So Many Replicas!

[sje]

It's Freescale that owns the 68000 IP, and they don't make DIPs of any kind. Old 68000 DIPs can be had, possibly salvaged from old Macs, Amigas, etc., for about US$20 each.

Anyway, a 68000 really needs a 68551 MMU to do Linux, and even that's a little clunky. I wouldn't try it with less than a 68030 as the base chip, and that was never made in DIP form.

[sje]

The S-100 bus had too many problems physically, electronically, and logically. That's why it died out so quickly. Designed for the 8080, and not very well at that, it is a piling of kludge upon kludge to make the S-100 bus work for a 6502, 65856, or 68000.

[Grant Stockly]

Originally Posted by sje

The S-100 bus had too many problems physically, electronically, and logically. That's why it died out so quickly. Designed for the 8080, and not very well at that, it is a piling of kludge upon kludge to make the S-100 bus work for a 6502, 65856, or 68000.

Its already enough of a stretch to throw a 68000 on an S-100 card and say "Altair runs Linux". It has to at least get power from the S-100 bus and make the lights blink!

Imagine it, with Linux the Altair would finally be Slashdot worthy.

[Grant Stockly]

I think it may be a 64 pin DIP, which is still better than a 68 pin PLCC.

[sje]

The Unicorn Electronics link is inviting, but I checked and all of their catalog pages are at least a year old. So maybe the stock counts are not really up to date.

If someone uses GPL code but never releases the product, then they're in the clear.

Until the advent of the fairly well specified PCI bus, all earlier microcomputer buses were either too slow, too big (VME), proprietary (IBM micro-channel), or just plain crap (S-100, ISA). The only exception is the MIT NuBus that was used in the early slot days of Macintosh computers, and even that bus was a little slow (33 MHz).

It would be possible to run Unix/Linux on a 4 KB 8080 with enough mass storage; simply write a small interpreter that's powerful enough to run an interpreter for a 68K or some other process, and have that interpreter run the OS and applications. Maybe it would be better to have 16 KB 8080 and only run one interpreter. I've heard of one Mac enthusiast who ran a PowerPC interpreter on an ancient 68K Mac and it boots OS/X. It runs a couple hundred times slower than the real thing.

[Grant Stockly]

The thought of Vista on an IBM PC or Mac OS X on a Lisa has crossed my mind.

[Grant Stockly]

Unicorn maintains a stock of any item on their website. They will sell you anything on there at that price. If they don't have it, they get it. They then will sell you one part.

They do not list 8008 microprocessors or Kenbak memory, but I have bought both. If you want a part they do not stock, then you have to buy a minimum of 25-100 parts.

[Grant Stockly]

Originally Posted by sje

It's Freescale that owns the 68000 IP, and they don't make DIPs of any kind. Old 68000 DIPs can be had, possibly salvaged from old Macs, Amigas, etc., for about US$20 each.

Anyway, a 68000 really needs a 68551 MMU to do Linux, and even that's a little clunky. I wouldn't try it with less than a 68030 as the base chip, and that was never made in DIP form.

For uCLinux you wouldn't need an MMU. That means its just an application host and not a development environment, but could still be fun. Possibly more useful than an 8080???

PLCC versions of the 68LC000 are available from DigiKey, and they are 100% compatible with the old Macintoshes. I even built a carrier board and ran a Macintosh on one.

The DIP versions are available from second source places like Unicorn.

http://www.unicornelectronics.com/IC/68000.html

I buy ALL of the ICs for my kits from Unicorn.

I would rather buy an old DIP 68000 than a new PLCC 68LC000...because a 68 pin DIP is just TOO cool...