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Motorola's 6809: The Best 8-Bit? (thechipletter.substack.com)
17 points by klelatti 86 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



Nice article, fun reading; brings back many memories.

That was the first processor we used for our exercises at ETH Zurich in the eighties. I remember well that there was actually no real introduction and we students were just supposed to know how to program the 6809 on assembler level from one day to the other. At that moment, the students were split into two camps; some of them bought and devoured books about the 6809 to make up for the lack of lectures; others threw computer engineering to the wind and tried their luck with traditional electrical engineering; fortunately, I made it to the former. Shortly afterwards, I started building digital musical instruments.


I remember being thrilled to bits that indexed addressing offered automatic increment/decrement, obviating the need to follow your load or store with an explicit INC or DEC, saving a byte (or 2? Idk, 40y ago) of memory, which was a big deal in a tiny little 64K address space. Better still, saving a clock cycle - considering this sort of thing was often inside a loop, and with clock frequencies in the 1-2 MHz range, also a big deal.


That feeling when realizing that an upgrade from "toy computer" to an IBM PC involves a downgrade in instruction sets...

And operating systems, if you have managed to get that toy computer to run OS-9.


OS-9 level 2 was well ahead of its time.


Multi-page article on the 6809 but no mention of the Vectrex?

Good read though. It's exactly these people-environment-industry background stories I enjoy. Stuff you can't find in databooks or (not much) on Wikipedia & co.




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