Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 290
trebonian writes "For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 (used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES), the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: 'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) "transistor circuit" simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org.'"
Re:Seems their server runs on a 6502 (Score:4, Funny)
No, the website runs on a javascript emulator of a 6502.
Sounds familiar (Score:4, Funny)
An animation with voltages racing around the chip as it executes?
Where's my light-cycle?? I must save my User from the MCP!!
Re:Painful (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Really lost? (Score:5, Funny)
You mean to tell me that the companies who designed or licensed this chip plus the chip fabs themselves have no information on how they were manufactured?
Well, sure, but they had them backed up on their Apple /// machines, and ... well ...
Re:Painful (Score:2, Funny)
Universal truth, Any text following the phrase "Funny story" is 100% guaranteed to be as funny as soya-milk is tasty.
Re:Not to split hairs. . . (Score:4, Funny)
Yes [wikipedia.org], but the difference ain't much.
According to my rough calculations the difference is at least two more than the difference between an 8080 and an 8086.