The 68000 really fascinates me, because it has an interesting legacy: the m68k ISA was heavily inspired by the DEC PDP-11 (the classic Unix architecture), and t

The 68000 really fascinates me, because it has an interesting legacy: the m68k ISA was heavily inspired by the DEC PDP-11 (the classic Unix architecture), and the assembly language was almost identical. If a few things went differently, the modern computer industry could've been dominated by a descendent of the PDP-11... Instead, however, we got x86, which is the worst of all possible worlds. People like to shit on x86 for being CISC instead of RISC, but the truth is that a good CISC architecture has lots of things (e.g. orthogonality) that can make up for not being RISC, and x86 is just a really poor example of CISC. The ultimate CISC ISA was VAX, but PDP-11 and m68k came pretty damn close, and it's a real shame that they got crushed under the x86 juggernaut.