Motorola 68008 (was Re: Retrospective on the Sinclair QL, 30 years later)

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Very cool. One of my co-workers, who designed some of our 68000-based COMBOARDs had a QL, the only one I've seen in the States (I bought an Amiga the next year). The only other 68008 I've seen was in a "COMBOARD-mini" design I came up with that never launched - it was essentially a protocol emulator/async-sync converter to sit on a cable between a host and an IBM Front End speaking HASP or 3780. We were moving into the era where it was going to be easier to hook up to a serial port than stick a card in a box, so we kicked around a miniaturized version of our flagship product. Since the code was already in 68000 assembler, in a dialect of our own, changing CPUs wasn't feasible, but going from a 16-bit DMA host interface to an async serial host interface was. We made a run of boards, assembled a couple, but never had enough market response to dedicate the labor to port the host transport layer come. The era of bisync comms was over. -ethan