Had IBM made the 68000 choice instead of 8088, the world would have been a better place...

One of the unsung hero use cases of the Motorola 68000 was in the legendary 5ESS Switching System, used for decades by nearly every Telecom on earth.   Versions of it were still in use as late as 2022 in modern mobile telecom systems.  Still running on those same 68000 chips.  Just extra bits and bobs and modules tacked onto the system to allow for modern IP switching.   I know, I supported them.   A 40 year career longevity for a single microchip family is downright Methuselan.  Yet they still were doing the job, as dependable as ever, just as they always had, until those systems were finally shut down.   There's still a couple hanging around, doing tiny jobs in telecom Central Offices that cannot be easily switched over to modern systems.

The best example of the 68K in a video game was Spy Hunter. It used a Z80 for the logic, but a 68K for playing the Peter Gunn theme.

IBM not adopting the 68000 set the industry back at least ten years.

It's interesting that you say that the 68000 was written with compilers in mind, and the Intel was not, because the 68000 was a dream to program in assembler, and the Intel was an absolute nightmare. Only with the 8051 family did Intel come up with an ISA that was sane to program in assembler. The 68000 was a masterpiece of a chip family, but once again marketing the crap out of garbage does eventually win the day over the best engineering. You see it time and again, and it's very sad.

It's re born in Amiga vampire project 68080 😁🤔

The 68000 chip was, in every significant respect, superior to the 8088/86.  What it came down to was this: IBM was nervous about a single-source for its chips. Remember, CPU's were not selling in the quantities we see today, and building a system was expensive. In the end, Motorola refused to license-out their chip's Intellectual Property (IP)  to other manufacturers whereas Intel would permit alternate suppliers such as Cyrix, AMD etc..  What is also true is that IBM already had in-house systems built on the 8086 and 68000, several types were used in systems testing (esp. banking). Which, incidentally, is the true origin of the DIN tape input - we loaded test suites from tape!

The early PC's were super-expensive and the 68000 systems were unaffordable for most homes; another major factor when considering the notion of a home PC for the masses.

There were nuances to the story. IBM was used to working with paged, segmented memory on its mainframes. It was, at least in part, a security feature since processes could be assigned to run in logically separated (protected) segments. By contrast, the 680xx series were strictly flat memory model. Indeed, Intel would continue to support segmented memory for several generations, although after the 80386 they consciously, deliberately, moved towards a flat memory model.

From a designer's perspective we wanted the 68000 CPU, concurrent CP/M and a future operating system that could seamlessly supported multiple processors onto a common bus. What we got was a pseudo 8/16 bit CPU with segmented memory and (at the time) non-concurrent MS-DOS. It was heart breaking.

It's still around, like the 68SEC000 and other variants.

By the end of the 1980s the Intel x86 chips had totally passed up 68000 family, large multistage caching, flat 32 bit architecture and getting floating point on chip first while the 68040 was made later.  ditto for superscaler multi-instruction architecture Intel had first before the 68040 had it later.

Another AI-slop slide show.  Poorly narrated.  Stock photos unrelated to the story, or decades away from the dates described
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