ABSTRACT
Ultimately, they turned to their Grass Valley facility-Atari’s think tank-to design the system. Steve Mayer found a chip that could handle the graphics and supply the speed and versatility to power the system they had in mind. It was the 6502 chip from MOS Technology, designed by Chuck Peddle, founder of MOS. The 6502 was powerful for its time, outperforming and selling for less than competitive chips such as the Intel 8080 and the Motorola 6800 chip. Ironically, the chip that Atari eventually chose for their game system, the 6507, was a slightly limited version of the 6502 used in the first generation of personal computers.
