Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!oakhill!davet
From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (David Trissel)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 68000 architecture
Message-ID: <2095@oakhill.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jun 89 12:05:38 GMT
References: <1989May30.171335.473@utzoo.uucp> <658@geovision.UUCP> <40938@bbn.COM>
Reply-To: davet@oakhill.UUCP (David Trissel)
Organization: Motorola Inc., Austin Tx.
Lines: 24

In article <40938@bbn.COM> slackey@BBN.COM (Stan Lackey) writes:

>The 68000 was the next generation after the 6800/6809 8-bitters, and was
>influenced much by the embedded controller market.  Here, the program
>was typically in ROM, and only data was in RAM.  I would bet that
>Motorola was pleasantly surprised by how well the chip caught on in
>the (then nonexistant) workstation business.

Good guess. I remember a group of us at the plant talking among ourselves and
wondering if any customers would even want something like a MC68000. Hard
to believe now, isn't it? But remember, at that time not even the MC6809 had
been introduced and our largest systems were MC6800 with a whopping 16K of RAM.
You were really a bigwig if your MC6800 system had 24K or (GASP!) 32K of RAM. 

The sign-extended short absolute addressing was deemed to be a perfect fit for
hardware designers chosing to put the I/O ports at the "upper" end of memory
since this was typical of hardware designs with the 16-bit bus processors.

Of historical interest is a seminar I gave on the just-announced
MC68000 in Toronto. I mentioned that a 10 Mhz MC68000 would run at nearly
a full MIP and I was actually hissed at by some of the crowd. To many of them
it was simply absurd to think that a microprocessor could attain such speed.

 --  Dave Trissel - Motorola Semiconductor Inc. - Austin