The Joys of Motorola

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 21:57:29 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:

Other reasons that have been reported are:
 
1) IBM required any "outside IBM" chips to be second sourced.  Intel
already had AMD as an official licenced second source for the 8088 chip,
Motorola did not (yet) have any second source for the 68000.
 
2) Intel had the chip on the market, and could supply the production
volume (or so they claimed to IBM) IBM wanted.  Motorola had
"pre-production" versions of the 68000 available for 'breadboarding'
but it had not yet entered full production at the time IBM was selecting
a CPU to use (and IIRC, was not planned to enter full production until
after IBM had planned to release their new "PC").

On 2025-01-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

Both are believable. Even for the older microcontrollers Motorola had a
bad reputation for hanging you out to dry if they reverted to their roots
and got an order for millions of pieces from the automotive industry.

I think it was 1981 that Motorola announced the LANCE chip, which made
Ethernet practical. Lots of companies designed products around it, but
in the end it was 2 years late to ship production quantities.

I was at ACC (Associated Computer Consultants, later Advanced Computer
Communications). Larry Green, their top designer, left to start CMC
(Communications Machinery Corporation) to build Ethernet cards to
real-time systems, primarily VersaBus. Since they could not get
even evaluation quantities of actual LANCE chips, they designed a LANCE
emulator board (something like 30 x 50 centimeter size) to plug into the
boards they were designing to test the boards and the software drivers
for the boards. While they were building an inventory of pruduct boards
with an empty socket where the LANCE would go, the only thing they had to
sell was the EMULATOR, which they then sold at at good price to the
other vendors of products for mostly different buses.

This must have fresh in the minds of whoever would be choosing
arhitectures for new computers.