On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 01:00:40PM -0500, John Hasler wrote:
It has been argued that IBM chose Intel over Motorola because the 68000 was so powerful that a pc based on it might have competed with some of their entry level business systems.
Whoever argued that didn't math the math very well. The 68000 wasn't available when IBM designed the PC, and that alone was a show stopper. More important, the 68000 was not even close to meeting IBMs price target--the 68000 cost something like $125 in quantity when released. The 8088 also cost about $125 when released *in 1978*; by 1981 it listed for $15 and IBM got it for $5. The prices for the 68000 also decreased rapidly, but that's irrelevant to how much it would cost IBM to build a machine in 1981. A $125 CPU is not interchangable with a $5 CPU on a BOM. In addition, implementing the 16 bit memory/peripheral interface needed by the 68000 (or 8086) would have also significantly increased costs. Motorola did eventually release the 68008, which was an 8 bit interface version of the 68000, and would have had similar implementation costs to the 8088, but that was not an option when the PC was designed.
Compared to competitors available *when it was released* the PC had very good price/performance/capability. The industry was evolving very quickly, and even a couple of years later it was possible to build a much more capable machine for the same amount of money, but when looking at what was possible to design in 1980 IBM did a reasonable job, and could not have done much better for the same cost. The PC debuted at $1500; two years later the m68000-based lisa was introduced at $9995 and a year after that apple got the cost of a base model lisa down to $3500. It in unrealistic to believe that IBM could have delivered the PC with a m68000 CPU for $1500 in 1981, if only <something>.
A more realistic assessment is that the industry would be completely different if motorola had released the 68000 in quantity in 1978 rather than late 1980, to compete head-to-head with the 8086. But the reality is that motorola built the 68000 *in response to* the 8086, and it took them longer to get acceptable yields than it took intel--so intel had a 2.5 year head start. IBM did what they could with the technology available in 1980, and bashing them because later designs were "better" makes no sense.