The Motorola 6800 microprocessor was the first for which an undocumented assembly mnemonic HCF became widely known. The operation codes (opcodes—the portions of the machine language instructions that specify an operation to be performed) are hexadecimal 9D and DD, and were reported and given the unofficial mnemonic HCF in an article written by Gerry Wheeler in the December 1977 issue of "BYTE" magazine on undocumented opcodes. Wheeler noted that Motorola reported 197 valid operation codes for the M6800 processor, and so inferred that with 256 possible 8 bit combinations, there must be 59 "invalid instructions". He goes on to describe the HCF as a "big surprise", and saying of the Catch Fire portion of the moniker, "Well, almost":