[COFF] Why did Motorola fail?

[Lawrence Stewart]

Well RISC happened.  I suppose SPARC was part of that, but it was preceded by the IBM 801 and evolved along with the MIPS R2000 and R3000 and the HP PA-RISC.  In those days, semiconductor density wasn’t so high, and RISCs were substantially simpler.  Then Digital kicked everyone in the teeth with 200 MHz Alpha parts in the early ‘90s and we were off on the clock races.

Later, as density improved, CISCs became competitive again and by 1994 or so PCs running BSD were the systems of choice at my startup.  It was too late for Motorola.

One thing I’m puzzled about is that TI never really made a run.  They had very nice, fast, DSP chips around then, and it wouldn’t have been that hard to put together a decent general purpose chip, but it never happened.

> On 2018, Aug 9, at 10:23 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> 
> Forty years ago Motorola 680x0 CPUs powered most good Unix boxen, with
> the exception of this upstart SPARC thing.  And then they were gone.
> I'm trying to remember why.  Can anybody help me?  I recall claims
> that Moto didn't put enough effort into development, but was this
> primarily a technical or a commercial issue?
> 
> Greg
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