Just to let you guys know, there were much larger 6809 systems. The 6809
was a great processor.
I worked for many years on a 6809 system with 4Mb ram, scsi disk interface
with hard drive and ms-dos 3.5 floppy, 68030 floating point co-processor.
This was in use from about 1980 until 1992, when superceeded by the new
system.
The 6809 was retained for so long due to the software investment.
Originally it had a custom disk interface to 5.25 floppy only, which was
upgraded to scsi and ms-dos fat file format around 1988. It also originally
had a smaller stack based floating point chip, but we needed faster float
speed for coordinate calculations. So we upgraded to using the floating
point co-processor that was used with the 68030. All of this and the
memory managment was custom hardware. It started out being a couple of
boards, but later was reduced to one board for all the cpu stuff.
These systems also had several other 6809's in them. Originally the pattern
rec vision system used one also. The material handling system, and motion
control axis used the smaller 6805s in them.
It was used on the Kulicke & Soffa wire bonders, used to manufacture
computer chips, including Motorola of course.
http://www.kns.com/prodserv/equipment/8060.asp
Chad Martin
Received on Wed Apr 28 2004 - 19:26:33 BST