So who's the bigger nerd?

[jmowreader]

I present to you the subject of this discussion:



Your choices in the Bigger Nerd of the Day Contest:

a) The guy who got a 6502 IC tattooed onto his shoulder

or

b) Me, for knowing a 6502 is a 40-pin IC without looking at the data sheet?

[GeorgeGist]

1. The tattoo seems to be missing a few pins.

[Fla Dem]

2. You're just smart.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. The guy with the tattoo because he not only knew what it was,

he cared enough about it to get a tattoo.

[3catwoman3]

4. What the heck is a 6502 IC?

And why do you know what they are?

[jmowreader]

7. A 6502 is a microprocessor

It powered a lot of old computers:

From what I remember, these machines all contained the 6502:

Apple II and III series (except for the IIgs, which had a different chip)
Commodore PET, C64 and VIC-20
Atari 400 and 800
MOS Technology KIM-1 (which was more of an industrial controller than it was a real computer - the "display" was a set of 7-segment displays and the "keyboard" was a hexadecimal thing with digits from 0 to F...yes, in base-16 "F" is a digit)

There were a few other chipsets out there - Intel had the 8080A, Motorola had the 6800 and Zilog had the Z80. The 6502 was popular for a few reasons - the biggest being it was the cheapest one to get running. The part itself was reasonably priced, you fed it off +5V (the 8080 required three voltages - 5V positive, 5V negative and 12v positive, which meant its power supply needed either two transformers, an 18v center-tapped and a 15v, or one very expensive three-winding one) and the crystal frequency was the same as the processor frequency (for some strange reason, the 2MHz 8080A required an 18MHz crystal).

[hunter]

14. In many ways today's ARM microprocessors are the 6502's modern successor.

After testing all available processors and finding them lacking, Acorn decided it needed a new architecture. Inspired by papers from the Berkeley RISC project, Acorn considered designing its own processor. A visit to the Western Design Center in Phoenix, where the 6502 was being updated by what was effectively a single-person company, showed Acorn engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson they did not need massive resources and state-of-the-art research and development facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

ARM processors are what's in our cell phones, set top boxes, tablets, e-readers, etc...

Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced as of 2017.

IBM's choice of the 8088 processor for their Personal Computer, and a disk operating system purchased from Microsoft (which Microsoft had bought in turn from someone else) was a horrible catastrophe, a monkey wrench in human technological progress we still haven't recovered from.

The Apple Macintosh, which used the complex instruction set 68000 microprocessor, was a similar rat's nest of arbitrary, capricious, and unmaintainable code, no better than the PC.

The Apple IIGS was an evolutionary step beyond RISC-like 6502 architectures using the Western Design Center 65C816, the 6502's direct successor mentioned an the excerpt above, but Apple eventually killed it in favor of the Macintosh.

Current x86 processors respect the original 8088 family's complex instruction sets which eventually became quite hairy with "multimedia" and memory management functions, etc. (everything and the kitchen sink too!), but internally they are now developed more along the lines of RISC machines, including actual ARM and similar RISC cores overseeing sleeping and waking states, security, and digital rights management in the difficult to secure x86 environment.

Heh, how's that for nerd?

[hunter]

5. Maybe he's emulating a 6502 on a 14 pin ATtiny.

I used to dream 1802 and 65C02 code.

[marked50]

6. Who says that's a tattoo? Looks like the real thing to me stuck in wherever....

[jmowreader]

8. The real 6502 has a lot more pins than that

If he would have had 7400, 7404 or 4001...no big problem. All those are 14-pin chips.

[CentralMass]

9. Hers is a link to the correct image.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MOS_6502AD_4585_top.jpg

[CentralMass]

10. A wkipedia article on the 6502

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502

"The MOS Technology 6502 (typically "sixty-five-oh-two" or "six-five-oh-two&quot [3] is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small team led by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology. When it was introduced in 1975, the 6502 was, by a considerable margin, the least expensive microprocessor on the market. It initially sold for less than one-sixth the cost of competing designs from larger companies, such as Motorola and Intel, and caused rapid decreases in pricing across the entire processor market. Along with the Zilog Z80, it sparked a series of projects that resulted in the home computer revolution of the early 1980s."

Produced
1975; 43 years ago
Common manufacturer(s)
MOS Technology, Rockwell, Synertek
Max. CPU clock rate
1 MHz to 3 MHz
Instruction set
MOS 6502
Transistors
3,510,[1] 4,237[2]
Instructions
56
Data width
8
Address width
16
Package(s)
40-pin DIP

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Those things got around.

[shenmue]

12. I have no idea what you're talking about

[jmowreader]

13. Look at the thing you are accessing DU from

Whether it's a phone, a tablet or a computer, it's computerized.

The heart of your computer is a microprocessor, which is most of what you need to make a computer in one small package.

A 6502 microprocessor is one that existed in the very early days of small-systems computing.

[sl8]

15. Better?

From https://secondrunnings.me/2017/03/30/a-new-tattoo/

A new tattoo!

ON MARCH 30, 2017 BY JAMISONIN GENERAL, WRITE-A-PALOOZA 2017

Last week I got a message from my tattoo artist that he was going to be in town for a few days, and wanted to see if there were any pieces I wanted to get done. I’ve got some ideas for larger works, but also some smaller ones. In particular I’ve been wanting to commemorate my history with technology with an image that reflects where I got my start.

My very first computer was a Commodore 64 back in 1982. I was 8 years old, and it was the most amazing thing I owned. From that computer I learned how to program, and use an operating system, and how hardware worked. It was the start of a career that has now spanned close to two decades.

To honor this, I decided I wanted an image of the CPU that powered the Commodore 64, the 6502 chip. This workhorse of a chip was an amazing piece of technology in it’s day. Systems such as the Apple IIe, Nintendo Famicom, Atari 2600 all used this chip (or variants), in addition to my beloved Commodore. It was truly a piece of my childhood in silicon form.

My artist put together a nice rendition of the chip that wasn’t just a mechanical drawing of it, but was fun and stylized. I also asked that he make it look as if it was attached to my skin, and had him place the art on my back between my shoulder blades. In other words, it looks like I’m personally powered by the 6502. Additionally, I had him use the date of 1982 for the serial number on the chip, to designate when I got my C64.

...

More at link.

[sl8]

16. Backstory:

From https://www.bytecellar.com/2011/03/14/i-have-a-chip-on-my-shoulder/

I Have a Chip on my Shoulder

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Blake Patterson

It just occurred to me that six months have passed and I’ve not posted about the new tattoo I had inked. Geek tattoo, that is — the best kind. And this, after reaching out for help from readers to choose the proper squid (TAITO says it’s a squid) to use for my Space Invaders tattoo I had inked back in ’08.

So, I was talking to my long time friend Chris Bernick (who is now the backend guy for AppShopper) and tattoos came up in the conversation. I don’t remember the specifics, but he said something that made it occur to me just how awesome it would be to get “a chip on my shoulder.” And, what better a chip to have emblazon upon my skin than the venerable 8-bit MOS Tech 6502, heart of the Atari VCS, Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 800, and various others?

Now, despite planting the seed that sprouted into this majestic bit of body art, Chris has harshly criticized my new tattoo because of the fact that it’s supposed to be a likeness of the 6502, but sports a mere 14 pins, while the standard 6502 DIP sports 40 pins. I just felt that 40 pins seemed too complex — would require too intricate a design.

...

More at link.