Source: Hacker News
Article note: It's interesting to see that as a historical question rather than a memory of an era.
Motorola tended to be behind on architectural features and fab processes. Even though the 68k was one of the first "serious business" microprocessors to make it to market, even the original 68k had the whole "a 68010 is a 6800 that works" fiasco with its virtual memory, and that slowness is what later launched the major RISC designs like SPARC and PRISM and MIPS because all the UNIX workstation vendors started with 68ks and had to move off because it wasn't keeping up.
Motorola also had the distraction of their own RISC plans with the 88k which was too late and not impressive enough, then rolling over to PPC.
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