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> 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 t

> 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 ago
But 6809 was better in many ways.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  But not in the way in which most customers cared (price).
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, that's true it was a bit more expensive. But the real money back then was not in the CPU but in the RAM. Silly prices for tiny memories.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    yeah, technical superiority matters very little when cheaper alternatives exist which meet requirements.
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Yeah, had Moto basically matched the 6502, 8 bit land could have been very different. The 6809 is a lot of fun to program. Beautiful 8 bit machine.
glimshe 3y ago
I feel the nostalgia, but what would you expect this platform to do that Windows or Linux on PC wouldn't? You can kind of have a very, very fast Amiga running on an emulator today.
- leptons 3y ago
  Amiga OS was lightyears ahead of MacOS and Windows in the 80s and even into the 90s. If the Amiga had continued to be developed and gained the adoption that Windows had, and it became a dominant platform, then computing would likely be far ahead of where it is today. Amiga was revolutionary. Business mismanagement was Commodore's downfall as well as the general stupidity of humanity kept pushing the PC platform and Windows forward, and Commodore went out of business. Sure I can run an Amiga today in an emulator, but Amiga OS didn't really continue to be developed. My comment was more talking about what computing would be like if Amiga was still a popular platform and did continue to be developed in a meaningful way.
hakfoo 3y ago
Part of the reason that few 8-bit platforms successfully went 16-bit is because they filled up the address space too early. If you were writing code for a Commodore 64 or Atari 800XL, you largely didn't have to think about designing your software to probe the memory map or deal with larger and smaller versions of the system. This had two toxic outcomes: 1. The platform itself had no good way to expand upwards. If you built "C64, but with a 65C816 instead", you still had loads of software that expected to hit very specific ROM and memory-mapped hardware spots, so you couldn't remap them without breaking the world. You could potentially work around this by building the new machine with enough memory that you can just start the "enhanced-mode universe" after the hairball that exists in the bottom 64k. But if you wanted to offer a 128k or 256k machine, you can't afford to squander all that expensive RAM. And even still... 2. The software was largely incapable of exploiting extra resources if you had them. Some software learned to deal with Commodore REU devices or the bank-switched RAM in an Atari 130XE, but that requires a lot of heavy lifting to use efficiently. In contrast, someone who took a 128k 8088 PC clone and upgraded to a 512k 286 usually got bigger spreadsheets and longer documents for free. There was no need to think about allocating from non-contiguous memory spaces-- just a larger version of the easy to manage space that starts at 1k and ends around 640k.
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  > You could potentially work around this by building the new machine with enough memory that you can just start the "enhanced-mode universe" after the hairball that exists in the bottom 64k. But if you wanted to offer a 128k or 256k machine, you can't afford to squander all that expensive RAM. And even still... That's exactly what PCs did with 386 . even today, if you boot on legacy bios mode, you get the same lower 1MiB address space and mappings
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    I was thinking more specifically like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Always-Reserve-1MB https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Always-Reserve-1MB Note that this was apparently a decision made in 2001. If you tried this in 1988, when 2Mb was an enormous machine, and you said to users "Yeah, only half of that will be allocated to user programs", that's not gonna fly.

jacquesm 3y ago

But 6809 was better in many ways.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
But not in the way in which most customers cared (price).
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Yes, that's true it was a bit more expensive. But the real money back then was not in the CPU but in the RAM. Silly prices for tiny memories.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  yeah, technical superiority matters very little when cheaper alternatives exist which meet requirements.
- ddingus 3y ago
  Yeah, had Moto basically matched the 6502, 8 bit land could have been very different. The 6809 is a lot of fun to program. Beautiful 8 bit machine.

glimshe 3y ago

I feel the nostalgia, but what would you expect this platform to do that Windows or Linux on PC wouldn't? You can kind of have a very, very fast Amiga running on an emulator today.

leptons 3y ago
Amiga OS was lightyears ahead of MacOS and Windows in the 80s and even into the 90s. If the Amiga had continued to be developed and gained the adoption that Windows had, and it became a dominant platform, then computing would likely be far ahead of where it is today. Amiga was revolutionary. Business mismanagement was Commodore's downfall as well as the general stupidity of humanity kept pushing the PC platform and Windows forward, and Commodore went out of business. Sure I can run an Amiga today in an emulator, but Amiga OS didn't really continue to be developed. My comment was more talking about what computing would be like if Amiga was still a popular platform and did continue to be developed in a meaningful way.

hakfoo 3y ago

Part of the reason that few 8-bit platforms successfully went 16-bit is because they filled up the address space too early. If you were writing code for a Commodore 64 or Atari 800XL, you largely didn't have to think about designing your software to probe the memory map or deal with larger and smaller versions of the system. This had two toxic outcomes: 1. The platform itself had no good way to expand upwards. If you built "C64, but with a 65C816 instead", you still had loads of software that expected to hit very specific ROM and memory-mapped hardware spots, so you couldn't remap them without breaking the world. You could potentially work around this by building the new machine with enough memory that you can just start the "enhanced-mode universe" after the hairball that exists in the bottom 64k. But if you wanted to offer a 128k or 256k machine, you can't afford to squander all that expensive RAM. And even still... 2. The software was largely incapable of exploiting extra resources if you had them. Some software learned to deal with Commodore REU devices or the bank-switched RAM in an Atari 130XE, but that requires a lot of heavy lifting to use efficiently. In contrast, someone who took a 128k 8088 PC clone and upgraded to a 512k 286 usually got bigger spreadsheets and longer documents for free. There was no need to think about allocating from non-contiguous memory spaces-- just a larger version of the easy to manage space that starts at 1k and ends around 640k.

Zardoz84 3y ago
> You could potentially work around this by building the new machine with enough memory that you can just start the "enhanced-mode universe" after the hairball that exists in the bottom 64k. But if you wanted to offer a 128k or 256k machine, you can't afford to squander all that expensive RAM. And even still... That's exactly what PCs did with 386 . even today, if you boot on legacy bios mode, you get the same lower 1MiB address space and mappings
- hakfoo 3y ago
  I was thinking more specifically like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Always-Reserve-1MB https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Always-Reserve-1MB Note that this was apparently a decision made in 2001. If you tried this in 1988, when 2Mb was an enormous machine, and you said to users "Yeah, only half of that will be allocated to user programs", that's not gonna fly.