Teaching kids about computers...

[Chuck Guzis]

On 29 Nov 2007 at 16:11, Jules Richardson wrote:

> [1] Google seems to suggest 1979 - perhaps too late (or back then, too 
> expensive) for use over the 6502...

1979 sounds right to me.  I recall a BYTE magazine interview with the 
design team.  One topic was the low clock speed (initially 1 MHz).  
The response from one of the team members was something to the effect 
"if we would have known that people would rate CPUs by their clock 
speed, we would have put a waveguide on the 6809".  I believe that 
the 6809 actually has *fewer* instructions in its set than the 6800 
(depending on what one calls an instruction), which was something 
very unusual at the time.

But the 6809 was an evolutionary dead-end.  It came out too late, and 
while it turned in very respectable performance, it was hampered by 
lousy product timing--the 68K debuted in the same year and was in a 
different category altogether.

I recall seeing the 6809 datasheet and looking for information at the 
1979 Wescon (IIRC) and coming home with a pile of 68K literature and 
forgetting about the 6809 entirely.  

It's ironic in a way--6800-family products are still made, as are 68K 
products.  But the 6809 is forgotten.  Apparently, there's a VHDL 
implementation for those amenable to FPGA versions.

Cheers,
Chuck