Motorola 68000 series

The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bitcomplex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and were the primary competitors of Intel's x86 microprocessors.

The 680x0 series were best known as the processors used in the early Apple Macintosh, the Sharp X68000, the Commodore Amiga, the Sinclair QL, the Atari ST and Falcon, the Atari Jaguar, the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) and Sega CD, the Philips CD-i, the Capcom System I (Arcade), the AT&T UNIX PC, the Tandy Model 16/16B/6000, the Sun Microsystems Sun-1, Sun-2 and Sun-3, the NeXT Computer, NeXTcube, NeXTstation, and NeXTcube Turbo, early Silicon Graphics IRIS workstations, the Aesthedes, computers from MASSCOMP, the Texas InstrumentsTI-89/TI-92 calculators, the Palm Pilot (all models running Palm OS 4.x or earlier), the Control Data Corporation CDCNET Device Interface, the VTech Precomputer Unlimited and the Space Shuttle.

Motorola ceased development of the 680x0 series architecture in 1994 and replaced it with PowerPC, a RISC-based architecture developed in conjunction with IBM and Apple Computer as part of the AIM alliance. While no modern computers today use processors based on the 680x0 series, derivatives are still used in various embedded systems.