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Why did the Motorola 68000 processor family fall out of use in PCs?
- tedunangst 3y agoEveryone knew CISC was dead and 88k was the future.
- dboreham 3y agoForgot the irony flag
- KerrAvon 3y agoYes. That's literally the explanation. Motorola wanted to move people to their 88k RISC CPU. Apple was planning to move the Mac to 88k; the 68k emulator on the first PowerMacs was originally for the 88k.
- kabdib 3y agoWe had 88K nuBus cards for our Macs. I was digging into 88K runtime architecture and toolchains to support it. Without warning, one fine day we were instructed to immediately remove the cards and return them to managers. No explanations. It was the steepest edge to "this project is getting canceled" I've experienced.
- cheaprentalyeti 3y agoIn the era under discussion, a "PC" was _by definition_ a computer with an x86 processor, and Macs and Amigas and Ataris were Something Else for boutique users.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonsen 3y ago"by definition" is a little harsh, and "with an x86 processor" is a little too narrow: "The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history, has not meant "personal computer" generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running the same software that a contemporary IBM PC could.": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible
- aidenn0 3y agoHere's Steve Wozniak referring to the Apple II as a "personal computer" before the 8086 was released: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-05/page/n35/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-05/page/n35/m...
- cheaprentalyeti 3y agoAll that got thrown out the window when IBM named their computer the "IBM Personal Computer." It was very effective salesmanship. It was _wrong_ and I don't like it BUT it was very effective.
- dboreham 3y agoBetamax vs VHS, and similarly BluRay and Netflix won eventually. (modern PCs don't use 8086 either).
- DonHopkins 3y agoFor the same reason VHS beat Betamax, the 6809 should have won, because it had the SEX instruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEX_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEX_(computing)
- mixmastamyk 3y agoBecause of the vast amounts of money being poured into wintel (dostel?) at the time, no one else could compete after a decade+ of being outspent 10x on R&D by Intel. Not Sparc, not Mips, no not Motorola either. Was just reading about DEC/Alpha in another thread. Software lock-in, first from IBM then MS contributed to massive consolidation in the industry and until the old players tapped-out. Presumably, with Intel's budget Motorola could have paved over the 68k's flaws just like was done with x86.
- wk_end 3y agoI too suspect they could have - but even if they could have, it wasn’t at all clear that it would’ve been the right thing to do. Even for Intel I don’t think it was clear for a while that their gambit was going to pay off and bury RISC (or Itanium), and there was much less incentive for Motorola to maintain backwards compatibility. A clean design that was faster - and easier to make faster - must’ve seemed like a sure bet at the time.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoIntel had so much money to burn they tried at least three different strategies and the market chose the winner. Compatible with Pentium, RISC with i860, and clean-slate with Itanium are those that come to mind. Each of those projects undoubtedly cost billions. An incredibly luxurious position to be in.
- agumonkey 3y agoIt seems the software was a massive influence because motorola cpus were successful in consoles.
- bell-cot 3y agoFrom both vague memory, and a skim of Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68020#Launch,_fabrication_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68020#Launch,_fabrica... - I'd say that Motorola management's motto was "Meh, whatever", while Intel management's motto was "Only the paranoid survive".
- pfdietz 3y agoMotorola was an example of the adage "never invest in a company that has a museum to itself." (The Galvin Center has since been demolished, replaced by a Top Golf. There's drone footage on Youtube of various stages of the demolition.)
- aworks 3y agohttps://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/museum-visiting-intel.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/museum-visit...
- pfdietz 3y agoSo it has come to this. https://xkcd.com/1022/ https://xkcd.com/1022/
- ohdannyboy 3y agoI wouldn't invest in Intel. They're definitely past their peak and most of their battles right now center on not becoming obsolete.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoHa, the Motorola Museum tour should have been a mandatory annual event for all executives and high-level managers. “We build new things, we create entirely new product segments, but when markets start to mature we sell the division to someone who knows how to run that kind of business.” They failed to do that with CPUs and then they failed to do that with mobile phones. And it pretty much killed the company. That museum. So much stuff from one single company. It was incredible - for the first 80 years.
