#breBytes La familia Motorola 68000

La vida de la familia 68000 de Motorola fue breve (dejó de fabricarse en 1996), pero intensa, siendo el procesador de nuestro adorado Amiga y del Atari ST, pero sobre todo la primera arquitectura sobre la que se construyeron los Macs (y el Lisa antes de eso). Apple se pasó a los PowerPC en 1994, y eso acabó con los 68k. Pero hace 40 años, en septiembre de 1986, la familia 68000 prometía muchísimo: lo suficiente como para ser portada de Byte.

Portada de la revista Byte de septiembre de 1986, dedicada a la familia 68000 de procesadores. Ilustran la portada algunos chips de la familia y pequeñas fotos de un Mac, un Atari ST y un Amiga 1000.

La revista le dedica un buen espacio a las diferentes máquinas 68000 (incluyendo un apartado dedicado a Unix), pero nosotros ya sabemos cuál era la mejor. Y es que, ¿qué otra máquina podía producir gráficos así?

Anuncio a página completa del Commodore Amiga, con una imagen a todo color de una ilustración de la imagen clásica del emperador egipcio Tutankamón.

Y claro, lo que más nos interesa de la sección es esta comparación entre el Amiga y el Mac, aunque está hecha desde el punto de vista del programador:

AMIGA VS. MACINTOSH by Adam Brooks Webber A programmer's comparison of the system calls on two 68000~based machines I HELPED IMPLEMENT the True BASIC language system on the Macintosh. The project has been completed for some time now and we've all recovered our perspective and good humor, but at the time I felt that if I saw that smiling "Welcome to Macintosh" message one more time I would scream. It was in this frame of mind, on my way to see the Amiga for the first time, that I wrote out a list entitled "Why I Hate the Macintosh." That incident led to this article. I have now completed the same project on the Amiga and have many gripes about that machine, too. In this article I compare the system software, of the two machines. Implementing a language system is a good way to get to know a machine. True BASIC is not just a compiler and interpreter, it's a screen editor, a graphics program, and a number cruncher. It makes sounds, it prints, it manipulates files— in short, it uses most of a system's software. My comparison of the Macintosh and the Am\ga is necessarily limited, but I have tried to choose areas that are of general interest and that are representative of the differences between the two machines. These are the user interface, graphics primitives, printers and other devices, multitasking, and memory management. The User Interface The user interface of a system is usually examined from the user's point of view. You ask, "Is it intuitive? Is it powerful? Is it forgiving of error?" as you consider how to communicate with a program. I am interested in another point of view: What does a program have to do to communicate with the user? For some machines, communicating with the user means reading characters from the keyboard and writing text to the screen. Adding windows, menus, and mouse operations makes things more complicated, lust how complicated is shown by the Macintosh user interface software, which determines the structure of every Mac program more or less completely. The program must have a main loop that is executed as often as possible, usually 60 times a second. (One rule of thumb: The quality of system software is inversely proportional to the number of things a program must do "as often as possible.") The main loop checks for events like keystrokes, mouse clicks, and disk insertions and responds to them. Responding to an event is usually a lot of work because the Mac's user interface software provides little assistance. Figure 1 shows, in pseudocode, a simple example of what a program must do to allow a window with a scroll bar to change in size— something that most Mac programs have to deal with. The system software does offer significant help in two areas of user interface: text editing and file access. TextEdit is a subsystem that provides a mechanism for displaying and editing text in a window. (True BASIC doesn't use TextEdit, but only because we have our own internal string-handling procedures.) For...

Nótese, por cierto, que el artículo está escrito por un graduado del Dartmouth College, el lugar de nacimiento de BASIC. La comparación, por cierto, es favorable al Amiga en cuanto a la programación de la interfaz, gestión de dispositivos, multitarea (no es una sorpresa enorme, teniendo en cuenta que el Mac no era multitarea en 1986) y gestión de memoria, y al Mac en lo que se refiere a primitivas gráficas. Pero esto no le salvaría la vida al Amiga, lamentablemente.

Un poco más adelante, en su Chaos Manor Jerry Pournelle seguía enamorado del Amiga y nos hablaba de ese clásico que fue Deluxe Paint (con el que se hizo el Tutankamón de aquí arriba, si no me equivoco, y que ocuparía el lugar en el imaginario que le dedicamos a Photoshop si viviésemos en la línea temporal correcta), pero ya veía los primeros pasos de la muerte de Commodore…

