[cmrdporcupine]

Yep, and a victim not just the PowerPC nightmare but two other minority architectures _before_ that, both the 65xx and the 680x0. Arguably they didn't care as much about the 6502/65816 because they were already moving to the Mac/68k across their whole platform (people often forget that the Apple II line was Apple's major product and revenue source for their first 10 years), but in the early 90s Apple, Atari, and Commodore were all left in the lurch by the decline of the 68000 architecture. The PowerPC was the nominated successor, but it dragged Apple through 10 years of transition, with buggy backwards compatibility, porting an OS that was never designed to be portable, with major sections of it running as emulated 68k for years after they stopped shipping 68k machines...

[brudgers]

M68000 wasn't a minority architecture at the time Apple adopted it. It was a workstation workhorse. That's part of what justified the Lisa's $10,000 price in 1983. But a lot of it was margin and hence a year later 68000 Macs could be sold for less than a quarter that price but still offer incredible performance on a personal computer. By adopting a *nix based OS, Apple reduced most hardware compatibility issues to recompilation, performance of course being another matter.

As for the dark days of Apple in the PC market and the deaths of Commodore and Atari, my recollection is that it had more to do with the stock market crash of 1987 tightening access to capital and the S&L crisis that followed it creating a recession where downsizing was what corporations not empty-nesters did.

[cmrdporcupine]

At the time they adopted it but soon after. The moment the 386 became affordable the 68k platform was in decline.

[bryanlarsen]

If the 65816 (or something very similar to it) was available in 1978, the computing world would probably be very different now. 1978 was the year that both the 8086 and 6809 were released, which were similar 8/16 bit chips. 1979 saw the release of the 68000, which was a much more powerful chip than 1983's 65c816.

[cmrdporcupine]

68000 was more powerful for addressing large amounts of RAM that nobody could afford. In terms of actual workhorse performance there's a good argument to be made that a similarly clocked 65816 could outperform a 68000, unless your benchmark is heavy on 32-bit integer calculations. Instructions per cycle and interrupt responsiveness are higher for the 65xx (and 6809)

I'd prefer a 6809 with a wider address bus over a 68000. I wish Motorola had improved on the 6809 rather than having two competing architectures. The 6809 is a joy to code for.