Thanks for the link to that John Mashey post. It's meaty, so I'll need some time to chew through it :-)
> Motorola did not have a senior 68k implementation engineer, who could look down the road...
Yeah, this makes sense. Having started out as a complete newbie user and fanboy on 8-bit micros and then leaping to the brand new Amiga 1000 as my first 68k (because it was just so awesome), I've realized the perspective I had back then on Moto and the 68k line wasn't very complete. Reading some of the first-hand oral history from insiders in recent years shows that Motorola management made key strategic mistakes like not realizing the potential of what they had at various inflection points. The 68k was created by a new team with very little experience but which had some unusually brilliant people on it. That yielded a bold and expansive design with lots of deeply powerful aspects (like that addressing) but it may have been "too expansive" (or maybe over-complete) for what would be the first part in a long product line.
Moto also didn't seem to realize they were in an all-out, high-stakes drag race to advance silicon fabrication faster and farther than their competitors. Moto was quite the laggard both in leading edge process technology and in perfecting their leading edge manufacturing reliability/predictability. This may have just been due to Moto being a huge conglomerate with lots of divergent businesses, like selling millions of 8-bit 6803 derivatives to General Motors every year. Whereas in the 1980s, Intel could still adopt a startup mindset and singular focus when they decided it was crucial. Maybe that's the over-arching meta here. Intel bet the company on figuring out some way to scale the x86 into the future and Moto treated the 68k CPUs like they were just another line of business.
Personally, I now think of the 68k line as a beautiful swan born to distracted, mediocre parents who never really understood its potential, while the x86 was a bit of an ugly duckling born to committed, passionate, smart parents who were determined to find a way to make it successful. Maybe things would have turned out differently if the Moto board of directors knew that in 30 years the most valuable corporations in the world would all be based around silicon fabrication and IP. :-)
> Motorola did not have a senior 68k implementation engineer, who could look down the road...
Yeah, this makes sense. Having started out as a complete newbie user and fanboy on 8-bit micros and then leaping to the brand new Amiga 1000 as my first 68k (because it was just so awesome), I've realized the perspective I had back then on Moto and the 68k line wasn't very complete. Reading some of the first-hand oral history from insiders in recent years shows that Motorola management made key strategic mistakes like not realizing the potential of what they had at various inflection points. The 68k was created by a new team with very little experience but which had some unusually brilliant people on it. That yielded a bold and expansive design with lots of deeply powerful aspects (like that addressing) but it may have been "too expansive" (or maybe over-complete) for what would be the first part in a long product line.
Moto also didn't seem to realize they were in an all-out, high-stakes drag race to advance silicon fabrication faster and farther than their competitors. Moto was quite the laggard both in leading edge process technology and in perfecting their leading edge manufacturing reliability/predictability. This may have just been due to Moto being a huge conglomerate with lots of divergent businesses, like selling millions of 8-bit 6803 derivatives to General Motors every year. Whereas in the 1980s, Intel could still adopt a startup mindset and singular focus when they decided it was crucial. Maybe that's the over-arching meta here. Intel bet the company on figuring out some way to scale the x86 into the future and Moto treated the 68k CPUs like they were just another line of business.
Personally, I now think of the 68k line as a beautiful swan born to distracted, mediocre parents who never really understood its potential, while the x86 was a bit of an ugly duckling born to committed, passionate, smart parents who were determined to find a way to make it successful. Maybe things would have turned out differently if the Moto board of directors knew that in 30 years the most valuable corporations in the world would all be based around silicon fabrication and IP. :-)