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Designed by a team led by Chuck Peddle, and including Bill Mensch and several other ex-Motorola engineers, the 6502 - launched in September 1975 - was in essence a budget version of Motorola's 6800 CPU.

Much cheaper than any of its competition, its launch triggered a significant drop in CPU prices and helped to kick off the home computer revolution. It ended up - along with the Zilog Z80 - dominating the market throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

The 6502 and its variants ended up in many of the top sellers of the era including the Atari VCS/2600, plus Atari's other micros up until the ST, most of Commodore's machines including the PET, VIC-20, C64 and Plus/4, the Nintendo Famicom and NES, the Apple II, and many of Acorn's micros including the Atom and BBC Micro.

Unlike its arch-rival, the 6502 never had a cross-platform operating system equivalent to CP/M on the Z80, which limited its take-up on business-focussed micros. CP/M ended up amassing a huge library of mostly-portable software, meaning that it was almost commercial suicide to launch a business machine with anything else, at least until MS-DOS became dominant in the mid 1980s.

However, its use at Acorn was said to have directly inspired the development of the ARM architecture - the processor that powers billions of mobile phones.