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For Dave
Who’s Dave? Dave McWherter, who was an amazing 6502 programmer who got
started on personal computers with a KIM-1 computer. Dave went on to become VP
of Engineering at Franklin Computer, designed several processors for Franklin
Electronic Publishers, earned a number of patents, did the impossible on many
occasions, and was a great inspiration for anyone who had the pleasure to work
with him.
The story goes that Dave was a plumber’s apprentice and his boss bought an HP
programmable calculator that he became fascinated with. Dave bought a KIM-1 and
started learning assembly language at night while caring for his family. He found his
way to Delta Data Systems, clearly demonstrated an uncanny knack for assembly
language programming and eventually was hired as the VP of Engineering at a
young Franklin Computer Corporation, where he hired a 19 year old local 6502
programmer to join his staff (me). If you dig around the web you’ll find lots of
references to Dave in the lawsuit between Apple Computer and Franklin Computer.
Dave was completely outside the box all the time. There was no program that
couldn’t be improved and he’d tinker with working programs, sometimes coming
back after a weekend saying he re-wrote the program to run several times faster,
used half the memory, or now had a new feature nobody ever realized was needed
but would soon become commonly used.
Dave astounded us almost constantly. Not liking the crude 6502 assemblers of the
day, he wrote a better macro assembler that included a linker so that common
routines could be written once and then linked in as needed. Over a weekend he
wrote a complete editor that was faster, smaller and better suited to our job than
anything else on the market. Even more amazing, he wrote all of these tools on an
Atari 800 (also a 6502 based machine) and then ported them back to the Franklin
system by use of a standard I/O library he developed.
Unfortunately, Dave passed away in 2015, leaving behind a lot of amazing code,
outstanding development tools, and a lot of friends.
Bob Applegate
August 2017
