What killed the 68000?
And could it have survived on the desktop?
When we left the 68000 series in Motorola's 68000 Series: Its Rise in Ten Computers it was powering an impressive list of innovative computers. Workstations from Sun, Apollo, HP, and many others. The first Macintosh. Steve Jobs’s second act with the NeXT workstation. Cheaper machines, like the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, followed the Macintosh and put mice into the hands and windows onto the screen of millions of home computer users.
But, little more than a decade after its launch, the 68000 had effectively been abandoned by Motorola.
What went wrong? Why did a processor, whose name had been a byword for a new generation of powerful machines and software, fail?
In this post, we’ll look at the key factors that led to the demise of the 68000 series and see what we can learn from the demise of the iconic Motorola design.