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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (1570657)11/7/2025 2:15:11 PM
From: combjelly  Read Replies (1) of 1573136
 
Those keyboards are legendary. Loud, and a tragedy if they dropped, but the feel was great. I repaired a couple. An array of flappy paddles and springs.

Motorola screwed the pooch with their 6800. They were using contact masks and enhancement mode NMOS, having just switched from PMOS. And they had yield problems when Intel was going gang busters. They lost almost 2 years before they got their footing. By then, the 6501 and 6502 were out. The 8080 was a bitch to design with, you needed a flock of support chips with +12 and -5 volts to deal with so not everything was TTL compatible. The 6800/6501/6502 were almost identical in pin functions and everything was TTL except for the 2 phase clock on the 6800.

A company named Sphere sold the first microcomputer with display hardware and cassette interface for under $1k based on the 6800 in 1975. But college students were poor in those days.

And there was the lamented 6809. It even had a paged, MMU.

But the tide ran the other way. Instead of computer architectures that were derivatives of the PDP-11, the one rooted in Datapoint calculators from the 1960s won out.

I am not bitter. I moved on. Except there were some grad students who took the 6809, pipelined and widening internal busses to 16 bits as a master's thesis. Turbo9 on github. Sigh.

github.com
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