The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 9:54 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: The same old arguments... by Wol
Parent article: Eventual Rust in CPython

I can't speak for x86_64, but the 68000? the 32032? MUCH better chips, much better designed, they just couldn't make headway against the 80x86 line ...

The story goes that the reason why IBM used the 8088 for the PC rather than the 68000 (which had already been available at the time) is that they didn't want PCs to be too powerful because they might have cannibalised sales of their minicomputer lines. A similar argument later kept IBM from introducing 80386-based PCs but then Compaq came out with one and the floodgates were open.

As far as the 68000 was concerned, it was certainly not for lack of trying on the part of the industry. At the time, various 68000-based computers like the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were quite popular with home users but never made noticeable inroads in the business PC world (which was probably less to do with the technical merit of the platform(s) and more with terrible marketing and unwise product development decisions by their manufacturers). And of course the original Macintosh was 68000-based but the platform switched over to PowerPC and eventually x86 (and ARM) – much like early SUN-type Unix workstations were built around 680x0 chips before CISC fell out of fashion and the workstation makers all came up with their own RISC CPUs (SPARC, HPPA, …).

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The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 10:31 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

There's other parts to that story; the 68k had a 16 bit external data bus, where the 8088 had a mere 8 bit bus. This meant that the PC was a cheaper design, since it could reuse long-established 8 bit parts (and, indeed, if you look at the chips used in the IBM Personal Computer 5150 and the IBM System/23 Datamaster 5322 or 5324, you see a lot of overlap).

And, of course, the 32032 was a disaster zone of a chip. On paper, it was reasonable, but once you took the errata lists into account, it was awful, and you were better off with the 68000.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 9, 2025 11:27 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Ah yes, and the 68008 (which also had an 8-bit data bus and could have been used to build a cheap m68k-based machine) didn't come out until 1982, too late for the IBM PC.