[COFF] Why did Motorola fail?

[Bakul Shah]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2018 12:23:10 +1000 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?

I think the greatest influence has to be what IBM choose for
the PC.

This is what Gates said in a 1997 interview with the PC
Magazine:

For IBM it was extremely different because this was a project
where they let a supplier -- a partner, whatever you call us
-- shape the definition of the machine and provide fundamental
elements of the machine. When they first came to us, their
concept was to do an 8-bit computer. And the project was more
notable because they were going to do it so quickly and use an
outside company....The novel thing was: could you work with
outsiders, which in this case was mostly ourselves but also
Intel, and do it quickly? And the key engineer on the project,
Lou Eggebrecht, was fast-moving. Once we convinced IBM to go
16-bit (and we looked at 68000 which unfortunately wasn't
debugged at the time so decided to go 8086), he cranked out
that motherboard in about 40 days.

Dave Bradley, who wrote the BIOS (Basic Input Output System)
for the IBM PC, and many of the other engineers involved say
IBM had already decided to use the x86 architecture while the
project was still a task force preparing for management
approval in August 1980.

In a 1990 article for Byte, Bradley said there were four main
reasons for choosing the 8088. First, it had to be a 16-bit
chip that overcame the 64K memory limit of the 8-bit
processors. Second, the processor and its peripheral chips had
to be immediately available in quantity. Third, it had to be
technology IBM was familiar with. And fourth, it had to have
available languages and operating systems.

Cribbed from:
https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/chips/286228-why-the-ibm-pc-used-an-intel-8088