Personal Computers
The MITS Altair 8800, the first successful personal computer, used the Intel 8080 microprocessor and was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. The first personal computers using the Motorola 6800 were introduced in late 1975. Sphere Corporation of Bountiful, Utah ran a quarter-page advertisement in the July 1975 issue of Radio-Electronics for a $650 computer kit with a 6800 microprocessor, 4 kilobytes of RAM, a video board and a keyboard. This would display 16 lines of 32 characters on a TV or monitor. The Sphere computer kits began shipping in November 1975. Southwest Technical Products Corporation of San Antonio, Texas, officially announced their SWTPC 6800 Computer System in November 1975. Wayne Green visited SWTPC in August 1975 and described the SWTPC computer kit complete with photos of a working system in the October 1975 issue of 73. The SWTPC 6800 was based on the Motorola MEK6800 design evaluation kit chip set and used the MIKBUG ROM Software. The MITS Altair 680 was on the cover of the November 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The Altair 680 used a 6800 microprocessor and also had a front panel with toggle switches and LEDs. The initial design had to be revised and first deliveries of the Altair 680B were in April 1976.
Sphere was a small startup company and had difficulties delivering all of the products they announced. They filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 1977. The Altair 680B was popular but MITS focused most of the resources on their Altair 8800 computer system and they exited the hobby market in 1978. The Southwest Technical Products computer was the most successful 6800 based personal computer. Other companies, for instance, Smoke signal Broadcasting (California), Gimix (Chicago), Midwest Scientific (Olathe, Kansas), and Helix Systems (Hazelwood, Missouri), started producing SWTPC 6800 compatible boards and complete systems. The 8080 systems were far more popular than the 6800 ones.
The Tektronix 4051 Graphics Computing System was introduced in October 1975. This was a professional desktop computer that had a 6800 microprocessor with up to 32 kb of user RAM, 300 kb magnetic tape storage, BASIC in ROM and a 1024 by 780 graphics display. The Tektronix 4051 sold for $7000, rather higher than the personal computers using the 6800.
By 1977 personal computers were fully assembled and ready to use, not do-it-yourself kits. The Apple II and Commodore PET were based on the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor designed by former Motorola engineers. The Radio Shack TRS-80 used the Zilog Z80 microprocessor designed by former Intel engineers, Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima.
The 6800 processor also used at APF Imagination Machine game console.
The architecture and instruction set of the 6800 were easy for beginners to understand and Heathkit developed a microprocessor course and the ET3400 6800 trainer. The course and trainer proved popular with individuals and schools.
Motorola's next generation 8-bit microprocessor architecture, the MC6809 (1979), was used in the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer and the compatible Dragon 32/64 which was sold in Europe. SWTPC also released a 6809 based system, the s/09, as did other SS-50 vendors. The 6809 and the 16/32 bit 68000 were incompatible with the instruction set of the 6800, but could use 6800-family peripheral chips.
Read more about this topic: Motorola 6800
Famous quotes containing the word personal:
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