From the first issue of "DTACK Grounded" (July 1981):

The problem, fellows, is that the 6502 is about to go the way of the 4004/4040. Very soon, like early next year, your neighbor's kid is going to come home with a Trash 80 IV based on an Intel 8086, and he is going to LAUGH at your 6502 based system the same way we at Digital Acoustics laugh at our competitor's 4040 based instrument. What really hurts is that he will be laughing with justification. The 8086 actually CAN run circles around a 6502 based system.

and

The market window of the 68000 is just opening. Because the architecture and microcode are both extensible, the 68000 will probably be a viable performer for a long time (nothing lasts forever). Imagine, if you will, microcoded string and floating point instructions, a 32 bit data bus, writeable microcode... All of these things are in the future of the 68000.

Needless to say, I had to chuckle over that one. Mass market adoption of the 68000 never happened—the only significant personal computer applications were the Amiga and the pre-Intel Mac—and the 68000, 68010 and 68020 ended up being relegated to closeout prices at Jameco nearly 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, the "obsolete" 65xx family that the 8086 would run circles around went on to power the best selling computer of all time, and still lives in countless products.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

It's all very amusing but I don't want to descend to that level. I liked my Amiga and I learnt a lot in getting things running on it: had to drop to assembly twice I think, once to get a library working to read DOS format disks and once to get a C compiler connected into the OS. Hooking up different levels was an education in calling conventions.

No reason it has to be either/or.

Cheers
Ed

There's no "either/or" involved—I'm looking at it from an historical perspective—nor is there any descending taking place. I'm commenting on a certain type of myopia that afflicts some observers of computer technology. The "DTACK Grounded" editor was viewing microprocessor technology through a too-small lens, his view being further constricted by the desire to promote his company's product (I can't say I ever ran across one of those boards that adapted a 68K to a PET/CBM machine).

At the time of its introduction, the overwhelming advantage of the 68K family was its performance. However, for much of its economic life, it was hobbled by complexity and cost, exacerbated by Motorola's inability to bring down the cost to the level of Intel's inferior product. There has never been any question in my mind that the 68K was superior to the x86 design in almost all aspects. It was for that reason that I taught myself 68K assembly language some 25 years ago, thinking that, for once, technical superiority might win out over market hype and inferiority. It didn't happen. Had that been the case, we might have all been processing on Amigas running UNIX, and I might have actually gotten some benefit from my studiousness (I've all but forgotten 68K machine code).

The chuckles came from the predictions that were made by the "DTACK Grounded" editor despite emerging and quite apparent market forces. The microprocessor market during the period of time when "DTACK Grounded" was being published had already forked: complexity to the left (so to speak) and simplicity to the right. There was no question that the divergence would only increase in time (look at the current generation of x86 architecture systems—terribly complicated buggers).

I think it was too easy at the time to get caught up in the wave of ever-increasing capability/complexity and fail see that not all applications required it. Did the controller in a microwave oven require the capability/complexity of a 68K or x86 MPU? How about the ASIC embedded in the then-nascent cell phone? Neither did, and that's why Bill Mensch, who obviously was not viewing the microprocessor market through a peephole lens, continues to make WDC's weekly payroll with the 65xx family. I suspect he gets a chuckle every now and then as he reminisces about the "microprocessor battles" of the 1980s and how well his tiny company has done over the years despite the predictions.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

That sounds a little like of like that story with stage coaches and the railroad in the 19th century in the western U.S.. As the railroad was getting finished, stage companies were afraid their livelihood was history, and tried to sell their coaches before they were totally worthless because there was no use for them. Wells Fargo OTOH realized that with the new reailroad, now more coaches would be needed to go from the railroad into the land north and south of it, so they bought more coaches. It worked out great for them. The last coaches went out of usage in about 1923 IIRC, having served many decades after their "funeral."

Good analogy, and it describes a situation that is destined to be endlessly repeated. Also, think what it did for the horse trade.


Only to be replaced by...er...horseless coaches.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Hi BDD
Indeed, we might well have much the same perspective on this - my comment was a bit rushed. Sorry. All I meant to convey is that we on this forum need not follow the lead of that editor and rubbish the competition at the same time as supporting our team.

As it happens, one of the last things I did with one or the other of my Amigas was run a unix of some kind - probably linux - but it was a very small environment and I couldn't get excited about it. (I had a 68030 board which was probably crucial. I bought that at about the time I was losing interest, which wasn't very wise.)

Again, historically, I can see the excitement of that time: here was a microprocessor with a nice large register set and powerful instruction set, with a supervisory mode. We could move on from Vaxes and PDP machines! And, it had a future: from the lowly Sinclair QL (ahem) to the Sun 3 and Apollo workstations it did pretty well. (I think descendants of 68k did very well in automotive too.) It was a while before RISC and x86 swept the board.

Cheers
Ed

But you even may have some 68k descendants at home... The 68k lives on in form of microcontrollers.

From the wikipedia article:


See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_ColdFire

André

on the subject of 68000 forums, I just found
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
which covers hardware hacks (let's call it system engineering.)



Edit: I feel bad about resurrecting this thread now... if we get one more link to a suitably technical 68000 forum, and if no-one else does it first, I'll start a new thread to catalogue them.

Cheers
Ed

resulting new forum: AnyCPU, announced at viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2398. This is in no way a competitor to forum.6502.org, but a sister forum. I think it's a win-win for everyone.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Hi Garth, maybe you guys should make the parallel thread you started a 'sticky'?
That way the link won't get buried. I like the idea of a sister forum too, especially with a future Programmable Logic section.

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65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502