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The 68008 didn't ship until 1982, and the story's set in 1980.

• jacquesm 9y ago
  You're right, the 68000 shipped before the 68008. Still, the 6809 instruction set only resembles the 68000 set in a superficial way, the registers are completely different and even though they are technically of the same family they'd have to start all over again. Somewhere along the line they must have decided they needed more memory (and accessible faster than bankswitching could provide) so they ditched the 6809 in favor of the 68000 family. So, it went 6809->68000->PowerPc->x86. It's stranger still because the development of the Lisa started around that time as well and that did have a 68000.
  • KozmoNau7 9y ago
    And if the rumors are true, Apple will move from x86 to ARM in a couple of years. I'm not sure I believe it, but I wouldn't put it past them to try.
  • Aloha 9y ago
    the 6809 was a member of the 6800 family, the 68000 was a completely new microarchitecture.
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      Yes, that's why I was interested in the first place. That meant that they had to port the software they had written. The 6809 is a very nice 8 bit chip, the 68000 is a 32 bit chip.