[COFF] Why did Motorola fail?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 12:23:10PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey 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.

The original SPARC CPU was 20K gates and was faster than the 68020.
My guess is cheaper as well.  I was at Sun as they were making the
transition from 68K to SPARC and we all fought to get SPARC machines
because of performance.

I liked the 68K well enough, it was fairly nice in assembler (though
my heart belongs to the PDP-11 first, the National 32032 next, and
then the 68K for assembler).  But the SPARC chips were just faster.