- jagrsw 3y agoI vaguely remember those days, late '80s and early '90s, and a lot of it probably had to do with IBM's reputation. Amiga had its pro uses - like smaller TV stations using it with VideoToaster or Scala for broadcast management. But PCs had this vibe of being "serious" or "professional" that Amiga, Atari, and Mac just didn't have. On the technical side, Amiga had some downsides too. Its OS was in ROM, and while it was way ahead of DOS and early Windows back in '87, it got outdated by the early '90s. Smaller Amiga models didn't support hard drives without buying a pricey add-on, making them more like game machines where you were stuck swapping floppies. But if you look at OS and CPU architecture, it was almost like comparing a well-designed system to a mess. DOS was clunky, and x86 had its weird quirks: limited registers, awkward 8-bit compatibility, segmentation over paging, unnecessary IO mode/addressing instead of MMIO, messy assembler (prefixes, segments, adhoc instructions) you name it.
- roywashere 3y agoMotorola 68xxx is not just Amiga and fun and games. I used to own a Sun 3/60 which is 68020 and most definitely very much business, much more than IBM PC
- bink 3y agoAs well as NeXT computers which started out on 680x0.
- naikrovek 3y agoI don't know how you can say that Sun machines were "[more] business" than IBM PCs when you look at the number of IBM PCs sold to businesses versus Sun. IBM PCs and clones effectively OWNED the small and medium business market entirely, and a sizeable portion of large businesses, too.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoMotorola was in everything. There must be two dozen different workstation-class computers from the 1980s and even early 1990s that were based on it, and a half dozen home computer platforms besides.
- tivert 3y agoThis is the most interesting answer: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/27727/21496 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/27727/21496. It talks in detail about design choices that made 68k hard to scale.
- ajross 3y agoI think that's mostly wrong though, because as the P6 demonstrated complicated CISC addressing modes can be trivially decomposed and issued to a superscalar RISC core. What really killed 68k was the thing no one here is qualified to talk about: Motorola simply fell off the cutting edge as a semiconductor manufacturer. The 68k was groundbreaking and way ahead of its time (shipped in 1978!), the 68020 was market leading, the '030 was still very competitive but starting to fall behind the newer RISC designs, leading its target market to switch. The 68040 was late and slow. The 68060 pretty much never shipped at all (it eventually had some success as an embedded device). It's just that posters here are software people and so we want to talk about ISA all the time as if that's the most important thing. But it's not and never has been. Apple is winning now not because of "ARMness" but because TSMC pulled ahead of Intel on density and power/performance.
- ggm 3y agoSo.. if Motorola had taken the 88000 into TSMC and pursued the nm war down the size ladder do you think it would have worked? Maybe the 68000 -> 88000 transition was the problem?
- philwelch 3y agoThe 88000 first came out around the same time TSMC was founded, and long before TSMC became the world leader in fabrication.
- ghaff 3y agoAs @philwelch suggests, it wasn't really a foundry problem. The Tier 1 Unix system companies (many of whom had been Moto 68K customers) already had their own RISC designs and a lot of the second and certainly third tier companies were getting acquired or going out of business. So by the time there was really a solid 88K product--at least for the server market--almost no one was lined up to design systems around the chip. Data General did for a while. Forget who else did. But it just never got critical mass.
- kristopolous 3y agoIt's odd how arguably the most relevant of the lot was fairly obscure at the time: Acorn computers, creator of the ARM processor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers You can run RISC OS on a modern ARM like the Raspberry PI - it gets weirder the longer you work with it - menu items with input boxes and other GUI widgets, a strange DOS VMS UNIX hybrid CLI that appears at the bottom of the framebuffer, scrolling your graphic screen up as you type and full of terminology that's incredibly excessively British. Go to 10 minutes to see the shell https://youtu.be/oL4w3AK6Qpw?si=Vdu2ur1fM0N9Tl2X&t=10m https://youtu.be/oL4w3AK6Qpw?si=Vdu2ur1fM0N9Tl2X&t=10m and http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_2.html http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_... for the documentation Also see 8:50 for the British terminology and 12:34 for an example of the weird menus The thing I like about it is the creators clearly knew what the dominant paradigm was and made a decision to be different. It's nice.
- timmg 3y ago> Acorn computers, creator of the ARM processor. Whoah! I didn't realize they were the same company!
