[rescue] I hope this is not a Hoax

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 04:12:41PM -0700, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
> >
> > Why did it fail?
> 
> It came at the wrong time,it came out at the same time as the i860 and all
> the hype surrounding it pretty much drowned it because Moto made a half
> assed effort at selling it. It was presented as the RISC succesor for the
> 68K. However most of the companies who were using 68K had looked elsewhere
> for a replacement, since they wanted to break from Moto's hold. For
> example HP had started transitioning from 68K to PA-RISC, SUN was doing
> the smae towards SPARC, then they also had to compete with MIPS being the
> chosen processor for the ACE initiative.
> 
> The late 80s were filled with new designs, AMD, Fairchild, Intel,
> Motorola, Sparc, MIPS, HP, even IBM. Teh x86 survived which was rather
> remarkable  after such an onslaught. It was a very exciting time :), it
> may never repeat itself I am afraid.
> 
> In the end only DG built systems in certain volume around 88Ks, with Apple
> and NeXT being close to deliver products. But they never did. There were
> also Motorola branded systems delivered using 88K, and I also believe
> Philips in Europe produced 88K systems. In Japan Omron released the Luna
> 88K which as a nice SMP desktop box -I believe Mach was developed using
> these machines in CMU- In the end there was not much volume to justify

I think you are mistaken about this - was not the earliest Mach effort
by Rick Rashid at CMU in 1982 or so?  Or perhaps that was the
precursor to Mach.

Motorola did have their own hw, it was funky in that you could stack
them on top of each other and the integral backplane would fit in and
the expansion box would communicate with the system, no other cords
needed.  I doubt they sold many however.

--Patrick