"I was used to coming back to the lab at Apple after dinner, to see if anything interesting was going on and working on various extra-curricular projects."
That same line stuck out to me. I wish my current company had this culture. Instead, it's people talking over others, spending more effort shutting others down, and kissing up rather than creating this type of a collaborative environment.
Interesting that it had a 6809 rather than a 68008. The 6809 is an 8 bitter, the 68008 the 'thin' (8 bit bus) version of the 68K family that the Macintosh would later use (the Mac used the 68000 rather than the 68008).
That's partly because Jef Raskin's original Macintosh concept was for a radically different machine to the budget Lisa which shipped in 1984. Raskin's later Canon Cat was basically a realisation of his Macintosh concept.
You're right, the 68000 shipped before the 68008. Still, the 6809 instruction set only resembles the 68000 set in a superficial way, the registers are completely different and even though they are technically of the same family they'd have to start all over again. Somewhere along the line they must have decided they needed more memory (and accessible faster than bankswitching could provide) so they ditched the 6809 in favor of the 68000 family.
So, it went 6809->68000->PowerPc->x86.
It's stranger still because the development of the Lisa started around that time as well and that did have a 68000.
Yes, that's why I was interested in the first place. That meant that they had to port the software they had written. The 6809 is a very nice 8 bit chip, the 68000 is a 32 bit chip.
Warning! Folklore.org link detected! Please be advised that you may lose many hours reading charming stories with a goofy smile plastered on your face. It's happened to me more than once.
