As far as purchasing from MOS, yes they did sell some things to the competition, but I would say purchased at their own peril.  There used to be a poster up at MOS of Santa Clause and a bag of ROM's and some comment about making the deadline for your customers.  There is also a part urban legend about MOS, aka Jack, screwing Atari by leading them on about a pending delivery until it was too late for them to re-source in time for Christmas.  I believe part of this in in that calling Elton Southard (Pres at MOS) if you were from Atari would not have gotten your problem fixed at the expense of missing a CBM production date.  Elton/MOS's job was to sell every minute of production time they could however.

As far as the banking and the part itself, I don't think it was so much the 6510, the port on a 6510 is just a port, it is what the designers did with the port.  I think that there was an aggressiveness in the design, enabled by the use of the PLA where you could do almost anything so you'd better do almost anything, and then even fix some things later).  I attribute the beginning of this to the designers themselves, but would say that had they not that it probably would have been intolerable for Mr. Trameil to be paying for 64k chips and only using 48k.  He understood this kind of math very well and you'd better be the engineer making it happen rather than telling him why not.

Bil

>
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:30 AM, Bil Herd <bherd@idsbusiness.com> wrote:
> > Ah, the quintessential 64k machine, Apple could only get to 48K back then
>
> They didn't have the 6510 with its bankswitching capabilities. Do you
> know if Commodore ever sold it to an outside customer, or did you keep
> it and its derivatives (the 8502, 7501, etc) for yourselves?
>
> Niklas Ramsberg
> aka
> < .
>    (:)  Bacon
> < .
>
>
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>




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