3 ms·

I still dream of a world where IBM used the 68008 for the original IBM PC.

by protomyth 5y ago

pjmlp 5y ago
You are assuming that in that world Compaq also manages to ripoff IBM.
- protomyth 5y ago
  I would bet it would have worked the exact same way. Compaq's success was the BIOS and Microsoft's willingness to license DOS, and those wouldn't have been changed with the 68008. Given IBM's want for the 48 pin package, Compaq might have had a more interesting machine with the full 68000.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Compaq's success was that IBM lawsuit failed.
    - protomyth 5y ago
      Which was all about the BIOS. Having an MS-DOS "portable" wasn't a bad thing either.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        It doesn't matter if it was about the BIOS or whatever else, had IBM won there would be no clone market. Microsoft could have tried to make MS-DOS portable similar to CP/M or UNIX, but it would be a big what-if regarding Amiga, Atari, Mac, Archimedes and UNIX market.
        protomyth 5y ago
        Had IBM won, most of the fair use we take for granted would have gone out the window. The modern day version of that lawsuit was Oracle vs Google. Compaq started the clone market and I see no reason that their strategy would have been altered in a Motorola vs Intel world.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        On my alternative universe, the same people that decided to pick Motorola might also have had the perspicacity of putting in place the mechanism to prevent such actions.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I lusted after the 68k back when I owned a TRS-80 Coco. Circa 1984 a number of machines with advanced graphics came out based on the 68k such as the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Sinclair QL, not to mention some 'workstation' class machines such as the Sun 3. On paper the 68k was an attractive machine with lots of registers and the ability to access more memory in a more comfortable way than the low-cost microcomputers (that added bankswitching to evade the 64k limit in later iterations) and the IBM PC (which had a segmentation scheme that in some ways annoying but can also be a lot of fun for the assembly language programmer) In practice there must have been something wrong with the 68k because even Motorola gave up on it and all of the computer lines based on it either went extinct or made a transition to RISC architecture (Apple to Motorola's Power PC, Sun to SPARC.) I'd love to hear the real story of why Motorola abandoned the 68k.
- protomyth 5y ago
  I don't think it was a case of the 68k being bad, anymore than the 6809 was bad. I think they had a desire to jump on the RISC bandwagon with the 88000. They didn't seem to be too concerned about backwards compatibility when they did their jumps. The 88000 had low adoption (the price was a bit high) with Data General being the main company buying it (and, if I remember correctly, the bus living on in the early PowerPC). I wouldn't say they abandoned the architecture, it just wasn't a PC chip. They did try a modernized version with Coldfire, but the original 68K line found a home in PDAs and embedded. DragonBall was pretty successful. The 68K ended up in the non-PC market because most of their customers jumped to RISC and they didn't execute the jump successfully enough to attract customers. Sun had SPARC and HP had PA/RISC.
- bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
  I always wondered the same thing. For a while the 680x0 in Macs, Amiga and Atari was the most popular CPU, and I'm sure the first HPUX workstation I used in my Uni. had a 68040 so even in Unix and NeXT workstations. But after the 68040 it never seemed to evolve into anything else, and probably got subsumed by the Power line of CPUs into oblivion. And it has a fantastic assembly language to boot.

I still dream of a world where IBM used the 68008 for the original IBM PC.

pjmlp 5y ago

You are assuming that in that world Compaq also manages to ripoff IBM.

protomyth 5y ago
I would bet it would have worked the exact same way. Compaq's success was the BIOS and Microsoft's willingness to license DOS, and those wouldn't have been changed with the 68008. Given IBM's want for the 48 pin package, Compaq might have had a more interesting machine with the full 68000.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Compaq's success was that IBM lawsuit failed.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    Which was all about the BIOS. Having an MS-DOS "portable" wasn't a bad thing either.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      It doesn't matter if it was about the BIOS or whatever else, had IBM won there would be no clone market. Microsoft could have tried to make MS-DOS portable similar to CP/M or UNIX, but it would be a big what-if regarding Amiga, Atari, Mac, Archimedes and UNIX market.
      - protomyth 5y ago
        Had IBM won, most of the fair use we take for granted would have gone out the window. The modern day version of that lawsuit was Oracle vs Google. Compaq started the clone market and I see no reason that their strategy would have been altered in a Motorola vs Intel world.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        On my alternative universe, the same people that decided to pick Motorola might also have had the perspicacity of putting in place the mechanism to prevent such actions.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I lusted after the 68k back when I owned a TRS-80 Coco. Circa 1984 a number of machines with advanced graphics came out based on the 68k such as the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Sinclair QL, not to mention some 'workstation' class machines such as the Sun 3. On paper the 68k was an attractive machine with lots of registers and the ability to access more memory in a more comfortable way than the low-cost microcomputers (that added bankswitching to evade the 64k limit in later iterations) and the IBM PC (which had a segmentation scheme that in some ways annoying but can also be a lot of fun for the assembly language programmer) In practice there must have been something wrong with the 68k because even Motorola gave up on it and all of the computer lines based on it either went extinct or made a transition to RISC architecture (Apple to Motorola's Power PC, Sun to SPARC.) I'd love to hear the real story of why Motorola abandoned the 68k.

protomyth 5y ago
I don't think it was a case of the 68k being bad, anymore than the 6809 was bad. I think they had a desire to jump on the RISC bandwagon with the 88000. They didn't seem to be too concerned about backwards compatibility when they did their jumps. The 88000 had low adoption (the price was a bit high) with Data General being the main company buying it (and, if I remember correctly, the bus living on in the early PowerPC). I wouldn't say they abandoned the architecture, it just wasn't a PC chip. They did try a modernized version with Coldfire, but the original 68K line found a home in PDAs and embedded. DragonBall was pretty successful. The 68K ended up in the non-PC market because most of their customers jumped to RISC and they didn't execute the jump successfully enough to attract customers. Sun had SPARC and HP had PA/RISC.
bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
I always wondered the same thing. For a while the 680x0 in Macs, Amiga and Atari was the most popular CPU, and I'm sure the first HPUX workstation I used in my Uni. had a 68040 so even in Unix and NeXT workstations. But after the 68040 it never seemed to evolve into anything else, and probably got subsumed by the Power line of CPUs into oblivion. And it has a fantastic assembly language to boot.