- dingosity 3y agoYup. ARM == "Acorn RISC Machine"
- jacquesm 3y agoFun fact: the ARM 1 was designed using some custom software on a BBC Micro and tested in simulation (sub 1KLOC) before they submitted the design for tape-out and production. First silicon actually worked! https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/acorn/microarchitectures/arm1 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/acorn/microarchitectures/arm1
- kristopolous 3y agooh sure, design an entire cpu on a 6502 with 128kb of ram, no problem. It's wild how spoiled we are. The ATmega328p on a $10 Arduino Nano is 10x faster than that
- orochimaaru 3y agoOh man. I had to study this instruction set for a systems programming course for my undergrad. The project was to make a linker/loader that could run assembly code written in this. Boy does it have a complicated instruction set. Anyway, we early on negotiated with the instructor on what instructions we would support. Early education in defining scope for success I guess.
- readthenotes1 3y agoI am surprised that no one has commented on the difficulty of learning/using the 68000 Assembly language versus Intel. Iirc, there were no books available to me for the Motorola Assembly language programming nor do I remember having easy access to any environments for it.
- _moof 3y agoTrial by fire via MacsBug! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacsBug https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacsBug
- CalChris 3y agoHah! The kool kidz all used The Debugger.
- galangalalgol 3y agoI never wrote 69k assembly but I did use the coldfire subset and it was downright delightful compared to x86asm. X86asm is by far the most confusing hacked together mess I've ever seen.
- rjsw 3y agoI found 68k assembly language easier than that for the 8086. Just got down my copy of "MC68000 16/32-bit Microprocessor Programmer's Reference Manual" from the bookcase. Published by Motorola, don't remember it being particularly expensive.
- 3y ago
- api 3y agoIt was only used by closed vertically integrated brands like Apple and Commodore (Amiga) at a time when open component based PCs were all the rage. I don't even think M68K motherboards you could drop in a case and build with were even available. If they were it was never a big thing. The entire market dominance of the x86/x64 architecture came out of that era and came about because you could build PCs with it and run a variety of software on it including DOS, Windows, FreeBSD, commercial Unix, and later Linux.
- pjmlp 3y agoOnly because IBM failed to prevent Compaq to start the component based PC market in first place.
- pmarreck 3y agoYep. This was, ironically, and in my opinion, the real reason the Mac never won the PC wars. Forced open-sourcing via clean-room reimplementation.
- api 3y agoOh definitely. The Mac lost because it was a closed platform in an era of open platforms where that open ecosystem was constantly driving up performance and capability while crushing prices. The modern Mac is actually more open than the classic Mac because it's a BSD system. The UI is proprietary but the underlying OS is pretty commodity and loads of software that runs on things like Linux runs on it with little or no modification. It was really a pretty magical time. I was a kid and a teen then and it seemed like the PC was this wide open field of limitless permission-free innovation. New software, new hardware, new capabilities were constantly being introduced and you didn't need an "entitlement" in an App Store or any of that nonsense. Nothing is really like that today except maybe the open source world, and even that kind of feels like a tar pit. There's still an open PC ecosystem but it's smaller and less dynamic. Of course I also understand what killed it. It wasn't just cloud/SaaS or mobile. It was also the fact that we now operate in a "dark forest" war zone environment where we all have to navigate a sea of malware and exploitive surveillance-driven borderline-malware. It's hard enough for knowledgeable people but for end users downloading software is terrifying. It's like going to the worst neighborhood in the city in the middle of the night and walking around among living-dead drug addicts asking people if they know where to find something.
- smackeyacky 3y agoI started working professionally in the late 1980s and it seemed like the big competition at the time was between x86 and 680x0 variants. From the Mac right up to multiprocessing minis (Bull DPX/2 for example could be had with 4 68030), plus a variety of high end workstation vendors (Sun, Apollo) the 680x0 seemed like a much higher end processor than anything Intel based. Then Sun dropped it in favour of Sparc. It took a while but the 386 and it's replacements gradually ate everything in that space thanks to Compaq leading the way. Even Sun had intel based machines.
- tedunangst 3y agoHP also had a 68k workstation line before PA-RISC.
- ThomasBHickey 3y agoI remember the Apollo reps moaning that the speed of Motorola's 68k chips weren't keeping up the the x86. I still have an Apollo motheroard with two 68k chips on it -- a work around to enable virtual memory.
- hulitu 3y agoYet Domain OS was a distributed multiuser and multitasking system, with BSD and SYSV compatibility which run decent on 1989 hardware when x86 was almost only DOS and Windows 3.
- tinus_hn 3y agoBut did it do the things people wanted? Why have the complexity of a multiuser system on a single user PC? Why have multitasking when the system can barely run a single task competently?
