[rescue] I hope this is not a Hoax

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

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
continued development... so most vendors jumped ship.

The design for what I can see from paper is quite clean, and they were
very SMP friendly. There were plenty of aviions desktop pizza boxes that
packed 4 88Ks delivering over 100MIPS in 1990, whichwas amazing back then.