| > Yeah the era of "memory can outrun the CPU" was brief and glorious. I don't think I fully recognized at first what was happening when wait states, page mode DRAM, and caches started appearing in mainstream computers. :-) > Not sure about this alternate reality where Apple's 68000 machines were cheap :-) (I say this as an Atari ST owner). Yeah... I should have cast a broader net. The Atari ST machines were much better deals IIRC. In any event, DTACK grounded PoV was that the 68000 was targeted at minicomputer scale machines, so anything that fit on a desk at all was arguably going to be inexpensive. (Years later, I did embedded work on 68K class machines intended to run in low power environments. They had to be "intrinsically safe" in potentially flammable industrial control environments. That architecture had a long path from 'minicomputer class' to where either wound up.) The other thread this reminds me of is a bit later, Definicon was selling boards like the DSI-780. These were PC AT boards with an onboard 68020/68881 and local memory. Computationally intensive jobs could be offloaded to that board, which was supposedly like a VAX-11/780 on your desk. In some ways, it served a similar role to the DTACK attached processors, but at a slightly later point in time. Like the DTACK grounded products, the window of time in which these products had value was oh so short, relatively speaking. |