- jameshart 3y agoSure, the x86 family took a commanding lead over that time... But over in the corner where nobody was looking, in 1987 Acorn shipped the Archimedes with this RISC based processor they called the 'Acorn RISC Machine', or ARM... and it's looking increasingly like that whole x86/68x00 fight was a sideshow.
- phendrenad2 3y agoRISC hype mostly. Actually the odd one out is x86, which managed to hold on due to the massive software catalog and PC ecosystem.
- n00bskoolbus 3y agoDamn, I had a hunch that the fact I when learned it in my comp sci degree it wouldn't be useful in the future. I think it was 2012 when I took the class >.>
- JdeBP 3y agoI think that seven different answers there and at least that many, also all different, posted here indicates that there isn't in fact a demonstrably correct answer explaining why the global market did what it did. Of course, any economist would say "Welcome to economics!" at this point. (-:
- strangattractor 3y agoFrom what I recall at the time Apple (as well as others) tended to do things to keep M$ OSs off their hardware and differentiate themselves from IBM so they would have more control of the platform and sell boxes. M$ goal was to be the dominate OS then. IBM misguidedly chose to make money on hardware. They were too accustom to getting exorbitant amounts for their software ie leasing it. It was not so easy to port an OS back then and IBM PCs were the dominate species so too was DOS then Windows. Zilog was starting to fade also - the Z8000 never caught on. Apple became the only company keeping the 68000 alive. Motorola was not up to the challenge of competing with Intel or Apple was not making enough volume to make it worth their effort. Apple - fighting the last war - thought IBM was their competitor so eschewed any compatibility with IBM PCs and chose to go it alone. It wasn't until later (after Jobs return) that they realized they were wrong and things had moved on. Reasons for choosing a CPU where more about power and speed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- karmakaze 3y agoThere are many contributing factors as are being mentioned. I would say the most dominant one is the success of the x86 PC. That success depended on the continued cost/performance value. M68k systems on the whole were considered workstation machines that looked down upon less capable hardware. Exceptions to this were the Amiga and Atari ST, which unfortunately competed themselves out of existence rather than against the PC market which was squeezing them out. The Macintosh was more capable due to its software rather than CPU. Once you have the success of DOS PCs and add growing exposure of Windows 2.x (e.g. Windows/386) filling in capabilities it's hard to compete with technically better but also much more expensive systems except in smaller or niche markets over time. Even the server market switched from the likes of Sun SPARC to x86 systems. The theme is that cheaper and minimally viable has a larger market potential that wins if able to find a way to survive. An earlier/smaller example of this is how the 6502 ate the lunches of other/better 6800 or Z80 based systems. That success later failed due to stagnation of the hardware and operating systems, and again in-competition. The x86 PC-compatible market allowed competition between vendors while still using the same ISA and ecosystems DOS & Windows. I grew up in this era having multiple Atari 8-bit & ST systems, using Apple ][, Macintosh, and rare access to Amigas. I was extremely disappointed with DOS+Windows prevailing over the more exciting systems from a graphics/sound gaming perspective. Market size won.
- leptons 3y ago> An earlier/smaller example of this is how the 6502 ate the lunches of other/better 6800 or Z80 based systems. That success later failed due to stagnation of the hardware and operating systems, and again in-competition. 6800 and Z80 weren't much if at all better than a 6502 in terms of performance. They're all 8-bit CPUs and limited in various ways. They all also had 16-bit iterations in the 68000, 65816, and Z800. Intel x86 and the PC and the software being written for the platform is what killed off demand for those other chips. If there were a 68090 (or whatever 68k variant it would evolve into) today inside a modern Amiga platform with a modern GPU, that people still wrote software for, I'd be using it as my daily driver.
- jacquesm 3y agoBut 6809 was better in many ways.
- vardump 3y agoUntil mid-nineties things could have gone either way. Then x86 DOS got Doom. Everyone had to get a PC now.
- karmakaze 3y agoI played Doom at work--I got a PC to run OS/2 and C compilers.
- ksherlock 3y agoid's Doom (and Quake) level editors were written for NeXTStep which ran on NeXT hardware which was based on the Motorola 68030 or 68040. OpenStep later made it to x86 (also PA-RISC, SPARC, and via OS X, PPC, x64, and ARM64) but the level editors used the original NeXT classes (NX* instead of NS*) which didn't make the transition to OpenStep. https://github.com/TCRF/old-doom-stuff https://github.com/TCRF/old-doom-stuff https://github.com/FreeSlave/Quake-Tools/tree/master/QuakeEd https://github.com/FreeSlave/Quake-Tools/tree/master/QuakeEd
- vardump 3y agoPractically all id's revenue came from DOS games in Doom era. 99%+.
