Introduction To Computers
The MOS 6502 was introduced at a conference in San Francisco at a cost of $25, far less than comparable processors from Intel and Motorola, leading some attendees to believe that the company was perpetrating a hoax. The chip quickly became popular with designers of early personal computers like the Apple II and Commodore PET, as well as game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System. The 6502 and its progeny are still used today, usually in embedded applications. The Control Data Corporation performs up to 3 million instructions per second —three times faster than that of its closest competitor, the IBM 7030 supercomputer. It was also repeatedly expanded and improved throughout its 13-year lifespan. Many innovative programs were created for Johnniac, including the time-sharing system JOSS that allowed many users to simultaneously access the machine. In the past, when people thought about computers, they thought about machines. Many large organizations pay programmers to write...