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, the Apple II, and many of Acorn's micros including the Atom and BBC Micro.

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