68000 vs x86 History

According to history, there were three microprocessors in the running for the IBM PC. They were the Intel 8088, the Motorola 68000, and the Texas Instruments TMS99000.If I remember correctly, the Intel had lots of 8088s available immediately (so IBM could do things like lifecycle testing), and Motorola did not have enough 68000s available yet. IBM was concerned about how much memory you would be able to use with future iterations of the 99000.The 68000 series did see use in the Macintosh,

This was the reason for Dragon computers btw.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64

Didn't they just release the 8086?

The existence of an imaginary x86 monopoly in the 80s?

The 68000 and 68010 were 32bit CPUs, released in 1979 and 1982 respectively. Intel didn't have a 32bit x86 CPU until 1985 when it released the 386.At the time though, the 68K was regarded as the best general purpose CPU you could get and was sort of a "default choice" for building any reasonably high performance systems. Unix workstation manufacturers like Sun and SGI originally built their systems on the M68K platforms before their respective RISC architectures developed and m

68000 was the better CISC architecture.

> Motorola 68000 CPU range [...] it had 68000 transistors(!) Is that the origin of the chip's name?The ARM2 was highly competitive, yes. I still own my original ARM2 system from the late 1980s, an Acorn Archimedes A310.It has been odd to see the techie world getting excited over Apple's Arm-ISA CPU performance, some 35 years after much the same thing happened when the ARM2 hit the retail market.I bought my A310 used for £800 in 1989. At the time, my employer's top-e

My impression is that they all built desktop minicomputers possible thanks to CPUs like the 68K but moved on to RISC designs when the 68K started showing its age. I would not say the PA-RISC was open, but SPARC had multiple sources and MIPS showed up everywhere. At that period, the x86 was not an option - Sun tried.

Why was a 68030 a curious choice for a machine launched in 1988?

Looking back it does appear that Intel did nearly everything right, and their competitors didn't. It did help a lot though getting the IBM PC business, and due to that, aligning with Microsoft. If you look at the 68000 machines at the time they all had flaws that prevented them from really taking off, often not things that couldn't be corrected, but things that held them back. The Mac didn't have a hard disk, or multitasking, or color. The Amiga would always be constrained by the