The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of competing designs from larger companies such as Motorola and Intel. It was nevertheless fully comparable with them and, along with the Zilog Z80, sparked a series of computer projects that would eventually result in the home computer revolution of the 1980s. The 6502 design was originally second-sourced by Rockwell and Synertek and later licensed to a number of companies. Soon after the 6502's introduction, MOS Technology was bought outright by Commodore International, who continued to sell the chip to other manufacturers.

Apple IIe

BBC Micro

Atari 2600

Atari 800XL

Commodore VIC-20

Commodore 64

The 6502 was designed primarily by the same engineering team that had designed the Motorola 6800. One of the designers, Chuck Peddle, traveled around with the 6800 to introduce it to potential industrial customers. At the time it was targeted at the embedded market, and although their presentations sparked interest, the price, at about US$300 ($1,414 in 2012), was simply too high to be widely used. When he asked what sort of price would make the product useful, they settled on US$25. Peddle returned to Motorola and proposed producing a low-cost product to attack this market, but found that management was uninterested; as the 6800 was generating nice profits, there seemed to be no reason to change their sales efforts.

Bill Budge (born c. 1954) is a computer game programmer and designer. His two main claims to fame are 1981's Raster Blaster and 1983's Pinball Construction Set. Both these games were released originally for the Apple II.

Budge says he became interested in computers while obtaining a PhD at UC Berkeley. He purchased an Apple II and began writing games. He enjoyed it so much that he dropped out of school and became a game programmer.

Budge's first game was a Pong clone, called "Penny Arcade", which he wrote using his own custom graphics routines. He traded the completed game to Apple Computer for a Centronics printer. While a graduate student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, he went on to make other games, which he tried to market commercially. Teaming up with a floppy disk drive salesman who traveled from store to store, he and the salesman agreed to split profits of selling his games 50/50. Budge was shocked when he got his first check for USD$7,000.

Budge then proceeded to write fast graphics libraries for game programmers. He stated that was where his real love was:

Michael Abrash is a game programmer and technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Related issues were covered in his later book Zen of Graphics Programming. He frequently begins a technical discussion with an anecdote that draws parallels between a real-life experience he has had, and the article's subject matter. His prose encourages readers to think outside the box and to approach solving technical problems in an innovative way.

Before getting into technical writing, Abrash was a game programmer in the early days of the IBM PC. His first commercial game, Space Strike, released in 1982, was a PC booter. He co-authored several PC games with Dan Illowsky who previously wrote Snack Attack for the Apple II. Abrash and Illowsky worked together on Cosmic Crusader (1982), Big Top (1983), and Snack Attack II..

After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. Meantime, Abrash also worked on the popular game Doom. Some of the technology behind Quake is documented in Abrash's Ramblings in Realtime published on the Dr. Dobb's Journal. After Quake was released, Abrash returned to Microsoft to work on natural language research, then moved to the Xbox team, until 2001.