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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

I started working professionally in the late 1980s and it seemed like the big competition at the time was between x86 and 680x0 variants.

From the Mac right up to multiprocessing minis (Bull DPX/2 for example could be had with 4 68030), plus a variety of high end workstation vendors (Sun, Apollo) the 680x0 seemed like a much higher end processor than anything Intel based.

Then Sun dropped it in favour of Sparc.

It took a while but the 386 and it's replacements gradually ate everything in that space thanks to Compaq leading the way. Even Sun had intel based machines.

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Sure, the x86 family took a commanding lead over that time... But over in the corner where nobody was looking, in 1987 Acorn shipped the Archimedes with this RISC based processor they called the 'Acorn RISC Machine', or ARM... and it's looking increasingly like that whole x86/68x00 fight was a sideshow.

That is a very weird interpretation of what happened.

Acorn had horrible software, the hardware did not evolve as fast as x86 and after a few years hype it was pretty much dead.

What eventually saved it was basically an accident: due to lack of manpower the design was extremely simple, which turned out to translate to power efficiency.

Edit: the original designer put a very positive spin on things by saying that leadership gave them two things they needed to succeed: no money and no people.

Given the 80% desktop market of Windows, and what actually powers server rooms, I doubt it.

Mobile yes, Apple Newton was a reason why Acorn didn't just close shop in the 1980's.

Apple's M CPUs on their laptops versus Windows market share is quite close how Motorola/PowerPC vs x86 has always been.

I always enjoyed assembly programming the best on Motorola CPUs. Spent a lot of my youth on the 6809 and later 68020. Still have assembly programming books for both on the bookshelf behind me. Never really did enjoy assembly on the 8086 or 286, very ugly. Did some SPARC assembly programming later and it was nicer than x86 but by then assembly was fading from my life.

HP also had a 68k workstation line before PA-RISC.

I mean this how it might have appeared but internally everybody know it was up. Sun by like 1985 already knew that Motorola was pushing ahead fast enough, that's why they developed SPARC. They did try to get Motorola to be more aggressive and so on, but Motorola wasn't interested.

Even Acron knew it in 1884 when they evaluated processors.

Motorola was going nowhere quickly in the mid to late 80s.

Apple as usual was late to move and their internal RISC project went nowhere fast.

The surprising part of the story is Intel managed to keep up. They were able to do so because they had absurd volume and could pay far larger teams.

I remember the Apollo reps moaning that the speed of Motorola's 68k chips weren't keeping up the the x86. I still have an Apollo motheroard with two 68k chips on it -- a work around to enable virtual memory.

Yet Domain OS was a distributed multiuser and multitasking system, with BSD and SYSV compatibility which run decent on 1989 hardware when x86 was almost only DOS and Windows 3.

But did it do the things people wanted? Why have the complexity of a multiuser system on a single user PC? Why have multitasking when the system can barely run a single task competently?

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