- creer 3y agoThere were many microprocessor designs out or coming out from everybody. Plenty of them got design-ins (chosen to have a product built around them). For PC, nobody could compete with the wave of the PC-compatibles running Windows on x86. Many of the new microprocessors did come out in non-PC products like workstations - where it didn't matter as much.
- creer 3y agoThe original question was "in the 21st century?" which doesn't make much sense combined with "in personal computers". The fight was long over for the 68000, or for PCs, by the time of the 21st century.
- creer 3y agoEven Apple switched to PowerPC processors in 1994.
- hshxushx 3y agoIntel won because of windows. None of those answers adequately give credit to gates.
- vondur 3y agoIntel won because of DOS. Once Compaq opened the market to clones, you could purchase an Intel PC from any number of manufacturers that could run DOS, and then later Windows. IBM tried to stop this with OS2, but thanks to its DOS compatibility layer, Microsoft convinced everyone to develop for DOS, since it wasn't going away in OS2.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoYep, the IBM PC clones are what opened things up for x86 - you could get PC clones for a lot cheaper than Macs or even IBM branded PCs. I suspect that if IBM had decided to not allow clones (either by design or by lawsuits) that the 68K family would have been viable for longer (and/or we would have seen Macs transition to the 88K). There would have essentially have been main 2 choices for a while:IBM PC or Macs. Which would also have meant that Intel wouldn't have completely dominated the processor market - it would have been more of a 2 player CPU market. We also had the Amiga and the Atari ST machines on 68K then as well, so without PC clones they would likely have become the low-price choice for a while.
- tcbawo 3y agoI mentioned this in another comment, but the presence of interchangeable clones created a form of distributed long term support for business software. This was the killer feature that propelled business investment. Companies invest a lot in tailoring off the shelf software and custom software. Knowing that you have the ability to switch to another vendor made the decision a no-brainer for most businesses.
- jacquesm 3y agoBecause IBM picked the other chip for their flagship offering. It's as simple as that. If IBM had picked the 68K series a lot more funding would have been available to keep the Motorola chips competitive. In this branch of the multiverse they had to compete with the IBM/Intel combination, which with their massive sales of PCs and compatibles had both better margins and substantially larger volume. Motorola didn't stand a chance, even if they may have had bit of a head start technology wise.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lproven 3y agoIBM did make a 68000-based PC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000
- kalleboo 3y agoOP said "flagship offering" Your link says > Noting the obscurity of its 1982 release, BYTE in January 1983 called the System 9000 "IBM's 'Secret' Computer" A computer that is not advertised is not going to win.
- lproven 3y agoThat strikes me as splitting hairs, but OK, as you wish. I think it was interesting that another bit of the company did use the CPU that it is often said IBM didn't use, or similar statements. It did. Why the PC was promoted and the 9K wasn't, I don't know. Possibly price. IBM later used modified 68000s in the S360 compatility card for the IBM PC as well.
- gumby 3y agoLots of excellent answers but this is the best response that gets to the core of the question (don’t know how to make a link to an answer, so pasting it here): > Processor architectures come and go. The history of the 68k architecture is perfectly normal. It's the x86 that's anomalous. I believe that is the result of Microsoft's peculiar inability to switch architectures. No other software company seems so stuck: they move opportunistically to whatever architecture suits their immediate needs. Apple has evolved 6502->68k->PPC->x86->ARM. – John Doty Sep 25 at 12:14
- mattmillr 3y agoIt's not intuitive at all, you click the timestamp and the URL changes to the anchor for that comment. Here's the one you copy/pasted: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27722/why-did-the-motorola-68000-processor-family-fall-out-of-use-in-personal-computer#comment98886_27722 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27722/why...
- gumby 3y agoThanks! I guessed that based on HN but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work on my device.
- rdlw 3y agoNot intuitive but it's the same on HN :)
- nayuki 3y agoAnd Facebook and Twitter and at some point Reddit...
- JdeBP 3y agoIn part that's because it's not an answer. Answers have an obvious "Share" hyperlink below them. That, there, in contrast is a question comment.
