Branching the thread away from Compaq deskpro boards: "What We Have Lost"

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Sun Aug 1 13:51:38 CDT 2021



> On Aug 1, 2021, at 2:45 PM, ben via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-08-01 12:32 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> 
>> Would the 68K have succeeded if it were not for Apple and Commodore?
>> --Chuck
> I suspect if they had the proper virtual memory, it would have been picked
> up as a Unix cpu, instead. It is the only common non segemented 16 bit cpu I can think in that time frame.

Apollo built a workstation company around the 68000.  That was hairy because that chip doesn't handle page faults right.  I think they used two of them, running in lock step one cycle apart so the one behind could be used to save state at a paging exception and allow it to be restored.

In the 68010 that design oversight was fixed and page faults became properly restartable.

	paul




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