6502 chip

Mike Dillon mdill at lsil.com
Thu Oct 1 21:50:01 GMT 1998


I am not sure but I think the only "chips" commonly around in the 
late 60's were DTL, I think TTL was early 70's and therefore would 
not have been avalible for the Apollo program. "Processors" were 
purpose built at that time (and not all digital). They only included
those functions in each computer, that were need for that computer
to complete its mission nothing more.
Digital Logic was very expencive and used lots of power so any computer(s) on 
the apollo spacecraft, (Even the shuttle, but they may have upgraded it)
would have been special built for the specifc job it was to do, and even
by the standards of the 6502 would have been slow, used lots of power,
had very little program-data space and not very adaptable to any other 
use. The Military and NASA was the driving force in the early years of 
the semiconductor industry, as they wanted to reduce the power used 
and weight of the rocket guidence systems, they were building crude
guidence (by todays standards) computers with lots of transistors and
passiive compents. Russia just built bigger rockets.   
Alot was done using analog computers they used fewer transistors for
a given task (Look at the early EFI "computers") but were not very 
adaptable to other functions.

Mike D.


> From diy_efi-owner at esl.eng.ohio-state.edu Thu Oct  1 15:31 CDT 1998
> From: mrvette <mrvette at bellsouth.net>
> 
> so you are saying that the sapce landing processor used TTl 7400 series chips in
> an array?   or thousands of discrete transistors?     GENE
> 
> goflo at pacbell.net wrote:
> > 
> > The 4004 was developed by Intel in 1970-71 ...
> > Prior to that processors were constructed using discrete logic.
> > 6502 came along much later.
> > 
> > Regards, Jack
> > 
> > mrvette wrote:
> > > Funny, way I heard it was that the chips were developed for the space program
> > > so what was Armstrong's 'puter processor?      earliest one I ever heard of was
> > > 6500 series....GENE
> 
> -- 
> 
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