The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

6502

    An eight-bit microprocessor designed by MOS
   Technology around 1975 and made by Rockwell.

   Unlike the Intel 8080 and its kind, the 6502 had very few
   registers.  It was an 8-bit processor, with 16-bit address
   bus.  Inside was one 8-bit data register (accumulator), two
   8-bit index registers and an 8-bit stack pointer (stack
   was preset from address 256 to 511).  It used these index and
   stack registers effectively, with more addressing modes,
   including a fast zero-page mode that accessed memory locations
   from address 0 to 255 with an 8-bit address (it didn't have to
   fetch a second byte for the address).

   Back when the 6502 was introduced, RAM was actually faster
   than CPUs, so it made sense to optimise for RAM access
   rather than increase the number of registers on a chip.

   The 6502 was used in the BBC Microcomputer, Apple II,
   Commodore, Apple Computer and Atari personal
   computers.  Steve Wozniak described it as the first chip
   you could get for less than a hundred dollars (actually a
   quarter of the 6800 price).

   The 6502's indirect jump instruction, JMP (xxxx), was
   broken.  If the address was hexadecimal xxFF, the processor
   would not access the address stored in xxFF and xxFF + 1, but
   rather xxFF and xx00.  The 6510 did not fix this bug, nor
   was it fixed in any of the other NMOS versions of the 6502
   such as the 8502.  Bill Mensch at Western Design Center
   was probably the first to fix it, in the 65C02.

   The 6502 also had undocumented instructions.

   The 65816 is an expanded version of the 6502.

   There is a 6502 assembler by Doug Jones 
   which supports macros and conditional features and can be
   used for linkage editing of object files.  It requires
   Pascal.

   See also cross-assembler, RTI, Small-C.

   (2001-01-02)