Motorola 68030 wire wrap prototype

Re:Motorola 68030 wire wrap prototype by tasty_freeze on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @01:21AM (#33784275)

Very cool, but there is no way those boards are 24" x 24". As you can see in the photos, there are 24 ICs across the board (along the narrow width of the ICs). ICs are 0.3" DIPs, and worst case they are 0.5" center to center. Those boards are on the order of 12" x 12". Look at the folders on the shelf behind the cabinet -- those should give one the sense of scale.

I recall interviewing an engineer from Data General around 1990 and he described work he had recently done. Data General had designed a workstation around the 68040, but Motorola was way behind schedule. So DG designed a discrete board set that ran the 68040 instruction set and they shipped it. He said it was faster than the production 68040 as well (at that date, anyway).

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Re:Motorola 68030 wire wrap prototype by zerohp on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @02:44AM (#33784730)

Are you sure that was DG? I have a daughterboard from an Apollo workstation that has a 50mhz 68030, 68881 and a bunch of logic that mates to a 68040 socket.

I don’t think you could build a processor to run the 040 instruction set out of discrete logic without completely blowing your budget but you could build a 68040 bus adapter like Apollo did.

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Re:Motorola 68030 wire wrap prototype by tasty_freeze on Wednesday November 30, 2022 @02:39PM (#33806434)

Now that you mention it, I'm not confident. It was a one hour interview 30+ years ago, but that salient points are it was an east coast minicomputer maker. Apollo would be more likely now that you mention it.

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