Amiga My top pick of Spring COMDEX was the Amiga. The Amiga did have some problems. For instance, when Ken Sheldon and l approached the Atari booth, they practically ran out to grab us; I stood in the Amiga booth for 15 minutes before anyone spoke to me. Atari software was demonstrated by hackers; most of the Amiga software was demonstrated by clerical employees from Commodore headquarters. None of that really mattered. What was important was that the Amiga booth was jammed. 1 could feel the excitement. It reminded me of the early days of microcomputers. Moreover, once I got past the clerks and secretaries, there were plenty of real hackers. Mike Lehman, who originally wrote Pascal MT+ and was later a vice president of Digital Research, has started a new company called Maxisoft. The product is MaxiPlan, a combination spreadsheet and database with chart capability. MaxiPlan knows how to do a lot of statistical calculations. It will make databases and charts, and it will talk to you through the Amiga's speech synthesizer. You'll spend a while on the manual— this thing is powerful, and the instructions can be complicated— but it's worth the investment. Highly recommended. TDI Software has Modula-2 compilers for both the Atari and Amiga machines. The Atari version is a new release that fixes some problems with the original. Both versions work and should make it simpler to transport programs from Atari to Amiga. Longtime readers know I'm a Modula-2 fan; this is a reasonable implementation, and TD1 is working to make it better. The chief problem is the documentation: TDI needs to give more and better examples of just how to write and compile simple programs. Pournelle's law of software documentation: You can't have too many examples. I wish TDI would learn it. The Amiga is known for its graphics; one of the best graphics programs is Deluxe Paint by Electronic Arts. Alas, they use an obnoxious copy-protection scheme. That's its only real fault; otherwise. Deluxe Paint is glorious. There's just very little you can't do with it. You can color-cycle portions of your drawing, so that waterfalls have running water; zoom in for fine details; and suchlike. It's a lot of fun. EA also has various games, some interesting, some boring. Mindscape is another company that has developed some interesting Amiga software. The Halley Project is a spaceflight game that's part arcade but largely strategic; it helps to know something about planetary astronomy. Activision has a whole bunch of Amiga software, including Music Studio, which 1 haven't much got into but which looks wonderful, and a series of illustrated text adventure games, including Hacker, which some say is the most difficult adventure of that type ever written. In other words, there's a great deal of Amiga software: business, games, educational, programming tools. That, however, wasn't the real hit. What was really impressive was the Amiga Sidecar, a box that turns an Amiga into a 99 percent PCompatible. Moreover, since the Amiga is a multitasking machine, they were able to run PC software as just one job. It was eerie to watch Flight Simulator running as if on a PC and still see the famous Amiga bouncing ball in the background and a word-processing program running in the foreground. The Sidecar has both 8088 and 8087 chips and is supposed to sell for significantly less than a thousand dollars. An Amiga plus Sidecar plus hard disk would be one of the most powerful combinations around, and I had no problem designating that the number one pick of Spring COMDEX. Problems One problem I've had with the Amiga is that while I kept hearing about all the new software for it, I never got any. Commodore's people sent catalogs, while the Atari people sent software. At COMDEX, Bob Pariseau, vice president for software development and one of the original Amiga development team, promised to fix all that. He also arranged to get me a Sidecar as soon as it was available. 1 left COMDEX convinced that the Amiga was likely to be the product of the year. Two weeks later, Commodore laid off nearly 200 people, including Bob Pariseau. There were 55 Amiga people in the West Coast office; 20 were let go. Moreover, many who didn't leave immediately were put on notice; others, seeing the handwriting on the wall, quietly began sending out their resumes. The rumor I hear is that the investment bankers want Commodore to reduce their payroll by 50 percent; given Commodore's financial situation, the company is in no position to argue. The question, then, is whether Commodore has— and can keep— enough high-tech people to support the Amiga properly. Commodore says they can. So do Amiga enthusiasts. Me, I don't know. The situation is made vastly more complicated because many of those laid off were required to sign, as a condition for getting a few more severance benefits, a particularly severe— I would say obnoxious— nondisclosure agreement, the first term of which is that the agreement itself is secret. This has made it very difficult to get a decent picture of what has really happened at Commodore, and as I write this in early June I don't think anyone knows. So. I like the Amiga, and I was much impressed by the enthusiasm of the Amiga people at COMDEX. Of course, even then the Commodore top brass must have known that many of those enthusiasts wouldn't be with the company two weeks later. By the time you read this, we may know the end of the story. I can't say I'm very fond of Commodore's management, but I do wish the Amiga well. It's a heck of a machine.

Y no me voy sin rescatar este anuncio, con el que se lanzaba lo que sería el estándar oro de los monitores durante muchísimos años: los NEC Multisync, capaces de trabajar con básicamente cualquier ordenador de la época, y que en esta, su primera encarnación, era capaz de alcanzar los 800 por 560 de resolución en sus 13 pulgadas :-).

Anuncio de la gama de monitores de tubo NEC Multisync

Un día de estos, más :-).

Un comentario en “#breBytes La familia Motorola 68000”

  1. > La vida de la familia 68000 de Motorola fue breve (dejó de fabricarse en 1996)

    Ligeramente ambiguo. El 68000 dejó de fabricarse en 1996, pero la familia continuó, aunque la Wikipedia no entra mucho en detalle. No me queda claro si el https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall podría ejecutar software de 68k (la otra variante, ColdFire, parece que no).

    Pero bueno, 27 años tampoco está mal, ¿eh?

    (No sabía que el 68000 original tenía 5-6 años cuando salió el Amiga. El mundo iba a otro ritmo.)

Deja un comentario

Este sitio usa Akismet para reducir el spam. Aprende cómo se procesan los datos de tus comentarios.