13 Jul
2010
13 Jul
'10
1:42 p.m.
Jeff Walther wrote:
Really, it's a kindness to take the 68020 out of
an LC. The LC only had
a 16 bit wide data bus. Just senseless.
It was perfectly sensible. Using a 16-bit wide bus reduced the
manufacturing cost, allowing the machine to be priced less than the Mac
II family machines, including the Mac IIsi. Same reason the original
IBM PC had an 8088 rather than an 8086.
If you wanted a machine with a 32-bit bus, Apple offered plenty of
models that had it. They were more expensive. Eventually costs came
down enough that in the LC III a 32-bit bus was used.
I worked for Apple at the time, and knew and had discussions with some
of the people involved. They were doing everything they could to keep
the cost of the LC down. There was even talk of using some interesting
tricks to compress the ROM contents in order to use the next smaller
size of ROM chips, but I don't know whether that was actually done.
Eric