<gets on soapbox> It's true that the '186 and '188 were VERY widely used. The 68000 was really not nearly so popular, but it looks as though they were similarly popular in the PC world. That market, in the '80's represents a completely insignificant share of the market, however, since many products using processors of the '186/88 class were made in quantities each week equalling the entire PC market. Intel may, if its dominance on the PC market continues, eventually sell as many pentium chips as they'd sold '186's by the end of 1989, but only if they stop selling '186's right now, which they won't. The '186 was so significant that the Soviets even counterfeited the thing for use in their cruise missiles, among other things. The 68000 was a disappointment on the market, not living up to its promise, or even its claims, badly marketed, and too costly for the applications that it did suit. The 68010 was an improvement in some respects, but its main performance hit came when MOT made the decision to punt high performance, as promised by the presence of that "DTACK" signal that ended a bus cycle, in order to make applications engineering easier. The result was that this processor, which could have run quite fast if outfitted with a small amount of cache, had a shortest-cycle of about 500 ns, which was as slow as nearly any other CPU. Further, because of its long opcodes, it required two strokes into memory for an opcode, at least two for the effective address, and two for the data. There were other CPU's at the time that would easily outrun it even though they were only 8-bit types, in many tasks. Because of its architecture and its inability to run fast, on short addresses and data, it ran 8-bit tasks very badly, and Intel's processors looked pretty good by comparison. In fact, the 68K was inherently a better-designed architecture, but the abandonment of the DTACK-enabled fast bus cycle which the early masks could use, hurt them in the market. The 68020 finally seemed to hit the mark, but was quite costly to use. In a fair test of computing power, the 68K would outperform the '186, but most tasks for microprocessors aren't really computing tasks, they're simple signal processing tasks, and not in the sense of "Digital Signal Processing" which is VERY numerically oriented, but in the sense of simple ANDs and ORs, and the like. Had MOT gotten behind the CP/M 68K costing a few hundred dollars, rather than the then (1980) very costly UNIX types, not to mention their own rather weak operating systems, they'd have had a tiger by the tail, because the computer market was ready. MOT wasn't, however. They thought a 6809 was a better choice for home computing. <falls off soapbox> Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter C. Wallace" &lt;pcw(a)mesanet.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2002 5:33 PM Subject: Re: 68010 & 80186 (was: Re: Mac IIci) chip