Re:Motorola 68030 wire wrap prototype
by neilv on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @02:59AM
(#33784824)
Yeah, though Sun did do one 68030 workstation that I know of, the Sun 3/80, at the very end. It was packaged in the same distinctive chassis design as the SPARCstation 1 (Sun 4/60). I don't know the story, so I could only guess it might've been for hedging, or for customers still tied to m68k.
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Yeah...it was pretty much an olive branch to the dead-enders who hadn't drunk the RISC coolaide. Most all of the shops I knew who bought them had some critical app that wasn't being ported to SPARC. Sun also had the 3/400 series servers that were 68030 based.
The 3/80 was also notable for using the Sparcstation expansion bus called 'SBus', which Sun used to claim SBus was an 'architecture neutral' expansion bus and tried to position it as a competitor to PCI (for a very short period of time). I went to a Sun SBus hardware design class at one point...it was a nifty design but clearly wasn't getting market traction outside Sun.
I didn't know about the 3/400 series.
One nice thing about the migration to SPARC is I was able to personally buy a retired 3/75 from the local Sun field office as a teen. Unix and megapixel display for a fraction of what assembling that with a PC would've cost. :)