- ianlevesque 3y ago
- SanjayMehta 3y agoSpeaking from a very narrow perspective: microprocessor based instrumentation in India in the early 80s, it was documentation and support. We’d write to Intel for information and they would send back a stack of manuals gratis. Motorola wouldn’t even reply.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoMotorola jerked around their customers by announcing the deprecation and death of the 68k not once but twice; first the 88k (total flop), then the PowerPC. Intel played around with making fancy new alternative architectures, too (i960, i860). But it never gave any of its PC customers the impression that x86 was going to be murdered. (Well, until Itanium, but that's much later and was almost serious trouble for them.) The switch to PowerPC almost killed Apple, in my opinion. They couldn't afford the chaos and instability. System 7.6 on PowerPC was terribly unstable, and offered little to no advantages. Meanwhile Intel iterated on the (basically inferior) x86 architecture and we got Pentium & Pentium I and proved you didn't have to go RISC. A few years later Motorola/Freescale rolled out ColdFire, which did for 68k what Intel did for x86. But probably about 3-4 years too late, and targeted really only for embedded devices. 68k was great. But these days I don't think I'd want a big-endian machine.
- anthk 3y agoOSX on PPC got a good chunk of the PC sales on multimedia and press.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoFailure to try hard enough seems like the likely answer. X86 sold more & thus got more money poured into making it faster. X86 had more companies in the running for value longer (three then two, after Via really vanished). I think it was powerpc but not 68k, but one notable different & distinct characteristic of ppc was that it has inverted page tables. I would not expect it to be a major make or break architectural difference, it's probably not a huge difference, but different ISAs seem not that consequential, while having totally different memory architectures makes the whole effort to optimize very very different, changes how all caches work deeply. There were some very neat objects oriented sympathetic ways inverted page tables worked that seem potentially mechanistically sympathetic to have expressed at a hardware level. But there's also a real possibility that various caches were harder to make run fast, with inverted page tables. PPC's different memory architecture was fairly unique.
- PeterStuer 3y agoIBM 'legitimized' the personal computer for business use. Their PC was build around Intel's processor. They accidentally made the design clonable, and the OS was not exclusivly licenced. Compaq was first to jump into this, but soon this opportunity created a massive ecosystem of competing clones all able to run the same binary distributed software packages which fueled both a software industry and a commoditization of the platform which made it much more accesible and affordable. This enormous ecosystem success forced Intel to remain backward compatible with old instruction sets to run older binaries, with Microsoft forced the same way on OS api's and services. Even IBM itself tried but failed to counter this s runaway train on both the hardware and the software front. At the processor level I loved the much more sane instruction set of the 68000 family (much like I preferred the Z80 over the 6502 before), but the dynamics of the whole PC ecosytem just steamrolled over the alternative 68000 platforms, even though Atari, Commodore and Apple produced compelling designs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- usrusr 3y agoYeah, it was the vertically unbundled platform that made the decision. Relative technical qualities of x86 vs 68k had very little to do with the outcome I think.
- sitkack 3y agoCorrect. If the M68k ended up in the IBM PC, this conversation would be entirely different. Things rarely fail from purely technical issues.
- fortran77 3y agoWorkstations, like the original Sun workstations, also used the 68000 family. The SO question omits that....
- TacticalCoder 3y agoSomething has to be said about clock race too... Even the Sun workstation with 68020 Motorola CPU would only clock at 16 to 20 Mhz I think. Meanwhile the 386 came out in 1985 (announced in 1984 according to Wikipedia) and could go to 40 Mhz. One answer on SO (with only six upvotes) says that Motorola couldn't keep up the clock race. When technology is advancing at an insane pace and you see a CPU line that is already not keeping up with the clock race, it probably doesn't make much sense to bet on that CPU line. I remember going from my beloved Commodore Amiga (68000) to a PC felt like going back in time but the PC's 386 would clock at 40 Mhz while the Amiga would clock a... 7 Mhz. So there's that.
- dboreham 3y agoExcept Intel clock cycles weren't the same as Motorola clock cycles.
- nxobject 3y agoI'm sure the fact that 68k evolved over its lifetime from an incredibly elaborate interpretive microcoded system to something that supported pipelined out-of-order doesn't help, either.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoRaw clocks matter far less than architectural efficiency and instruction throughput. A 16MHz 386 was around 2MIPS, around the same as a 12MHz 68000. A 40MHz 68040 was around 40MIPS, a 66MHz 468DX2 was around 25MIPS. The 68040 also had significantly faster floating point performance. It's slightly insane that the 68000 (released 1979) was comparable in performance to a VAX 11/780 (released 1977) - for a tiny fraction of the cost.
