4 ms·
Some forget that the Motorola 68000 was the first truly modern processor. It was cheap enough that regular people could actually be exposed to, use, and later o
by johnklos 2y ago
Some forget that the Motorola 68000 was the first truly modern processor. It was cheap enough that regular people could actually be exposed to, use, and later on own, machines with them. It facilitated the first commonplace GUI-based computers. It was designed well enough from the start that code written for the original processor can run without modification on later processors. The family gave us the first taste of a common processor that could run modern OSes with arbitrarily large amounts of memory, virtual memory, and performant multitasking years before Intel's first proper, common 32 bit processor.
In contrast, programs on the 8088 / 8086 are vastly different than on the 80286, and vastly different again than on the 80386. The 80386 came out finally in 1985, but even this processor has shortcomings (lack of atomic instructions, for example) that make it so no modern OS supports it any longer.
The Motorola 68020, on the other hand, came out in 1984 and can run fully modern OSes now, in 2024, forty years later.
Whereas much more modern processors like the Intel Itanic came out more than half a decade after the release of the Motorola 68060, it has already died and been relegated to the trash bin of history (with gcc removing support for it recently), whereas m68k has llvm / clang support, excellent support in gcc, a huge following in the retro communities, new products based on them, and a thriving platform, the Amiga, that has never stopped making software for these chips.
Quite an impressive architecture!
- snvzz 2y ago>The Motorola 68020, on the other hand, came out in 1984 and can run fully modern OSes now, in 2024, forty years later. I'd place the cutting point at 68010, which solves a virtualization flaw in 68000 (unprivileged move from SR) and can support virtual memory (can recover from bus error).
- johnklos 2y agoThere is actually a modern OS (NetBSD) that can run on m68010 systems: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sun2/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sun2/ However, it'd be difficult to argue that it's actually all that useful ;) On the other hand, an '020 or '030 system can be quite useful. I compile and run lots of software, including sendmail with TLS, on a Mac LC III+ with a 33 MHz '030 and 36 megs of memory.
- snvzz 2y ago>There is actually a modern OS (NetBSD) that can run on m68010 systems: More than one ;) Check out the rosco-m68k (I built one of these), which is actually 68010 based. A few systems have been ported to run on it. IIRC fuzix was one of them. Netbsd can run on 68010, but unfortunately not mmuless.
- avmich 2y ago> (lack of atomic instructions, Well, 8086 had XCHG. Do you mean something more capable?..
- johnklos 2y agoThis explains what the 80386 lacked that was a large part of what made it simpler to stop supporting 80386 entirely and make 80486 the minimum for gcc: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190404-00/?p=102383 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190404-00/?p=10...