Old processors never die, they just get a bit tired...

[Notebook]

http://www.elektor.com/news/soft-co...um=email&utm_campaign=news&cat=microprocessor

I'm surprised at this, the Motorola 6800 must have come out in the early 70's, the 68000 a bit later?

Whats the market, legacy equipment? There must be enough choice these days for uProcessors with Arudinos and the like.

N.

 

[tl8]

The Motorola's are good because there are a lot of tools for them. A lot of people were educated on them (Including me). So yes, there are other products, but if it does the job, stick with what you know...

 

[Urwumpe]

Also 68XXs are still popular as microcontrollers... I remember my brother programming one at university.

 

[csanders]

The good ol' 68000.

If I recall, it had a very nice mechanism for prioritized real-time interrupts.

 

[John_L]

Yeah, I cut my assembly language teeth on an MC6809 out of the 68xx series, the 8 bit grand pappy of the 68000 series. (Radio Shack Color Computer). Also, the early model 12 and 16's had both a Zilog Z80 8 bit processor for compatibility with the Model II, and the 68000 as well. The model 16 was the first 16 bit processor on the market. And it's true that the 68xx series chips still exist today as well. This chip does the same thing for the 68000 series. By the time those computers were out, the IBM PC was out, so those systems (despite being way better than PCs of the day) soon died off. Radio Shack tried to keep up by releasing the Model 2000, which was supposed to be PC compatible, but wasn't fully due to the use of the 80186. Oh, the old days...! Cool find though

 

[Artlav]

Hm, i always remembered m68k as that motorola processor from that weird american computer called "macintosh", which they used before powerpc.
The only other time i've heard of it is in the compiler construction book, which used it as an example to generate code to.

In assembly and operating system classes we used some soviet vintage processor instead, then 8086.

Never heard of 6800 before researching home-made lithography.
Here are the people who disassembled them, and made a transistor-level simulator:
http://visual6502.org/wiki/index.php?title=Motorola_6800

So, it would seem somebody still care about these ones.

 

[Urwumpe]

The 680X0 is also in Commodore Amiga computers, Atari ST, German U206A submarines, TV settop boxes, studio equipment and lots more... It is still pretty popular under the Coldfire brand.

 

[Ragtag]

The good ol' 68000.

If I recall, it had a very nice mechanism for prioritized real-time interrupts.

It can also address memory far better than any of the Intel 8086 stuff ever could. I worked for Motorola when it was released and we , i.e. engineers couldn't beleive how much better it was over the Intel stuff. My first computer was a home brew 6809 based system mainly because I couldn't afford the expense of 16k ram for the 68000. I could get the processor free but had to buy all the other stuff.