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

On 13 January 2014 17:35, emanuel stiebler <emu at e-bbes.com> wrote: Ah ha! I was going to link to that in reply to Ethan's comment myself. It looks like a very interesting design. I shudder to think what it would have cost in the early-to-mid 1980s, though. The QL was a very badly compromised design, sadly. A fascinating machine, but almost every single design decision in it was wrong, in hindsight. IMHO, the QL done right - a 68000 home computer, built to a strict, tight budget, using COTS parts and a largely COTS software stack - was the Atari ST. The standard 8-bit sound chip, a standard PC floppy controller, (I believe) PC-derived graphics chips etc. - and it was still nearly twice the price of the QL at launch. And Atari's sort of incremental launch strategy - the first public prototypes with 256kB of RAM, the soft-loaded OS, the external transformer and modulator and floppy, all gradually built in as the machine grew into its final form... a good, sensible, if merely pragmatic process. As opposed to Commodore's big-bang Amiga 1000 which was too expensive for almost anyone at first, so that real mass market sales had to wait on the cheaper, cut-down Amiga 500. It's no irony that Tony Tebby eventually took the QL's OS onto the ST as SMS2 and eventually SMSQ/E. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884