Editing Addressing mode (section)

===Zero page===
The [[Data General Nova]], [[Motorola 6800]] family, and [[MOS Technology 6502]] family of processors had very few internal registers. Arithmetic and logical instructions were mostly performed against values in memory as opposed to internal registers. As a result, many instructions required a two-byte (16-bit) location to memory. Given that opcodes on these processors were only one byte (8 bits) in length, memory addresses could make up a significant part of code size.

Designers of these processors included a partial remedy known as "zero page" addressing. The initial 256 bytes of memory ($0000 – $00FF; a.k.a., page "0") could be accessed using a one-byte absolute or indexed memory address. This reduced instruction execution time by one clock cycle and instruction length by one byte. By storing often-used data in this region, programs could be made smaller and faster.

As a result, the zero page was used similarly to a register file. On many systems, however, this resulted in high utilization of the zero page memory area by the operating system and user programs, which limited its use since free space was limited.