In fact, the resulting compiler was extremely good: It was lightning fast, the language was easy to learn and program, and the compiled programs were comparable in speed to anything we would have written directly in assembly language. I believe it would have been an extremely useful product. However, our timing was astoundingly poor. The compiler was completed in 1984, just as the Apple II was fading forever into oblivion and we were heading off to college. Thus our fabulous compiler never really got used for anything.

In retrospect I would say the limitations of the 6502 forced us, against our wills, to be clever and learn the workings of things at a deeper level. For example, we had to write our own efficient subroutines to multiply and divide 16-bit numbers, using only 8-bit addition and subtraction and bit shifting. As another example, it is possible (in fact trivial) in computer graphics to compute the pixels along a line segment from (A, B) to (C, D) without using division or computing the slope. Again it requires cleverness, though. So I think programming the 6502, especially in the days of limited computer memory, was very useful in terms of learning to think creatively and efficiently.

Moving now 15 years into the future to the year 1999, I was working on an early episode of ”Futurama.” Bender was being X-rayed (actually, ”F-rayed”), and we needed to see what was powering his mighty robot brain. Naturally, the 6502.

While I can claim responsibility for the appearance of the 6502 in ”Futurama,” I was not the most highly trained computer scientist or engineer on the ”Futurama” writing staff. I have a master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. However, writer Ken Keeler has a Ph.D. from Harvard in applied math, as well as a master’s from Stanford in electrical engineering (and yes, in all seriousness, Ken confirms that he does read every issue of IEEE Spectrum and occasionally looks at Transactions on Information Theory ).

No doubt Woz’s head still survives in a jar in the year 3000, and somehow it is probably wearing sandals. So it is quite possible that he provided Bender’s design to Mom’s Friendly Robot Co. in return for some extra fish food in his jar.

For more articles, go to Special Report: 25 Microchips That Shook the World.