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0 pointsmschaef7y ago0 comments

> Yes, the death of 8-bit systems was obvious by 89, but so was the death of the 68000. Motorola was already pushing the failed 88000 by the late 80s. And the 68000 itself was killed off only a couple years later.

You may be overstating the death of the 68000... the 68060 was introduced in 1994, and I remember doing embedded work on 68000 based designs in 1999-2000. (In fact, some of the processors are still available, although not recommended for new designs.)

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jhbadger7y ago

And even into the early 2000s, Palm and other handhelds had Freescale Dragonball processors inside, and that was based off of the 68000 core which was licensed from Motorola.

cmrdporcupine7y ago

Sure, and ColdFire is still around to some degree. But Motorola/Freescale was not promoting this architecture for new desktop designs past the very early 90s. Yes, Apple and others continued to make machines until the mid-90s around 68k, but it was seen as dead in the water and the push was to get onto PowerPC (itself an unfortunate dead-end).

I still like the 68k. It has a very nice instruction set. It makes a great target for C compilers. I still enjoy writing assembler for it here and there. I like my Atari STs.

But for the market that Atari and Amiga were going for, I am still not convinced it was appropriate. I think Apple made the right choices with the IIgs. Except they underclocked it, overpriced it, and handicapped it in favour of promoting the Macintosh despite the II line being a big profit centre for them.

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