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What held back the 3b1? That's rarely mentioned in these parts, but it was a fantastic machine from a company that had experience building real computers (if e
by kw71 11y ago
What held back the 3b1? That's rarely mentioned in these parts, but it was a fantastic machine from a company that had experience building real computers (if even for its own use.)
- Animats 11y agoThere were a lot of early UNIX workstation companies in the early 1980s. Three Rivers, Apollo, HP, IBM, Apple, Sun, Sony, and AT&T all had 680x0-based machines. All totally incompatible. At the time, it looked like lower-cost versions of those were the future of computing. But, as mentioned previously, Motorola was too slow getting the MMU situation fixed, which meant that all those workstations had some homebrew MMU that ran up the cost. Not until the 60030 in 1987 did Motorola offer an on-chip MMU. Workstations in that era cost $10K - $20K in 1980s dollars. Even the Apple Lisa was a $10K machine. Workstation prices didn't come down fast enough. Meanwhile, people were learning how to get things done on the original DOS PC, clones, and PC/AT, which had inferior technology but volume was driving down the price. We had UNIX on the desktop in the 1980s, but few could afford it.