail. Similarly, the ARM architecture was designed by two people, one a hardware specialist (Steve Furber) and one a software specialist (Sophie Wilson), neither had much in the way of resources. The result was a processor that is in 90% of the world's mobile phones, and without which the iPhone just wouldn't be possible.

Keep your teams small!

Reverse Engineering the 6502 - How they did it

A few weeks ago I posted a link to www.visual6502.org which perfectly simulates the famouos 8-bit micro which was used in a huge range of computers. The same people have posted a series of lectures explaining how they did it, and what their future plans are.