Teaching kids about computers...

On 29 Nov 2007 at 16:11, Jules Richardson wrote: 1979 sounds right to me. I recall a BYTE magazine interview with the design team. One topic was the low clock speed (initially 1 MHz). The response from one of the team members was something to the effect "if we would have known that people would rate CPUs by their clock speed, we would have put a waveguide on the 6809". I believe that the 6809 actually has *fewer* instructions in its set than the 6800 (depending on what one calls an instruction), which was something very unusual at the time. But the 6809 was an evolutionary dead-end. It came out too late, and while it turned in very respectable performance, it was hampered by lousy product timing--the 68K debuted in the same year and was in a different category altogether. I recall seeing the 6809 datasheet and looking for information at the 1979 Wescon (IIRC) and coming home with a pile of 68K literature and forgetting about the 6809 entirely. It's ironic in a way--6800-family products are still made, as are 68K products. But the 6809 is forgotten. Apparently, there's a VHDL implementation for those amenable to FPGA versions. Cheers, Chuck