- justapassenger 3y agoThey’re less meaningful, but they’re number. And numbers are easy to compare, with ignoring all the context.
- dsm9000 3y agoI liked programming the m68k cpus. They were also the CPU used in my computer science department curricula for assembly language programming classes. At school we had lots of Sun{2,3,4}, Apollo, HP, Mac, and NeXT computers which we could practice on. Kinda saw the writing on the wall when we got a 6 CPU i386 sequent symmetry system and then SPARC, MIPS RISC, and PowerPC while nothing really from Motorola. I never enjoyed programming x86 cpus after being self taught on 6502 and then m68k systems :-) I still have an ATARI Mega ST and a Sun 2 at home for sentimental reasons only.
- denton-scratch 3y agoI loved the 68K. It had a lovely, regular architecture and assembly-language. I learned it with a Sinclair QL (actually 68008, but close enough). I'm sorry it died.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amelius 3y agoThe simple answer is: software > hardware
- ergonaught 3y agoAfter I found myself stuck on x86, I finally gave up and learned C. I couldn't stand assembly language on x86 after 680x0. That slope was slippery.
- wslh 3y agoI have the same experience: I first learned 6502 (Apple II), then 68000 (Amiga), and finally (x86). The 68000 was very straightforward in the number of registers and memory addressing. Mainly when you compare with an 8088.
- Keyframe 3y agoYeah, not even exposure to Z80 prepared one for x86 lol.
- japanuspus 3y agoHey - Z80 was nice! I wrote Z80 assembly by converting from op-codes to hex by hand based on a couple of copied pages from the datasheet.
- mst 3y agoI learned assembly for ARM2, loved it, moved from Archimedes to PC and pretty much immediately went "oh my word what the flying fornication NO" and have basically never written assembly since.
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- rwmj 3y ago68000 assembler was a delight to use, completely regular with lots of powerful instructions. I was lucky enough to write 68k software professionally for a while (on the MVME147/167). However that was part of its downfall because it's hard to make a superscalar architecture when individual instructions have many complicated side effects. Also Intel just had way more money because of the mighty Wintel monopoly. They could scale up the manufacturing side.
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- cmrdporcupine 3y agoComing back to this thread a day later. I think the real story is that: 68k could not keep up because Motorola just stopped investing in it. Dunno if this is a chicken vs egg thing due to its already declining popularity, or just bad leadership at Motorola, or both. But Intel shoveled money into the R&D furnace for x86 while Motorola spent their energies elsewhere. And so they stopped competing, and then stopped existing.
- simne 3y ago68k was good, but with extreme flaws, and late. This was enough so Intel become first. Most annoying flaws: sophisticated memory interface and very limited old companion chips (from 6800 family), and for original 68k need second CPU to make virtual memory. So what happen? - When appear first 8086/88 and 68k, RAM was small in all machines, but 8086 was simpler and 8086 system was cheaper, and near same speed. Then appear 286, which was improved 8086 with much better speed and bigger possible RAM, but Motorola answer with 68010, just fixes flaws, this was good, but not enough in race. Fortunately for Motorola, 286 was not fully compatible with 8086, some programs need to be modified, but many old programs from 68k family also does not work on 68020, so this was good time to think, why bother too much about compatibility, if it is not achievable. To be honest, on PC I first seen real compatibility, most programs run without any modifications on 8086/8088/80286/80386/80486, just on each iteration faster. First really significant issues with compatibility on x86 appear on Pentium, as I remember, Pentium-Pro was first Intels microarchitecture on which 16-bit programs was slower then on previous Intel CPUs. But all these facts was future when was first competition of 8086 and 68k, and nobody could be sure about Intel future before 80386, even many people think 80286 is unfortunate CPU. So I think, if Motorola made simplified 68k with fixed flaws (to be cheaper and may be to integrate more on CPU chip), it was really possible to gain momentum and overcome Intel on PC market. Unfortunately, Motorola decide to make 68020/68030, semi-compatible with 68k, but not cheap enough, and stay second in race. May be this because Motorola that time have good sales in military, so they don't bother about future. And after 80386 for Motorola time was lost forever. PowerPC was totally another history.