6502 - the first RISC µP

Micro Processors (µP) have changed our life radically in the last 25 years (a mere quarter century). Those of us who toiled in embedded development had an inkling but usually we were so overwhelmed by the sheer difficulty of the task at hand that we did not even prognosticate.

Back in the heroic age of µP development Electronic Management Support was developing an intelligent CCTV security system - it was also an extremely sophisticated “glass TTY.” Under-capitalized, our initial development was done using MOS Technology's 6502 KIM-1 development system. By necessity our development work was done using machine code (there were no assemblers or compilers available for the KIM-1).

Towards the beginning of that development project we wasted an entire man-week because one of us (Eric Clever) misread the programming card and translated BCS (Branch Carry Set) to 0x80 instead of the correct 0xB0. Out of that frustration was born the 6500 wall chart.

The original chart was designed by EC with the actual drafting work done by Richard Moy. We used what was state of the art for the time - Leroy Lettering in ink on Mylar. It was a fairly ambitious project with the original inking done on E-size Mylar over top of penciled templates. Our recollection is that it consumed many man-weeks (over six). Unfortunately RM is no longer with us to confirm how long it took.

Out of nostalgia EC decided to reproduce that chart. Instead of a Leroy Lettering template set and Mylar (although he still has RM's Leroy set) EC used AutoCad*, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe PhotoShop and a laser printer. It took less than one man week. In order to preserve the original look as much as possible we used a Leroy-Lettering-like font: Coniglio Sublime. The other standard choice for a Leroy look-alike is VAG Rounded. However we found too many differences between VAG Rounded and Leroy - most notably punctuation and in particular the "comma."

While the PDF of the new chart is printable on a standard A-size sheet it is actually designed to the original E-sized format (actually we fudged slightly: E size in millimeters is 1118 × 864 and our doc is 1120 x 870).

Several thousand copies were printed and sold at various computer club meetings and local hobbyist/computer stores (none of which are still in existence - pioneering has its risks).

*(Adobe Illustrator might have been a better choice)